- By Dr Shanthikumar Hettiarachchi
- Sunday, 25 May 2014 00:00
India’s new Premier Narendra Modi should put behind him the ugly scenario of Gujarat in 2002 and display a different behavior to emerge as a true democratic leader. (AFP)
The end of Manmohan Singh reign also brought curtains on the dynastic era of the Gandhi-Nehru political influence on Indian politics. This was due to the humiliating defeat the Congress party suffered, managing to win less than 50 seats in the Lok Sabha of 543 seats. Forecasters suggested that Modi was on course to secure a clear majority and win the largest number of seats since 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi won a landslide on a wave of sympathy and anguish following the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi. Modi does not need a coalition which leaves the king making Tamil Nadu in a different kind of political cocoon. This is yet another time in India’s post independence elections that a non Gandhi-Nehru candidate has been elected to govern this billion + population with over 500 million voter base, Modi securing a clear majority with 282 seats which constitutionally requires only 272 seats to form a government.
The jubilant Modi said “India has won”, what underpins that statement is loud and clear, that he will rule India with this large majority. Also he indicates that separatist tendencies of the Nagas, the Kalistanis, Kashmiris and the fractured politics of Tamil Nadu may not be needed anymore to form the Delhi government which even Congress had to plead upon. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with its unholy alliance with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) evoking bad and the ugly scenes in Gujarat in 2002 and elsewhere with its essentialist Hindu narrative inflicting fear on the minorities will have to be reformed and revisited to be loyal to the secular India. Modi’s challenge now is beyond being the chief minister of Gujarat, but as the prime minister of India, the largest democracy that India boasts all the time. The time is now to prove that India not only the largest democracy but also a credible democracy that is able to mother all Indians of the North, the South, the East and the West, the land of contradictions of the scandalously rich with abject poverty side by side.
Jayaram’s Tamil Nadu
It is also first time that one single party has been able to secure 34 of the 39 seats of the State parliament. However, AIADMK is no king maker as being predicted by political gurus of the South. Karunanidi family tree and Vaiko, a close ally of the LTTE’s slain maverick are now political dwarfs before the Brahmin Kannada Komalavalli of Mysore now known as Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the incumbent chief minister. She had organized 202 pre-election eating places in Chennai – all set up over the last 14 months and all hugely popular – were known as “Amma canteens” cooking 185kg of rice in each canteen. Nearly 4,000 daily customers flocked, porters, rickshaw drivers, nurses, patients, students, bureaucrats, doctors and itinerant holy men all stand to eat their heavily subsidized meals, priced at no more than 5 rupees and eaten at ferocious speed from tin plates. She will remain powerful, but her rivals with the local chief and his sons will also remain her nightmares in the days to come. The political clout she might have dreamt to maneuver Delhi politics remains only a dream and the pressure particularly on Sri Lankan politics whether be on the question of ‘illegal fishing’ or speaking and wanting to act as if she was also the chief minister for Sri Lanka was a mockery indeed.
What she must remember is that her mandate now received from her people is to govern Tamil Nadu which is a state in India, and she needs to pay more attention to the most discriminated large population of Dalits of the state of Tamil Nadu who voted her into power in 2014. She must also remember that she is under the constitution of India even if her state has its ethnic affinities with the Tamil co ethnics in Malaysia, Fiji, Singapore and Sri Lanka. If she really feels and wishes to resolve problems of Tamils in any of the above countries, then at least she must make visits and befriend her counterparts in these countries because remote control politics is of her one time celluloid world is not the real world. The new prime minister of India must make sure that Jayaram’s constituency of TN once again does not become a haven for training of foreign terrorists, centre for procurement of arms, a hub for illegal activities of human trafficking, drug peddling and criminal logistics. Instead it can be a place where the celebrated Siva Siddhanta philosophy and the Siva bhakti tradition, Tamil culture and cuisines, popular Kollywood cinema, Tirukkural and the literature like could be shared and disseminated to the global ethnic Tamils and others as Tamil Nadu is the one single place where over 60 million Tamil speaking people live traditionally. It is the cultural hub of global Tamils and no other place is comparable to that rich Dravidian ethos. What the writer is not sure about is the fact whether modern global Tamil ethnics look up to Jayaram’s political landscape with the same feeling of a heritage and cultural roots.
positive response
“This is a crucial election,” said A.R. Venkatachalapathy, a respected Tamil Nadu historian, analyst and translator. “It is a referendum on what kind of India the electorate want to have. India has so many interests – cultural, social, religious as well as regional – and all look for democratic expression. That is the nation’s strength”. Historian’s pre-election comment is valuable in the post-election period to assess where this nation heading itself. India has not been in best of diplomatic relations with most of her neighbors, cold relations with China, ambiguous with Russia, US relations bitter, EU with a poor tempo, even though UK had repaired links moderately just before nominations. Basically India’s foreign policy is at its lowest ebb since its independence. However, both the heads of governments of Pakistan and Sri Lanka have sent their felicitations and invited the new prime minister to visit their respective countries. Response to Sri Lanka has been on a positive note.
