‘He was clearly a man in a hurry,’ claims new book on Narendra Modi

New Delhi: In 2012, a year before the BJP declared him as the party's Prime Ministerial candidate, the then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi believed only he could bring about  a ‘tectonic shift’ in India's political scenario.

While sharing his thoughts with R Balashankar, former editor of RSS mouthpiece Organiser, Mr Modi was not merely “aware of his immense popularity” but “expressed fear” that if the Sangh Parivar did not back his candidature, “a great opportunity maybe lost”. These are a few excerpts from the book on Modi, Creative Disruptor - The Maker of New India by R Balashankar. The book will be released by BJP chief Amit Shah on December 10. 

While analyising Modi, the politician, Balashankar writes: “He was strikingly unlike most of his colleagues in his party and in other parties. He was clearly a man in a hurry.”

The author once asked the Prime Minister about the secret of his success. 

“His reply was eloquent: Mein swayam ko mitane ki kshamta rakhta hun

(I possess the capacity to even destroy myself in pursuit of my aim).

What he meant was that he works like a karmayogi without bothering about the outcome,” Balashankar writes.

Talking about attacks and murders of free thinkers and writes, the author claimed these were nothing new. “Murders of writers, the so-called progressive thinkers, robberies in churches, killing of a man from the the minority community and burning of Dalit huts… these and much worse have happened during the six decades of Congress rule," he writes and gives examples of the murders of social activists, Narendra Dabholkar and M M Kalburgi.

In the chapter 'Anti-Modi Front', the writer claims that “with regular frequency Hindu-Muslim riots have happened all over the country, with the majority community taking the brunt of the attack. People have been butchered worse than cattle and yet none had spoken up.”

He then argued that “if one were to go into the details of each of these incidents, it would be clear that stray, concocted events were joined together to create a mirage, whose only purpose was to tarnish the image of the Modi government.”

Toeing a similar line, he writes: “Mob lynching and hate crimes are not new to India. We have been like this for years and lynch mobs are not Modi’s creation.”

On the contentious subject of beef ban and cow slaughter, the author writes: “There is a lot of misleading propaganda in the name of beef ban. A ban on cow slaughter is not exactly a ban on eating other varieties of beef. Hence the fear that it will affect livelihood of the butchers and meat sellers is wrong. Similarly, it will in no way affect the leather industry.”

Here is an excerpt from the book:

INTOLERANCE DEBATE

Consider the facts about the writers’ murders they were protesting.

Narendra Dabholkar was murdered under the Congress regime.

So was M.M. Kalburgi. So why the late reaction? In the case of burning of the home of a Dalit in Faridabad, in which two children died, the forensic team visiting the area declared that the house had been burnt from within because the man had wanted to kill his wife and children as he suspected her of infidelity. In the Mohammed Akhlaq case too, there have been varying versions on the killing. We are not going into details.

On the ban on beef and the protest and award returning by eminent scientist P.M. Bhargava, a young scientist wrote an open letter to him. He said, ‘Dear Dr Bhargava, with all due respect, I want to point out a few facts. As a scientist, I hope you would value facts. Most of the Indian states have banned cow slaughter for many decades now. The state where you worked and lived, Andhra Pradesh, had banned cow slaughter in 1977 itself.

Maharashtra had banned it in 1976. Karnataka banned it in 1964. So, your freedom to eat whatever you want did not exist in India even when you received your Padma Bhushan in 1986.’ The youngster goes on to quote the several riots that have taken place in the name of beef and cow slaughter and also the various incidents of violence against writers, teachers and activists in the past. ‘Violence associated with cow slaughter is not new in India.

There have been many cases where people got killed in violence associated with cow slaughter. Just two examples to demonstrate the point — one in 2013, where one person was killed, and one in 2006 where two people were killed. Both led to mini riots. Such riots have been happening almost every year, somewhere or the other. You did not bother.’

If only a handful of people resigned and protested, what spiralled the intolerance debate into an issue of national and perhaps international ramification? One, the media. A section of the media wittingly and a section unwittingly, in a herd mentality, gave strength to the intolerance campaign.

A section of the media had also been opposed to Modi, running a steady, personal vituperative campaign against him since his Gujarat days. His spectacular victory made the media realize that Modi could win ‘despite’ the media. They clearly had a score to settle.

The man who led the protest of returning awards, K. Satchidanandan, an ultra-Left Keralite writer, waited till the end of his term in the Sahitya Akademi to organise the protest. He was the one who organised his fellow companions to make the intolerance debate appear like a national catastrophe. When Modi won his massive mandate, the strongest such endorsement given to any party in 30 years, Satchidanandan wrote in Mathrubhumi weekly that this was no mandate because Modi and his partners got only 38 per cent of votes. According to him, majority of Indians had rejected Modi and he had not got a mandate to rule the country.

Incidentally, this ultra-Left fellow traveller has been regularly writing against the Modi government, most of which is utter falsehood, in Malayalam journals. Still, he waited till the end of his term to raise a hullabaloo about intolerance. It is also interesting that while in the Sahitya Akademi, he filled it and its various language academies with people of his ideological orientation.

All the awards and benefits, and selection of books by the Akademi were restricted to this club. Similar is the story, be it with Lalit Kala Akademi, NBT or any other academic institution under the UPA.

Now, he is a fellow with the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla, again a government nomination.

Also, the handful who were shrill-throated were the ones who had been the guardian angels of intellect, culture and literature under the Congress regime, perched in their safe holes at the India International Centre (IIC), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the like. Read what B. Jeyamohan, a writer of great repute in Malayalam and Tamil and a literary critic, said on his first brush with IIC. He was staying there as state guest when he had come to receive the Sanskriti Samman. This is a translation from his article ‘Intolerance’ in December 2015. ‘I learnt the meaning of ‘power’ when I visited Delhi in 1994 to receive my Sanskriti Samman...

IIC is the place where ‘power’ is served on a golden plate... That pomp kind of unnerved me. Venkat Swaminathan, who saw me the next day, immediately recognized my sense of discomfort.

He said, “Hey, three-fourths of this crowd is just a perfect horde of crows (the Tamil equivalent of sycophants). The snobs that make their living draw their power by licking the boots of power centres. Most of them are mere power brokers.’ Among the names that find mention in his article are Nayantara Sahgal, Pupul Jayakar, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Kapila Vatsyayan, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, and Nandita Das.

Jeyamohan goes on: ‘Once given accommodation in a government bungalow, they can never be removed from there. In Delhi alone, this crowd has illegally occupied 5,000 bungalows... It is the same story in JNU too.’

He says that the Ministry of Culture had served eviction notice on all those occupying government bungalows in prime locations free of cost for long years. Well-known painter Jatin Das, father of actor-director Nandita Das, was one of those who had received notice. ‘This is the real reason for Nandita Das strongly speaking about intolerance in television channels and writing in English newspapers (all diligently carried by the network),’ Jeyamohan added.

So who is being intolerant of whom? In a brilliantly argued article, senior journalist S. Gurumurthy draws attention to the Indian ethos that thrives in plurality. Comparing the Hindu on the one side and the Semitic religions on the other, he urges the reader to delve into the past to understand the strength of India’s capacity to assimilate other beliefs and yet remain faithful to its core.

For Christianity and Islam, power came from the conquering state. ‘This unity of the Semitic state and the Semitic society proved to be its strength as a conquering power. But this was also its weakness. The moment the state became weak or collapsed anywhere, the society there also followed the fate of the state.

In India, society was supported by institutions other than the state. Not just one, but hundreds and even thousands of institutions flourished within the polity and none of them had or needed to use any coercive power. Indian civilization culture, arts, music, and the collective life of the people, guardianship of the people and of the public mind — was not entrusted to the state. In fact, it was the sages, and not the state, who were seen as the guardians of the public mind,’ says Gurumurthy in the article.

It is this lack of understanding of the true Indian ethos that has made the intolerant brigade react the way they did. Blaming the Indian state, on the basis of their political bias, they hurt the sentiment of an average Indian. And this manifested in the social media. Almost every Indian took to the social media recounting the acts of intolerance that had been perpetrated across this land, mainly directed towards the Hindus. And then the question arose, ‘How come you were quiet then.’

This is one question that the protestors have not been able to answer. In fact, caught in a trap, the government took time to react. But it is the social media, in a sense the conscience of the society, which waged the war for the Indian state and government.

Perhaps for the first time, these people who had been pampered by the government largesse, with awards, bungalows, positions and nominations to various national and international bodies, were made to think about their real worth. But then, the damage has been done. They can draw satisfaction from the fact that they have repaid to the Congress, their original benefactors, their gratitude.