W ho is the most vilified chief minister of India of all times by the liberal and angst-ridden mainstream media? If one is fed on a diet of feel-good tetrapacks offered daily through the bytes beamed straight into our homes or lobbed under our doors in sanitised broadsheets, the answer is, indisputably, Narendra Modi.
That is no shocker, because it does not take one to be a trained psephologist to have predicted his second coming in 2007. Can the people of Gujarat, or the electoral majority of them, be blamed for electing a ‘mass-murderer’, touted to be the leader of one of the worst genocides to have happened in post-Partition India?
How is the liberal media likely to read the reincarnation of Modi? Possibly that the people of Gujarat set great store by him because he is a man who delivers. Or that economics is a greater unifying force than the disintegrating germ of communalism.
Fail to feel pulse
This clearly points to the gross disconnect between the way the ‘liberal’ media chose to demonise Modi, and the way, the people of Gujarat, chose to deify him. Should that also mean, that the ‘liberal’ media is completely at a loss to feel the pulse of the electorate, or to move them adequately into a verdict against Modi? Alas, the right-thinking media, cannot stage a coup of electoral conscience.
The point is simple. A crime as horrendous as a communal pogrom, the scale of which was epically gigantic was not essentially a disqualification, to the people voting for Modi. No matter how graphically and meticulously documented were the gory records of the Gujarat riots and the persistent orchestration of Modi’s monstrosity, as lately as in the Tehelka stings, the infamous CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar interview, etc Modi had no problem in shoving aside the irritants and in winning back Gujarat. Instead, he had been successful in portraying all the negative publicity as conspiracy against the people of Gujarat.
As the most vilified chief minister of our country, Modi’s disdain for “five-star activists” is not wide off the mark. Because, what our liberal intelligentsia failed to see is that their perception of evil is wildly at variance with how people view evil in the politicians they tend to elect. Perhaps the people of India attach more importance to expediency than to the so-called liberal values. Perhaps they are more need-driven than they are thought-driven.
Think of the liberal media’s another bete noire Laloo Prasad Yadav. At the height of the fodder scam, while he was being riled almost daily for looting away Bihar, he continued to be the messiah of the poor. Laloo was very much the darling with his people despite the statistics going against him, despite the media.
Take the instance of Jayalalitha Jayaram, former Tamil Nadu CM, whom the New York Times described in May 2001 as “a national caricature of the greedy, arrogant Indian politician” and against whom a number of criminal and corruption cases were pending, winning the election bandwagon. Though on September 21, 2001, a five-judge constitutional bench of the SC declared her appointment as CM as null and invalid with retrospective effect in the period between May 14, 2001 and September 21, 2001, she eventually took over on March 2, 2002 and continued till May 12, 2006.
Pritish Nandy once tartly said that if the larger numbers root for a rogue, a thief, a wanton criminal to hijack power, to perpetuate a wicked, criminal regime and thwart the beliefs and convictions of the rest of India, so it shall be. For that is democracy.
The “mass murderer” presided over Godhra killings but as a recent RBI report says, Gujarat under Modi was the favourite destination for investments in the country in 2007. In the last six years, the Modi government has worked on 72 initiatives including public-private participation in health care, adult education, rural infrastructure and farming and gender equality apart from encouraging investments into the state.
Demonology fails
These ‘leaders’ do indeed have a way with the masses. So, before the liberal intelligentsia begin to spout their bromides again, it should seriously ponder over its disconnect with the people, wondering why its messages of demonology fail to serve its purpose, why the virtual villains become real-life heroes.
