It perplexes me about how our national moral pendulum has swung so dramatically, or perhaps conveniently. In 1975, the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi had to face the wrath of a “total revolution” no less from a massive organised political coalition, amongst other things, because of the Allahabad High Court judgment about misuse of official machinery. Fair enough. But what exactly was her personal misdemeanour? They were, as historian Ramachandra Guha puts in India After Gandhi, “trifling offences” that can best be described as a secretarial oversight done by external parties. Her election manager Yashpal Kapoor’s resignation from his official government services although tendered on time received a belated approbation, and the second “electoral malpractice” referred to the “height of the rostrum”. On this technicality, Mrs Gandhi faced incessant acerbic criticism. She moved the Supreme Court which reversed the judgment. The tragic irony is that after the historic 1971 war win, forget Raj Narain, no one stood a chance against her in her home bastion of Rae Bareli. But notwithstanding that, Mrs Gandhi followed the legal process and yet was severely castigated. Now let’s compare this with Narendra Modi’s political conduct, the poster-boy of the Sangh Parivaar. Modi was the chief minister when the Gujarat conflagration subsumed 2,000 lives, leaving charred bodies and a wrecked humanity. He did nothing to stop it. He “looked away”. For similar studious disinterestedness, Hosni Mubarak, former President of Egypt was sentenced to life imprisonment. An abrogation of duty in the midst of a gory bloodbath makes a leader a willful accessory. Human lives were just collateral damage. Modi actually has the audacity to wax eloquent on “governance” after his contemptible, deliberate indifference to a brutal pogrom within miles of his personal official residence. And yet, Sunday champagne brunch columnists, foreign university professors with suspicious twangs and sundry corporate czars think he is an administrative genius, which is frankly laughable. Even his current bete noire LK Advani acknowledged that Modi inherited a high trajectory state but could not give it a vertical lift. Other states have registered extraordinary growth; their leaders don’t possess the obsessive compulsive disorder called “give me PR, please”. Fake encounters (the needle of suspicion points towards him too, in latest revelations), the conviction of close aide Maya Kodnani, the arrest of Amit Shah, police officers in cahoots with political masters, trials shifted out of the state for fear of intimidating witnesses, the ongoing Zakia Jafri case; Mr Modi is in a laundry-list of legal and criminal alphabet soups. And yet, he is projected to be above it all. And unlike Mrs Gandhi, no one believes that Modi should have resigned on moral grounds or taken political hibernation till legally cleared (he is a co-accused in the Zakia Jafri case). Why?
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 21:12:05 +0000
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