The visit, the arrival
I
feel the need to do this because of the number of people I have met in
the past few days in New York and Washington who have asked how Modi has
“such confidence, such sophistication”.
Indian Express ( October 2, 2014)
In the US, Modi changed India’s image, and his own.
It
is ironic that India’s least educated, most provincial prime minister
has done more to change
the way the world looks at India than his
educated, ‘sophisticated’ predecessors.
The
advantage of being a veteran in journalism is that it enables
perspective. So with the privilege this gives me, I am going to examine
for you Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States against the backdrop
of visits by other Indian prime ministers to foreign lands. I feel the
need to do this because of the number of people I have met in the past
few days in New York and Washington who have asked how Modi has “such
confidence, such sophistication”.
They
speak not of the “sophistication” a certain genre of Indian takes pride
in that allows them, for instance, to tell the difference between a
Louis Vuitton bag and a Gucci. Nor of the kind of confidence that makes
this same genre of Indian proud of speaking English perfectly while
being unable to speak their own mother tongue. In the Modi context, what
people mean by sophistication is the confidence with which he has dealt
with complicated international issues on this visit. And, the
confidence with which he has spoken of India’s flaws. The absence of
toilets and sanitation, the filthy streets of our cities and the
horrible pollution in our rivers.
“When
people ask me what my vision is, I tell them I am just a chaiwallah, a
small man who can only think of small things,” he said to thunderous
applause in Madison Square Gardens. He then added that what he did know
was that he wanted to do big things for small people. He listed his
“safai abhiyan” and his determination to clean the Ganga among these big
things. And, as I listened I thought of how different his language is
to that of earlier prime ministers who spent their visits to foreign
countries pretending that India had no flaws.
From
the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, they came to foreign capital cities and
saw wide avenues and dazzling monuments and either from shame or false
pride, reminded their hosts of India’s “ancient civilisation”, as if
this compensated for her modern squalor. When they came back to India
they did nothing to change the things that really matter. They
did not build the roads or the sewage systems or ensure that our cities
looked like real cities and not endless, ugly shanties. But,
they were feted and honoured for holding “India’s head high in the
comity of nations”. This was a remark Pupul Jayakar famously made about
Indira Gandhi, but it was made of other prime ministers as well. It was
made of Jawaharlal Nehru even when he begged the US to attack China when
we started losing the war in 1962.
Natwar
Singh writes in his memoir that as a junior official in the United
Nations, he remembers the shame he felt when he delivered Nehru’s letter
to John F. Kennedy. The discomfiture was enhanced by the disdain with
which Nehru treated America when he came here just before the war with
China. Kennedy described the visit as painful. Why has it taken Natwar
Singh so long to write this? Why has it taken him so long to write in
this same memoir that economic ideas “bored” Indira Gandhi? Could it be
because he belonged to that same class of educated, westernised Indian
who believed that India’s honour was safest in the hands of Indians
educated in Oxford and Cambridge?
How
ironic then that India’s least educated, most provincial prime minister
has done more to change the way the world looks at India than any of
his educated, “sophisticated” predecessors. Americans who have met the
prime minister in New York and Washington speak of how clearly he
understood complicated issues. They give examples. Modi has spoken of
terrorism as a problem for all humanity. He has hinted that the
Americans would be making a mistake by leaving Afghanistan too soon.
When Pakistan’s prime minister tried to provoke him into the usual UN
general assembly spat over Kashmir, he refused to engage. What gave him
the confidence?
While
driving from New York to Washington, I asked myself this question many
times. The highway that brought me here was built nearly a hundred years
ago and is more modern than 99 per cent of India’s highways. When I
stopped for lunch at a typical American fast food restaurant on the way,
I found myself wishing that the prime minister could have driven to
Washington as well. If he had, he would have seen how easily modern
infrastructure can coexist with environmental preservation. On either
side of the highway stretched forests in autumn colours that looked as
if they would have been renewed after the road was built. This can
happen in India too but because our leaders have preferred to ignore
these things in the past, this never happened. So we have degraded
forests and degraded highways.
Can
Modi change India? That is the question everyone I have met has asked
me. Investors have asked it for reasons of investment and because the
prime minister has emphasised so often during this visit that he
believes in “minimum government”. They know from having tried to make
investments how often they have been defeated by maximum government.
Politicians have asked the question in the hope that India will play the
role it should be playing internationally and friends have asked the
question in the hope that one day when they return to India, they will
see clean cities and modern infrastructure.
At
an environment conference in Washington, I heard India’s most famous
environmentalist, R.K. Pachauri, speak of how the prime minister has
shown a passionate interest in solar energy. He pointed out that India
is a major importer of oil and could soon be importing as much as 900
million tonnes of coal as well. So sustainable energy is no longer an
option. At another gathering in this city, I heard Indian businessmen
talk of how excited they were by the prime minister spelling out clearly
that obstacles to investment would be removed. In New York, at a
reception for the local Indian community, he spoke to everyone
individually and asked everyone to persuade at least five of their
friends to visit India, indicating that tourism would play a big role in
his future plans.
On
a personal level, nearly everyone I met asked if it was true that the
only nourishment he had in the nine days of navratri was water and lemon
juice. I said I believed this to be true and memories came back of
another prime minister whose taste in beverages was so bizarre that it
was hard to travel abroad if you were Indian in the late Seventies and
not be asked if it was true that the prime minister drank his own urine.
So with the perspective of a veteran journalist, what I can say is that
I cannot remember a prime minister who has succeeded in changing
India’s image for the better in so short a time.
There
were those who stood in small groups at street corners carrying black
flags of protest and placards calling Modi a murderer, but they were so
few that you needed a searchlight to find them. Modi succeeded on this visit in changing not just India’s image, but his own.
Excellent.
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