While it’s neither easy nor advisable to second guess Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it would be interesting to pen down some of the key points that he could be raising during his Independence Day address to the nation on 15 August this year. Interesting because the build-up seems to have begun.
For starters he will of course have to make some reference to the Covid pandemic and India’s reaction to it. This, strangely enough, is a topic he has not been very forthcoming about. During the initial stages of the lockdown we did get a couple of his televised addresses but these soon petered out (about six in all). There has been criticism that we locked down too soon, that the government was caught off-guard by the migrants’ exodus, that our bailout packages were neither adequate nor correctly tailored to address the crisis at hand. Will the PM take these criticisms head on, or will he brush these off as “Opposition propaganda”?
Will he use the fact that he implemented the world’s largest lockdown as a stand-alone achievement and let everything else pass off as collateral damage? After all, “Largest” and “Biggest” are words that fit neatly into the 56-inch chest-beating narrative. And to be fair, during the initial stages of the lockdown there were those (business leaders included) who praised him for having the nerve to shut down a country so huge, commenting that no other leader in India had the political capital to pull this one off. Certainly PM Modi had the political capital, but has he squandered a chunk of it in the implementation? Pragmatism says yes but politics says no, especially when the Opposition hasn’t done much to commend itself in the meantime.
And, yes of course, the much publicised Ram temple bhoomi pujan will be marked as an achievement. The event provides just the right setting for the “Hindu Hriday Samraat” in the backdrop of the coming Bihar and UP elections. The date of the bhoomi pujan clashes with the first anniversary of the revocation of Articles 370 & 35A in the Valley; both are a subtext of the same narrative. One Nation, One Constitution was a key mention of his speech last year.
However, one arena that will be of particular interest would be foreign policy. Lockdown began soon after US President Donald Trump’s visit to India. Foreign policy experts are since divided about the success of the visit especially since it didn’t yield any tangible benefits for India. This is election year in the US, so will the PM harp about his (now not-so) special relationship with Trump, or will he bide his time and see which way the geopolitical wind blows. But a bigger concern than Trump is our immediate neighbourhood, primarily the standoff with China. Again we haven’t heard the PM go as high voltage on this as he does about Pakistan. Will he shift the focus to Pakistan again, or will he hear his thoughts on China’s betrayal? Our equation with Nepal too is at an alltime low and that is worrying because while it’s a smaller country than both China and Pakistan, it is a part of our HUF, the larger Hindu Undivided Family.
Lastly, being Modi, he is known to take a grand event and use the platform to focus on something very basic. Such as the Swachh Bharat Mission and Jan Dhan Yojana (2014), to the Jan Arogya Abhiyan, national healthcare scheme to impact 50 crore Indians in 2018, to the Jan Jeevan Mission focusing on making drinking water available to all households (2019 speech). To be sure he’d have another scheme tagged and identified for 2020. He has already announced the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana to give 80 crore people free food grains till November. Given that the economy is still to pick up, I think we can safely expect more outreaches on these lines.
