Narendra Modi poised to become India’s first genuinely secular prime minister – Gautam Sen

“Narendra Modi is poised to become India’s first genuinely secular prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular impulses were basically a sham since he allowed political prejudices to determine their actual policy content. His successors have turned this initial duplicity into a low art form. There is every indication that Modi himself is instinctively averse to most current forms of state involvement in religious issues, which is the communalized norm that pretends to be its exact opposite. Their hugely damaging socio-political consequences are ignored because vote banks now determine electoral outcomes in much of India.” – Dr. Gautam Sen

Among the first tasks of a home minister of the Government of India in 2014 should be to establish a judicial commission to inquire into the criminal conspiracy to destroy one of India’s most popular, and also the most effective, political leaders since independence. The shameful deployment of the government apparatus, with the collusion of India’s foreign-owned media, to injure the reputation of Narendra Modi and implicate him in assorted alleged crimes cannot go unpunished. To its credit, India’s judiciary declined to join this outrage against Indian democracy. 

The desperate onslaught against Narendra Modi has been provoked because of his huge popularity across the length and breadth of India. And the visceral hate campaign against him has arisen from the threat he poses to the electoral survival of a corrupt and incompetent government that has bought the country to its knees. The idea that it is motivated by concern over supposed human rights violations or any other profound cause does not survive scrutiny. The feigned political lamentation of a bunch of plunderers and cutthroats who presided over the murder of Sikhs in 1984 is an essay in downright cynicism. 

The recent attempts at wit and sarcasm of reprobate UPA ministers as Narendra Modi’s political fortunes advance relentlessly is too pathetic to merit analysis. Their behaviour only exposes their low cunning and palpable anxiety at the political abyss confronting them. The exclusive preoccupation of these supine family retainers is degrading obeisance to India’s ignorant quasi royals sporting suspect foreign degree certificates. This obscenity has to end and the principals and protagonists of this humiliation of an ancient civilisation cast into the political dustbin where they belong. 

More shocking is the rank criminality of the Congress high command and some governmental agencies that are virtually blind towards Pakistani and Indian domestic terror group activities. Their constant espousal of lies about the involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots of Narendra Modi’s government, emphatically absolved by the Supreme Court SIT, has become the principal catalyst prompting ostensible retaliatory terrorist murders. This issue will justify unsparing public investigation and judicial purging by an incoming administration in 2014. In keeping with the Congress party’s underplaying of jihadi violence in the country, prime minister Manmohan Singh himself sought to exonerate Pakistan of its direct sponsorship of terrorism against India. His affirmation at Sharm El Sheikh that they too were victims of terror was all of a piece. 

The supposedly retiring academic and allegedly incorruptible saint has turned out to be a cunning and disastrous patron of harm to India’s vital national interests. Both he and his advisers should have been repudiated immediately on their return from Sharm El Sheikh. But, alas, the fate of India is in the hands of extra-parliamentary subversives who have corrupted its fundamental constitutional proprieties. And the presumed heir to the veritable national crown, with nothing whatsoever to justify it, had the gall to inform the US ambassador to India that he was mainly exercised by Hindu terror! He could not have been in any doubt about the actual source from which virtually all of it emanates in the entire world, but calculatedly chose to point an accusing finger at the majority in India he views as the principal hindrance to his dismal personal aspirations.

From all accounts, Narendra Modi is poised to become India’s first genuinely secular prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru’s secular impulses were basically a sham since he allowed political prejudices to determine their actual policy content. His successors have turned this initial duplicity into a low art form. There is every indication that Modi himself is instinctively averse to most current forms of state involvement in religious issues, which is the communalized norm that pretends to be its exact opposite. Their hugely damaging socio-political consequences are ignored because vote-banks now determine electoral outcomes in much of India. 

Anyone alarmed by this quite distasteful development, with one state government offering salaries to all imams and others offering multifarious benefits exclusively to minority communities, should be relieved. No doubt, help from the state based on need, irrespective of community and geographical region, will be extended in some form. But Narendra Modi is certain to embrace development and good governance as the dominant themes of his administration. One could query this overall conception somewhat on philosophical grounds but without the fear that a primary focus on development and good governance will injure India. However, for the first time, this country will have a prime minister with a truly imaginative feel for all the developmental possibilities thwarted so far by decades of unmitigated intellectual bankruptcy and political cowardice. Narendra Modi is nothing if not a determined man in a hurry, inspired by a strategic vision, and exhibiting a welcome focus on detail. 

One aspect of Modi’s credentials should hugely reassure state governments forever battling a self-serving and often contemptuously indifferent Centre. He will nearly be the first truly regional chief minister to assume the position of prime minister and uniquely well placed to readily apprehend the particular problems faced at the state level. The only two Indian prime ministers with experience as chief ministers did not encounter the problem of dealing with state governments in their far-reaching manifestations. Prime minister V.P.Singh was a former Congress chief minister who on assuming the high office dealt largely with Congress-ruled states and H.D.Deve Gowda’s tenure was too short to allow a genuine engagement between protagonists with competing political affiliations at the Central and state levels. This is a fascinating possibility that augurs well for the future of democratic governance of India. But Narendra Modi might also wish to think searchingly about the institutional reforms and punitive sanctions required to create a permanent line of defence against India’s preceding era of treachery and thievery. – NewsInsight, 10 June 2013