JOIN USPrime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches in Parliament during the debate on the President’s address to both Houses sounded more like speeches addressing voters in the states going to the polls soon. The Prime Minister went beyond defending his government and the claims made in the President’s address, and attacked the Opposition with such aggression and rhetoric that it was clear that he was speaking to an audience outside Parliament for an impact. There was evasion of issues, misrepresentation and misinterpretation of events, and unfair targeting of the Opposition, especially the Congress. He protested too much and resorted to low ridicule and high rhetoric in an exercise that was more vicious grandstanding than a reasoned response to criticism.
The Prime Minister tried to turn the tables on the Opposition parties who had criticised his government for poor Covid management by charging them with instigating migrant labourers to leave for their homes and helping them to do so during the first lockdown. This was falsification and an unfair inversion of events, very much like the distortion of history that is currently in vogue. It was the Prime Minister himself who, with his authoritarian 4-hour-notice lockdown of a nation of 1.3 billion people, created the situation that forced millions of migrant workers to make an exodus. Even the Supreme Court has criticised the government on its management of the migrants’ crisis. In fact, Modi’s claim of efficient management of the Covid situation also won’t be accepted easily in view of the many missteps and questionable policies adopted on the lockdown, treatment of patients, and vaccination. The PM may well be accused of trying to wash away memories of the floating dead bodies on the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh.
The Prime Minister said the Congress would not come back to power for a hundred years but still spent much of his time and energy attacking it. He called it by the worst epithets in his party’s lexicon, meant for anti-nationals and traitors. That is not a democratic response to the Opposition in Parliament. Once again, he invoked counterfactual history of the sort one might use to impress at an RSS adda — a hypothetical picture of what would have happened in the country if the Congress had been dissolved after Independence. A history that would have been is as unreal as distorted and invented history. The PM should have replied to questions about the various problems facing the country, such as joblessness, inflation, a precariously poised economy, rising social disharmony and other failures of his government. Instead, he blamed the Opposition and previous governments for all the ills and failings. No-one in the country is very proud of the Opposition parties it has, but when the Prime Minister picks them out and throws all the unflattering light on them, while sparing himself and his government, that light falls more on what he tries to hide than on what he seeks to expose.