PM Modi’s speech on Sindoor: Tectonic shift in Indian politics

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on the floor of the Lok Sabha on Operation Sindoor was an astonishing masterclass. It will go down as his finest hour and the most outstanding performance by an Indian political leader since Independence. Modi demolished all the treasonous slander and libel of India’s so-called political Opposition, in the wake of Pahalgam and Operation Sindoor. Prime Minister Modi eloquently asserted the quest for India’s unfinished goal of statehood in its most formative historical phase since the coronation of Chhatrapati Maharaj at Raigad Fort in 1674. No nation can be built by one solitary individual alone, but if anyone has a claim to being its driving contemporary force it’s surely Narendra Damodar Modi.

In just over a decade the change he has wrought to the Indian nation is unprecedented. It is more impressive than the achievements of Otto von Bismarck and Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had force at their disposal, to create modern Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century. By contrast Prime Minister Modi has had to navigate the most intolerably vexatious political order of truculent anarchy and constitutional roadblocks to pursue the imperative goal of placing the nation on a secure footing and institutionalizing its essential multidimensional attributes.

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Prime Minister Modi’s speech followed three superb performances by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Home Minister Amit Shah that laid out in exact detail and sequence the purposes and achievements of Operation Sindoor. But it was the Prime Minister who deployed a scalpel with precision, engaged in unforgiving historical analysis of Congress party history and precise chronological detail of the momentous events after the brutal murders of Pahalgam. He proceeded to unsparingly dissect the grotesque absurdity of India’s political Opposition and its entitled so-called Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi.

One by one, he summarised the calamitous missteps of the Congress party following Independence, especially Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, whose arrogant self-confidence despite utter incompetence have cost Indian dear. The most grievous losses to India occurred immediately after Independence because of his unctuous deference to Viceroy Lord Mountbatten and obsession with Edwina, his wife. Mountbatten presided over the colossal bloodletting of Partition despite being warned by his own officials it was going to occur, but Nehru nevertheless proceeded to retain him as Governor-General. Most egregiously he retained British Generals as India’s army chiefs of staff who duly betrayed India as it was poised to retake J&K in entirety and potentially liberate the strategically vital territory of Gilgit Baltistan. A grim account of events has been provided by India’s commanding officer during the war, Lionel Pratap Sen in his memoirs, Slender was the Thread.

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Nehru proceeded to betray Tibet by assisting its conquest by China, extending logistical support to it during the invasion. His monumental stupidity subsequently led to military defeat in 1962 when China attacked India and the loss of the Aksai Chin. Nehru ignored warnings by his most brilliant China expert, Sumol Sinha, whom he banished to Harvard in annoyance when alerted of the impending danger posed by China.

In the aftermath of the 1962 military catastrophe, he sought to ingratiate himself with Mountbatten again and supposedly secure his place in history, by ceding the Kashmir Valley to Pakistan. Thankfully, the negotiations he had sponsored in London faltered after Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto ceded the Shaksgam Valley to China and Nehru died before any resumption of talks was feasible.

The other grievous error was committed by his daughter, Indira Gandhi. After India’s historic military defeat of Pakistan in 1971 she mistakenly acquiesced to Soviet implorations and failed to retain vital Indian strategic gains made in the battlefield. The Soviets persuaded her not to impose a harsh peace on Pakistan at Simla because their vital SALT talks with the US were scheduled for the same year. A visionary stateswoman would have ignored Soviet requests, despite their important help during the conflict, and pursued urgent Indian national interests, facing down Soviet displeasure.

The astonishing calumny and legal assault Narendra Modi has suffered for almost twenty-three years would have defeated and broken a lesser man, but he’s evidently made of sterner stuff than most. But it is a cause of deep shame that his role as Prime Minister of India has not spared him the most despicable abuse from which the dignity of his office should have shielded him. But Modi was apparently intended for a higher purpose, as his former adviser the immensely learned and wise, late Bibek Debroy once prophetically pointed out. The dismal misconduct of Congress party apparatchiks is a reflection of the low mindset that has consumed the party today.

Rahul Gandhi himself is beyond redemption and the people of India have by now figured him out. His constant refrain inviting Modi to publicly denounce President Donald Trump as a liar, over claims he ensured the cessation of hostilities in the context of Operation Sindoor, is oblivious to the consequence of such observations by Modi prompting a huge setback in India-US relations, at a time when sensitive negotiations are in train between the two counties. His undue sensitivity towards two of the world’s most criminal regimes, with prodigious quantities of blood on their hands over many decades, has not made him reflect. The millions of famine victims of China’s Great Leap Forward and the genocidal war against the Hindus of East Pakistan in 1971 are crying out plaintively to no avail. Such is the temperament of Rahul Gandhi.

Operation Sindoor is a testament to what has happened to Bharat that is India over the past 11 years. A significantly reformed, rebuilt and indigenised Indian armed forces demonstrated what the nation is capable of once the shackles of prolonged foreign subjugation of policy idiocy end. The innovative genius of Indians was illustrated not just by the array of missiles designed and manufactured domestically, but how an outdated arsenal of guns was adapted with inventive new technology to return to the battlefield as highly efficient and cost-effective weaponry.

The imperative of an efficacious military is essential for deterrence and infinitely cheaper than warfighting and that’s the direction in which Modi’s has been headed. In fact, Operation Sindoor continued with India’s security agencies eliminating the killers of Pahalgam after a relentless search operation. Let it also be registered that both Pahalgam and Pakistani responses to India’s Operation Sindoor were a joint effort, with the terrorists and Pakistani terrorist army using Chinese equipment, from missiles and aircraft to machine guns and satellite phones.

The transformation of India’s defence sector is a metaphor for the advances in its wider economy of a massive infrastructure building surge, the absence of which earlier constrained economic progress. This key endeavour in lowering logistical costs and the implementation of unprecedented new associated dimensions, underlined by India’s digitisation and startups, will be the basis of a robust and internationally competitive economy. Combined with multiple measures to reduce poverty, highlighted by India’s forward leap in the recent World Bank Gini coefficient rankings, India will surely incarnate a new dharmic socio-economic order in the making.

This is the scale of Narendra Modi’s achievements and it’s a tragic irony that many supposedly sensible, allegedly educated Indians don’t see it, missing the forest for the trees, a chronic historic propensity of Hindus. The great danger remains that the well thought out Congress party strategy of inciting bitter caste animosity and the mobilisation of India’s growing jihadi constituency will upset India’s progressing apple cart. There should be no doubt the entire Congress strategy, the tried and tested Karnataka model, is perfectly rational and hugely portentous. It aims to seize power electorally by organising the intransigent Muslim vote-bank alongside disaffected caste constituencies and contrived regional discontent to establish a victorious coalition.

Such a political situation will threaten India’s sovereignty and independence as a nation and the dreams of its historic transformation, with mutually dependent Islamic and foreign interests conjoining to successfully seizing India from within. But the Lok Sabha debate on Operation Sindoor and the spectacular performance of the Prime Minister and his team also suggest the possibility of a reprieve for India in 2029 and, hopefully, beyond too. Once the Indian economy reaches its $10 trillion GDP target it will be unstoppable and secure.

The writer taught international political economy for more than two decades at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.