Modi must now know that he is no longer the CM of Gujarat where for a very long time he had the police under his direct rule, no ombudsman was appointed for grievance monitoring and redress release, relied on a remittance-led economy directly invested by the affluent Gujarati Diaspora of Europe, North America and in other part of the world. He is now being given a mandate to run a country not a state, not a police, but a people, not just to look to the states of India and Delhi alone, but a politically critical world with a regional leadership resting upon him. He will be asked to be accountable unlike the ugly scenario of Gujarat in 2002 where hundreds of Muslims were murdered which still haunts him. He has to display a different behavior that will make him a true democratic leader. He certainly has a lot of home work to do to become the caliber of a leader that India desires and deserves. Considering the humble origins, Modi had risen to the top most job of the land of his birth and he too deserves nothing less than felicitation, support and good wishes for a creative governance of Bharata – Sri Lanka’s illustrious neighbor.
The jubilant Modi said “India has won”, what underpins that statement is loud and clear, that he will rule India with this large majority. Also he indicates that separatist tendencies of the Nagas, the Kalistanis, Kashmiris and the fractured politics of Tamil Nadu may not be needed anymore to form the Delhi government which even Congress had to plead upon. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with its unholy alliance with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) evoking bad and the ugly scenes in Gujarat in 2002 and elsewhere with its essentialist Hindu narrative inflicting fear on the minorities will have to be reformed and revisited to be loyal to the secular India. Modi’s challenge now is beyond being the chief minister of Gujarat, but as the prime minister of India, the largest democracy that India boasts all the time. The time is now to prove that India not only the largest democracy but also a credible democracy that is able to mother all Indians of the North, the South, the East and the West, the land of contradictions of the scandalously rich with abject poverty side by side.
Jayaram’s Tamil Nadu
It is also first time that one single party has been able to secure 34 of the 39 seats of the State parliament. However, AIADMK is no king maker as being predicted by political gurus of the South. Karunanidi family tree and Vaiko, a close ally of the LTTE’s slain maverick are now political dwarfs before the Brahmin Kannada Komalavalli of Mysore now known as Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the incumbent chief minister. She had organized 202 pre-election eating places in Chennai – all set up over the last 14 months and all hugely popular – were known as “Amma canteens” cooking 185kg of rice in each canteen. Nearly 4,000 daily customers flocked, porters, rickshaw drivers, nurses, patients, students, bureaucrats, doctors and itinerant holy men all stand to eat their heavily subsidized meals, priced at no more than 5 rupees and eaten at ferocious speed from tin plates. She will remain powerful, but her rivals with the local chief and his sons will also remain her nightmares in the days to come. The political clout she might have dreamt to maneuver Delhi politics remains only a dream and the pressure particularly on Sri Lankan politics whether be on the question of ‘illegal fishing’ or speaking and wanting to act as if she was also the chief minister for Sri Lanka was a mockery indeed.
What she must remember is that her mandate now received from her people is to govern Tamil Nadu which is a state in India, and she needs to pay more attention to the most discriminated large population of Dalits of the state of Tamil Nadu who voted her into power in 2014. She must also remember that she is under the constitution of India even if her state has its ethnic affinities with the Tamil co ethnics in Malaysia, Fiji, Singapore and Sri Lanka. If she really feels and wishes to resolve problems of Tamils in any of the above countries, then at least she must make visits and befriend her counterparts in these countries because remote control politics is of her one time celluloid world is not the real world. The new prime minister of India must make sure that Jayaram’s constituency of TN once again does not become a haven for training of foreign terrorists, centre for procurement of arms, a hub for illegal activities of human trafficking, drug peddling and criminal logistics. Instead it can be a place where the celebrated Siva Siddhanta philosophy and the Siva bhakti tradition, Tamil culture and cuisines, popular Kollywood cinema, Tirukkural and the literature like could be shared and disseminated to the global ethnic Tamils and others as Tamil Nadu is the one single place where over 60 million Tamil speaking people live traditionally. It is the cultural hub of global Tamils and no other place is comparable to that rich Dravidian ethos. What the writer is not sure about is the fact whether modern global Tamil ethnics look up to Jayaram’s political landscape with the same feeling of a heritage and cultural roots.
positive response
“This is a crucial election,” said A.R. Venkatachalapathy, a respected Tamil Nadu historian, analyst and translator. “It is a referendum on what kind of India the electorate want to have. India has so many interests – cultural, social, religious as well as regional – and all look for democratic expression. That is the nation’s strength”. Historian’s pre-election comment is valuable in the post-election period to assess where this nation heading itself. India has not been in best of diplomatic relations with most of her neighbors, cold relations with China, ambiguous with Russia, US relations bitter, EU with a poor tempo, even though UK had repaired links moderately just before nominations. Basically India’s foreign policy is at its lowest ebb since its independence. However, both the heads of governments of Pakistan and Sri Lanka have sent their felicitations and invited the new prime minister to visit their respective countries. Response to Sri Lanka has been on a positive note.
Modi must now know that he is no longer the CM of Gujarat where for a very long time he had the police under his direct rule, no ombudsman was appointed for grievance monitoring and redress release, relied on a remittance-led economy directly invested by the affluent Gujarati Diaspora of Europe, North America and in other part of the world. He is now being given a mandate to run a country not a state, not a police, but a people, not just to look to the states of India and Delhi alone, but a politically critical world with a regional leadership resting upon him. He will be asked to be accountable unlike the ugly scenario of Gujarat in 2002 where hundreds of Muslims were murdered which still haunts him. He has to display a different behavior that will make him a true democratic leader. He certainly has a lot of home work to do to become the caliber of a leader that India desires and deserves. Considering the humble origins, Modi had risen to the top most job of the land of his birth and he too deserves nothing less than felicitation, support and good wishes for a creative governance of Bharata – Sri Lanka’s illustrious neighbor.
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