Opinion: Modi's speech indicates his fight to nail the Gandhis

Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s speech is being described in terms of what it should have been or could have been. The story of his speech neither lies in his attack on the Congress nor on the historical veracity of the facts he dished out or in the tone and tenor he deployed. His speech acknowledged what RSS, for long, has been articulating what it interpreted as historical right and wrong of contemporary Indian history.

Modi articulated the principal ideological underpinning of the RSS in his speech with strong electoral messaging. On Wednesday, he simply stamped his authority on issues which, in general, have been kept aside during the Parliamentary sessions.

Modi made it amply clear in his speech that the principle fight of RSS-BJP is not with the Congress but with Gandhi family. For this reason, Prime Minister Modi has been consistently raising the issue of dynasty.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

It is for this reason, the attack of the argument had a span of 50 years, covering all the Gandhi’s. He, in one breath, started from Nehru, then added Kashmir and ‘what if’ Sardar Patel would have become the first Prime Minister of the country.

The content becomes irrelevant here. It ignores the fact that Sardar Patel himself acknowledged the leadership of Nehru despite the age difference and Nehru being a natural successor. The speech was about possible subterfuge. The historical facts become irrelevant; the fact that Sardar Patel’s relationship with Nehru was that of a companion and not that of an aggrieved person comes to of no use.

For the same reason, it does not matter that politics has been positioned as a wish- as historical wrong- which cannot be corrected but repented in public. In the same breath, the issue of Rahul Gandhi and Cabinet papers came up. It is for this reason, Bofors, Davos, emergency and corruption cases were argued in the context of the family.

The subtext of the attack is that penance should come from marginalisation of the Congress as a political entity and not simply from defeating it electorally.

The point to be noted is that he ignored the barbs thrown by the TDP in the house. Instead, he appealed to the Telugu sentiment by evoking the issue of division of Andhra Pradesh and Rajiv Gandhi’s meeting with the Congress Chief Minister on the tarmac. This brings us to the politics of slur and attribution. The context of Rajiv Gandhi’s meeting with then CM was different but the historical memory continues to be embedded in the issue backward caste politics. For Modi, it becomes even more important because of the election in Karnataka where BJP is still struggling. Coming back to the issue of slur, it is a throwback from the days when the word ‘Sanghi’ was used as an abuse. Today, ‘Congressi’ has acquired the attribution and should be a cause of great concern for the Congress Party.

Lastly, Modi’s political outrage in the Parliament reflects modest but important success of Rahul’s politics.

Post-2015, Rahul Gandhi has taken an issue and pilloried BJP with it. Whether it was the jibe of suit boot ki Sarkar, or Vemula’s issue, or GST and now Rafale, Rahul Gandhi did not let the issue be drowned in the discourse of national vs anti-national barring self-goals engineered by his own party.

On the other hand, the prime minister has reacted on the issues either by correcting the position by sewing a new strategy or by going for a blistering attack against Congress and Rahul. After suit boot, he gave away the suit which subsequently got auctioned.

After Gujarat, he immediately shifted his focus to the rural sector and utilised the Budget to address the issues raised by the Opposition. But during the same election, he made it about us vs them and dynasty. If his speech in Parliament is an indication of the tenor of BJP’s future electoral politics, it also reflects its current anxiety in the context of Rajasthan and Gujarat results which parties like the TDP and Shiv Sena are waiting to exploit.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL)