The Prime Minister’s speech lacked both facts and dignity

Prime Minister Narendra Modi replied to the motion of thanks on the President’s address on Wednesday. He spoke in a way where he forgot the dignity of Parliament, parliamentary system and democratic values. He completely disregarded the dignity of language and spontaneity of words.

In a speech which lasted for almost 90 minutes, the PM attacked previous governments one by one, and the focus of his attacks were the Congress and the UPA governments.

In the beginning of his speech, he said, “The President’s address is not any party specific and it should be respected.” This is absolutely correct. But the PM perhaps forgot that the prime minister too does not belong to a particular political party, but he is the prime minister of the entire country. While attacking the Congress and UPA governments, he completely forgot that he is addressing the Lok Sabha and not a public rally.

He put a question mark on the democratic process through which he has become the prime minister. He was so engrossed in launching attacks on the Congress that he even called the British rule as democratic. He said, “Democracy in India is not a contribution of the Congress or Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the country existed even before them. Democracy runs in our veins, in our tradition. It is not a contribution of a particular party.”

It is clear by this that the prime minister neither has an understanding of history nor the realisation of the challenges faced during the initial years of building of this nation. He was so keen to display his aggression that he started looking excited and forgot that the temple of democracy where he is speaking, is the same place from where the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru had given the message of democratic values to the world. Perhaps Prime Minister Modi doesn’t remember that the speech ‘Tryst with Destiny’ delivered by Pandit Nehru in the Parliament is still revered and referred to all over the world.

By calling pre-independent India as democratic, perhaps the PM was hinting at how the founders of RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, had betrayed the country by supporting the Britishers and even submitted written apologies to them. Perhaps the PM was calling this benevolence of Britishers as democracy.

While calling Jawaharlal Nehru’s contribution to the building of this nation as negligible, the prime minister forgets that on May 2014, when he took oath of the office and promised to uphold and protect the Constitution, that Constitution was created during the tenure of Jawaharlal Nehru and India has become the largest democracy of the world under that Constitution. He forgot that the Nehru-Gandhi family he is ceaselessly blaming, some of the members of this very family sacrificed their lives for this country.

It is a tradition of parliamentary proceedings that whenever a member, whether he is a minister, prime minister or member of the opposition speaks, he always addresses the seat of the speaker. But when PM Modi was vehemently mentioning ‘your sins’, ‘your deeds’, he forgot who he was addressing.

This speech of the prime minister will always be remembered in parliamentary history, not because he continuously made bitter attacks on the Opposition, but because during this speech, the Opposition constantly kept shouting slogans and reacting to each of his statements.

In the entire speech Prime Minister Modi was seen displaying his verbosity and eloquence. But facts were missing from his speech. The restlessness and anxiety of the prime minister was quite apparent from his body language and he went on to say that the Congress did not have a vision or farsightedness. He mentioned former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in this context. But he forgot that if the Congress did not have a vision for this country, then we would not have prestigious educational institutions like IIT and IIM, nor the strong infrastructure, nor roads nor the railways.

When the PM mentions ‘hawai chappal se hawai jahaz’ (from slippers to aeroplanes), he forgets that it was Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with whose inspiration and encouragement, the first airline of the country was started. When he mentions projects like Ujjwala Yojana, he forgets that it was Jawaharlal Nehru who launched huge projects like Bhakhra Nangal. When PM Modi flaunted his achievements and counted the huge bridges and tunnels made during his tenure, he forgets who had laid the foundations of these projects and who contributed to the completion of the projects which he inaugurated immediately after he became the prime minister.

On Kashmir issue, Prime Minister Modi mentioned Sardar Patel and said, “Had Sardar Patel been our first prime minister, then the entire Kashmir would be ours.” But he forgot how the conditions in Kashmir have worsened during his tenure. There have never been as many incidents of cease fire violations as have taken place in last three-and-a-half years.

This speech made one more thing clear. For PM Modi, neither his government nor his party the BJP holds any significance. In his one-and-a-half-hour long speech, barring once or twice, he kept saying ‘I did this, I did that’ or ‘Modi does this or that’. Of course the Bhakts will not tire of clapping and praising this style of his, but this self-indulgence was apparently not taken in good taste by the senior leaders of the BJP and perhaps this was the reason why Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who was sitting beside him, just kept smiling lightly during his speech.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee is among the leaders who are appreciated and respected for their oratory and eloquence. He also delivered some emotionally charged speeches but never violated the dignity of language or the dignity of the traditions of the parliament. But Modi is quintessentially Modi. He doesn’t see anything beyond ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’. That is why when he mentioned his speech at the Red Fort, he said, “ Narendra Modi has always said this from the Red Fort, that all the previous government have contributed to making the country what it is today.”

To sum it up, PM Modi’s speech in Lok Sabha may have served his purpose but had neither facts nor the dignity of a prime minister.

Translated by Pragati Saxena