Modi, the Man of the masses or the Deity of the hollowmen

                                 Modi, the Man of the masses or the Deity of the hollowmen

The coronation day has come. A mega event that will make IPL opening ceremony a pale shadow in comparison is on display today at the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt. There had been fourteen Prime Ministers before the present PM-designate. All of them have been sworn in the Central Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The 15^th Prime Minister’s swearing-in-ceremony is different and it is to be in the open forecourt to accommodate 4000 invitees.  As leaders across the South Asian region are converging to participate in this grand function, unprecedented security measures have been put in place.

No one dare ask why all this fuss over a ceremony that is a regular event of Indian democracy that takes place periodically once in five years (or sometimes less than that period). Why this hype today  about showcasing Indian democracy as though all the previous elections did not project a robust democracy? Why are we beating our trumpet when the whole world has applauded our election commission’s efforts to ensure a fair and violence free poll? Is this pomp and show meant to highlight a new historic occasion that has eliminated the first PM’s Congress party and given a Congress-mukht Bharat? Maybe the BJP and its PM- designate feel that it is a second independence movement to free India this time from Congress colonizers. The euphoria of winning 300+ seats in the recently concluded elections is not a unique or an isolated one as in the past Congress has had a hatrick of humungous wins. Not even the win in the first general elections in 1951-52 was hailed in the way the current victory is celebrated as the triumph of democracy.  Does that mean the nation all these years –including the Vajpayee years- had experienced autocracy and witnessed the defeat of democracy? Why this hullabaloo today as ‘the beginning of a new era’ which is how the media headlines the occasion?

I write this not in anger nor in sadness but with trembling anxiety lest what is trumpeted today as the run of democracy may lead to oligarchy where a political system is governed by a few people. The new PM Narendra Modi has ben blessed with adequate  numbers to prop him to rule without any fetters. The opposition has been blown to smithereens and there will be no opposition worth the name to oppose him in his attempt to govern the way he chooses to. He may make his governance seem artless and ingenuous but his acolytes who want everything to be Modi-fied may push him to do just the opposite to keep with their slogan-‘make everything new’. In a magnificent poem The Hollowmen,  T.S.Eliot describes how a shadow paralyzes all our activites so that we are unable to act, create, respond or even exist:

                                                 Between the idea
                                                 And the reality
                                                 Between the motion
                                                 And the act
                                                 Falls the Shadow
                                                       .  .   ,

                                                       Between the conception
                                                       And the creation
                                                       Between the emotion
                                                       And the response
                                                       Falls the Shadow
                                                        .           .          .

                                                         Between the desire
                                                         And the spasm
                                                         Between the potency
                                                          And the existence
                                                          Between the essence
                                                          And the descent
                                                          Falls the Shadow

Eliot cautions men from becoming hollowmen citing the story of the Heart of Darkness about a colonial Englishman who goes power-hungry in Africa and how things only go downhill from there and how  a group of scarecrow-like individuals who  are hollowmen  contribute to a serious case of moral paralysis.

Modi is the Man of the Moment. He has been invested with insuperable power that makes him almost the God’s chosen man. But if media which had benefitted from him before the elections in its hunger for more benefits tries to deify him, it will put pressure on Modi to cast off that halo and remain people’s man who had been given him their reasoned mandate. May God save Modi from this pretentious bunch of acolytes and bootlickers and help him in the great role that Destiny has accorded him.