After the Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and other state assembly election results, the best summing-up came from the Prime Minister himself: “Building New India encompasses both recapturing a great past and on it, reconstructing a greater future”. The people have given an overwhelming mandate for this. They have also laid low traditional opponents, most of whom had been feeding the body politic with borrowed ideas and failed models.
Take, for instance, PM Modi’s bold bid to clean politics of dirty money. The opposition described demonetisation as an attack on the people. They counted on voters making a clean sweep of the BJP and endorsing the prophecy of the secularists, socialists and London-returned soothsayers of a banking collapse. What happened was quite contrary. Analysts, who themselves were stunned by the results, have concentrated too much on UP. They failed to read the overall lesson in the demonstrated public acceptance of the BJP.
The party had surged in local body elections in Mumbai. It won a large majority of zila parishads and village panchayats, not just in Maharashtra, but in Odisha and Rajasthan as well. There was a pro-BJP surge in Manipur, where the party was a minor player earlier. UP was the largest hurrah for the BJP. The agenda was framed by the PM and ground-level action planned by his chosen strategist and party chief, Amit Shah. After the analysts were stunned to see their caste arithmetic was not yielding results in UP, clearly a new factor has emerged in electoral politics. And that is the understanding of a national ethos that will drown the caste-religion divide for a truly Bharatiya model.
Modi is both the philosopher and the architect of the New India he is projecting as the overwhelming, overarching vision. The core of this ethos should make India a nation whose 120 crore people stand on their feet with pride, rather than groups whose label of being poor forces them to live on hand-outs and subsidies. To be known as a proud Indian, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Aizwal to Jamnagar, is a privilege. The BJP and its cadres held up this concrete nationalism — not just a woolly idea, but a dedication that makes us all proud and our neighbours jealous. However, some among us, mainly the Leftists and communalists, are singing hallelujah to the groups that demand “azadi” and advocate a vivisection of this great country.
The Left has always taken its cues from abroad. Its advocates never saw any true socialism in ancient Indian thinkers who preached the state’s aim as bahujana sukhaya, bahujana hitaya; Kautilya never touched them even as they poured over Machiavelli. Of course, the concept of “Integral Humanism” articulated by Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya is alien to most of them. Mahatma Gandhi had his feet firmly planted on Indian soil, but Jawaharlal Nehru was influenced by Karl Marx. Between Nehru and his buddy, V.K. Krishna Menon, they let Communist China walk into the Himalayas that had kept the Mongolian hordes out since time immemorial. The Left’s understanding of the political and economic forces shaping India came from Stalin’s decision in the Communist International on the basis that what is good for Russia is good for India too. That explains many programmes launched by the CPI — the support it gave to Britain for its war efforts and backing the demand for Pakistan stand as events of eternal shame.
S. Nurul Hasan had the longest term as education minister (1971-77), a formative period for higher education in India. He helped the cabal of Leftist teachers select fellow travellers for university teaching jobs, who manipulated doctoral selections, limiting them to Marxist ideologues. The result: Calls to armed rebellion as inspiration for freedom; militant attack on Parliament, resulting in the death of several security men, which was seen as “azadi”; calls for cutting the nation into bits was democracy; seeking profits in enterprise was theft. Was there any surprise there was no growth or 2.5 per cent growth till 1991, while Left intellectuals wrote Marxist droll as revelations?
For India to strengthen itself with indigenous insights from ancient wisdom, with modern technology to improve its productivity, the first task is to clear the Marxist and colonial cobwebs. Its electoral success reassures people that the BJP alone can achieve this. Three years of Modi has convinced the common Bharatiya that now, there is the right vision, the right party structure, the right political and government leadership. That is why the people are rejecting naysayers. After UP and local body polls, Modi’s New India is well on the track — 2014 was the first milestone. Now, more are in sight.
By Balbir Punj
The writer is a former BJP MP and Delhi-based commentator on social and political issues
Courtesy: The Indian Express
