I have been appalled, but not amazed, by the ‘idea of India’ utterances of the Congress party’s Dilip Cherian, Sam Pitroda, and Mani Shankar Aiyar recently. They spoke, respectively, of India being an accidental nation (very Churchillian); of Indians in different parts of the country belonging to different races; and of how India needs to appease Pakistan because it has nuclear weapons.
When seen juxtaposed with the clearly nihilistic and Stalinist ideas espoused by Rahul Gandhi about “proportional representation” and “wealth redistribution”, these statements betray a hidden agenda of the Congress to foment dissatisfaction, distrust and dismemberment. It is baring its fangs.
The irony is that the past ten years of Narendra Modi’s rule have shown us that it is possible to do several things:
- Uplift large sections from poverty (garibi hatao in action, not rhetoric)
- Create a national reawakening and sense of civilisational unity as the emotions over the Ram Mandir demonstrated (as opposed to fissiparous North-South and inter-caste divides)
- Use an “India-First” foreign policy to assert the nation’s interests (instead of faffing about in NAM)
In other words, the very opposite of what the Congress has done all these years, and it works.