India awaits the NaMo Model

By
Kanchan Gupta


From


http://www.dailypioneer.com/310885/India-awaits-the-NaMo-Model.html


There’s something eternal about folktales. No matter how old they are or how often they are retold, they still remain as relevant as they were when they were first told. What is most enduring about folktales is that they are neither culture nor society specific. The stories of Panchatantra are an example of how the wisdom contained in folktales is not limited to national borders and transcends cultural barriers. We may believe that folktales belong to the past and are irrelevant to our times. But it’s amazing how they reflect contemporary mores irrespective of their vintage. For instance, there’s a Cossack folktale I have recounted in the past because it helped explain attitudes and concerns of our times. That folktale came to mind while watching a television debate late Friday evening on last week’s Vibrant Gujarat investors’ conference in Gandhinagar. So here’s the story told all over again.

A young Cossack, who was a gifted horseman, dreamed of owning the best steed in the village where he lived. So he toiled and saved money to buy his dream horse, and eagerly waited for the annual animal fair that was held in a nearby village. At last, the big day came and our young Cossack set off for the fair, dressed in his Sunday best. He inspected all the horses on sale and finally found a stallion with a flowing mane, flaring nostrils, rippling muscles and a glistening white fleece. This was the horse he had dreamt of and toiled for! The owner asked for a huge sum, our young Cossack paid the money without even bothering to haggle over the price. Horse bought, its proud new owner mounted the steed and cantered home. He rode straight to the village square where his fellow Cossacks gathered every Sunday evening for raucous drunken revelry, dismounted and called them over to show off his new horse. A collective gasp was heard as the Cossacks gathered around: None had seen a more handsome stallion than this. One of them patted the horse and praised his strength; another counted his teeth and declared he couldn’t be more than a year old; a third ran his fingers through the mane and sighed. The village elder was so impressed that he declared the stallion the official stud of the village horse collective and ordered a fresh round of vodka for everybody. Then along came the village cynic, who was also the local correspondent of Pravda and the designated Cossack ‘intellectual’. He walked around the horse, went back to where he had been sitting sipping vodka, struck a pose similar to Rodin’s Thinker, got up after a while, walked back to the horse, lifted its tail, sniffed and declared, in a stentorian voice similar to that in which judges give their final verdict, “The horse stinks.”

That verdict of the cynic-intellectual-journalist Cossack, who could see nothing good about the stallion over which everybody else was swooning and for whom the ultimate test was to lift the horse’s tail and check whether his rear orifice stank, came to mind while watching the host of the television debate pompously waving aside the spectacular success of this year’s Vibrant Gujarat and declaring, in a caustic, dismissive voice, that promised investments worth more than India’s foreign exchange reserves mean nothing as the State is still “haunted by the riots of 2002” and Chief Minister Narendra Modi is “tainted” by the violence. Amazingly, he kept on repeating this point despite one of the panellists, a Muslim from Gujarat, forcefully asserting, more than once, that Gujaratis have moved on, Gujarat has moved ahead. That, in a sense, is the problem with our Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat without whom south Delhi would have been just another colony, no different from the colonies of east Delhi. They remain stuck in 2002 when Gujarat erupted in fury following the ghastly slaughter of 59 pilgrims returning from Ayodhya who were burned alive when a coach of Sabarmati Express was set on fire by a Muslim mob at Godhra on February 27. In the violence that followed, by all means far less gruesome than communal riots India has seen in Congress-ruled States — the massacres at Nellie and Bhagalpur come to mind — and nothing comparable to the ghastly anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, both Muslims (790) and Hindus (254) were killed. The scale and magnitude of the violence, which nobody condones, was blown out of proportion and immeasurably magnified by activists like Teesta Setalvad, who now stands accused of forgery, perjury and serious fraud, and her ilk, as well as their myriad admirers in media who seek to mould public opinion by manipulating information and by repeating the same lie, Goebbels like, a million times and more.

But the furious rant that emanates from television studios and the campaign of calumny to which newspapers take recourse when it comes to defaming and demonising Mr Modi does not, in any manner, reflect the mood in Gujarat or the popularity of the man whom India’s disproportionately empowered Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat love to hate. Mr Modi, dubbed “maut ka saudagar” by Ms Sonia Gandhi in a speech drafted by a Bollywood script-writer, has won successive Assembly elections, decimated the Congress, and taken Gujarat to dizzying heights of development, growth and prosperity. In recent local elections, more than 100 Muslims contested and won on a BJP ticket. It would be facetious to suggest people have forgotten 2002; but the present and the future of Gujarat have dimmed memories of those terrible days. That’s how it happens. But not for our Modi-bashers who are caught in a time-warp and suffer from selective amnesia: They keep on harping about 2002 as if that year marked the beginning of communal strife in India. The macabre tantalises them more than anything that is bright, positive and fruitful.

With last week’s Vibrant Gujarat resulting in the signing of MoUs worth $462 billion for projects that would create more than five million new jobs, Gujarat now glitters among all the States of the Union. It could be argued that not all the MoUs will fructify. True, but if the trend so far is any indicator, Gujarat can look forward to more than a third of the promised amount coming in — that would still mean half of India’s foreign exchange reserve and more than a million new jobs! The ‘Modi Model’ is working brilliantly for Gujarat; States like Madhya Pradesh and Bihar which have borrowed elements of that model are also reaping a rich harvest. India awaits the day when the ‘Modi Model’ will become the ‘Indian Model’ and propel the nation, not only Gujarat, to greater prosperity for all Indians. Ironically, our Left-liberal journalists, bogus intellectuals, pseudo-secularists and intellectually bankrupt commentariat will benefit from that too.