In invoking Tagore and Vivekananda as 'Bengal's children', Narendra Modi lands twin blows on Mamata Banerjee

India is a strange place. Here, the chief minister of a state stops students from watching live prime minister’s address to the nation, and yet claims to be a champion of free speech. In the fiefdom of West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government crushes dissenting voices, prevents Opposition from holding conventions in state-run auditoriums while she appears at a candlelight vigil to mourn the death of a journalist whose murder she blames (without any evidence) on ‘intolerance’.

The move to deny university students in Bengal the chance to watch prime minister’s speech was in particularly bad taste. Only one other state had joined Mamata Banerjee in her pettiness. Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah’s compulsions could still be attributed to jitteriness ahead of the impending Assembly polls, though nothing justifies the blocking. Narendra Modi wasn’t delivering an election rally.

The prime minister was addressing students across the nation on Monday morning from New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan to mark the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago address and Deendayal Upadhyaya’s centenary celebrations. The subject themed on ‘Young India, New India,’ was apolitical, the speech was unexceptionable and the message was simple: using the power of youth for nation-building.

The Bengal government, however, preempted a saffron ghost inside prime minister’s communication and asked all state-run universities and colleges to ignore UGC’s directive on live-streaming Monday’s event. “It is not acceptable to us as we feel it is a clear attempt at saffronisation of education. The colleges and universities in the state were surprised by the UGC circular. Then they approached us. I have clearly told them that there is no necessity to adhere to the UGC directive,” Partha Chatterjee was quoted as saying by Indian Express .

This isn’t the first time that the West Bengal government has refused to abide by UGC circulars. During Independence Day, it had asked all educational institutions under its aegis to ignore the programmes suggested by the Centre to celebrate India’s freedom from British rule.

Heavy handed tactics like these are usually counterproductive. Though there has been no evidence to prove that Gauri Lankesh’s murder was driven by politics or ideology, the tragic incident reinforced in public discourse the cliché about ideas transcending the brute force of bullets. By denying the students a chance to watch live-streaming of prime minister’s address, all that Mamata Banerjee succeeded in doing is to appear churlish and showcase her hypocrisy in the fight against suppression of dissent.

Modi didn’t waste the opportunity. Knowing well the motives behind the move, he shunned all political messaging and delivered an inclusive, directional and inspirational speech. He picked up threads from Swami Vivekananda’s 1893 Chicago address and weaved it into his idea of a ‘New India’. Further, in his eulogisation of Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda as “Bengal’s children”, the attempt to draw a contrast with Mamata’s ‘intolerance’ was clear.

“Both Rabindranath Tagore and Vivekandanda were Bengal’s children. On my international visits, I feel proud to say Tagore wrote national anthems for Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. Do we take pride in this?” the prime minister asked. Modi added ,“After Rabindranath Tagore was given the Nobel Prize for Literature and Swami Vivekananda was known across the world for his Chicago speech, India gained a significant place in the world map. It is a matter of pride that both these individuals hail from Bengal.”

The reference to Tagore will cut deeper than is apparent at first. In the fight fo a footprint in Bengal, BJP’s biggest weakness, which Mamata Banerjee has been able to exploit, is a lack of a cultural connect. The chief minister has sought to battle BJP’s upward curve by trying to showcase it as a sort of ’non-Bengali other’ — a political force antithetical to the culture and ‘idea of Bengal’. This creation of a sub-identity of ‘Bengalism’ within the larger national identity is deliberate and is meant to transcend the ‘Hindu victim’ card that BJP has bet on while trying to make inroads.

Mamata didn’t waste the chance when an RSS ideologue suggested a revision of school textbooks by removing references to Tagore. “Soon they will remove everyone from the country. How can one even talk of removing Tagore from school text books? This is just rubbish. He is the pride of the world, everybody respects him,” Mamata had said in July.

Modi’s reference to Tagore on Monday, therefore, was both a gambit against Mamata’s ‘intolerance’ and an attempt to appropriate the strongest signifier of Bengali identity. Apart from the deliberate messaging, the unintended one was equally important. There might be a thousand political opportunities for Mamata to pit herself as the fulcrum of Opposition resistance against BJP. But to attempt to do so on this occasion was a poor move. If anything, by blocking the prime minister’s speech while he celebrated Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy as the cornerstone of nation-building effort, Mamata may have unwittingly let BJP appropriate yet another icon.

In his rather long address , Modi sought to marry two rather diverging ideas into one cognitive whole.

When he said Swami Vivekananda’s way of reaching God was not through rituals, but through service to mankind and attached it to cleaning the nation by asking, “Do we even have the right to chant Vande Mataram today? I know my question will hurt some people, but how can we chant Vande Mataram while soiling the nation? Those who clean the nation are the real sons and daughters of Bharat Maata,” he was trying to link faith and religiosity with nation-building — with one fervor replacing the other.

We find a reinforcement of this attempt when he mentioned toilets before temples, stressed on sanitation of workers, touched upon social ills of untouchability and urged students to build a cross-cultural connection to build a unified India. He also encouraged students to create employment and dipped into Vivekananda’s correspondence with Jamsetji Tata to stress on the need for self-reliance.

Modi’s overall attempt was to elevate nation-building and nationalism on to a much higher plane where these are immune to Leftist construct of fascism. It was clear that Modi was aware of the controversy around his address and sought to maximize his gains by appearing more inclusive than his rivals. This was a master communicator at work.