#NotIndiasPride: India is way bigger than the UPA and PM Modi is not its Moses

Narendra Modi had a Twitter fumble. It’s not a great fall. He’s not Humpty Dumpty who cannot be put together again by all the king’s ministers and all the king’s bhakts. But yes, it was a rare moment of social (media) discomfiture for a man who rarely has a tweet out of place. A lot can be read into the #ModiInsultsIndia hashtag trending after his comments in Shanghai and Seoul. Analysts can debate whether some cracks are now visible in Modi’s armour of invincibility and unflappability. It could also point to the Congress belatedly getting their act together in the battlefields of social media. But what it also shows, inadvertently, is a rare glimpse into what the man thinks of himself. During the election campaign he importuned the voters to give this “sevak” a chance to serve them. But his comments abroad before adoring NRI crowds show that the “sevak” has a far grander view of himself. In an echo of his comments in Canada dissing the UPA scam-years, Modi told the diaspora in Seoul, “There was a time when people used to say we don’t know what sins we committed in our past life that we were born in Hindustan.” But no longer. Acchey din are here and as he puts it “the mood has changed.” What the Prime Minister inadvertently betrays by that comment his own sense of his place in history. And that’s just one year into the job. As The Telegraph notes: “The Prime Minister, true to his style of dividing the history of India into ‘before-me’ and ‘after-me’ in the manner of messiahs, was trying to draw a distinction between the country he inherited and the one he ‘rebuilt’ in the past 12 months.” [caption id=“attachment_2255104” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PTI[/caption] To further underscore the messianic complex, he sounds like a sort of Moses to the diaspora about to lead them back to the Promised Land or rather the Land Living up to its Promise. The people who wanted to leave, Modi says, are now ready to return to India. Return to India or R2I was a term in use long before Modi came to power. It was a by-product of the opening up of Indian markets, the entry of multinationals, rising payscales, and general growing affluence and improvement in quality of life at least for those who could afford it. Vivek Wadhwa, Wertheim Fellow at Harvard Law School published a study about it in 2009. Of course the hype and optimism about India took a hit during the doldrums of UPA-II and while Narendra Modi has done a lot to project a dynamic image of India abroad, it did not all begin in May 2014. India’s history is too vast and too complex to be turned into BM and AM – Before Modi and After Modi. And that too so soon. These comments come on the heels of one year report cards that find Narendra Modi remains hugely popular and has held onto his image as Mr. Clean but has disappointed many of his well-wishers by under-delivering on big ticket reforms. RBI governor Raghuram Rajan pretty much conceded that when he said that the expectations from the new government were “probably unrealistic” and it was “probably not appropriate” to think of Modi as “Ronald Reagan on a white horse” coming to slay anti-market forces. But the Prime Minister’s comments in Seoul revealed more hubris than humility as if he saw himself not just as that knight on a white horse but as a knight who had already brought achhey din to India. The PM sounded as if he had swallowed his followers’ hype of Modi-did-it-first and Modi-did-it-best. The first Indian prime minister to go to Mongolia. The first Indian prime minister to visit Nagaland in 10 years. The first Indian prime minister to make a bilateral trip to Nepal in 17 years. In a country that loves its first-class firsts, Modi is Numero Uno in spades. Modi claimed he was the first Indian prime minister to make a bilateral visit to Canada in 42 years. The Congress pointed out Manmohan Singh went there in 2010 at Stephen Harper’s invitation. Then the MEA clarified it was the “first stand along bilateral visit since 1973” which sounds a lot less historic. The fatal mistake in the latest comments, meant clearly to pump up the diaspora rather than insult the motherland, was Modi equated Hindustan with UPA. India is bigger than Modi and India is bigger than UPA. He is a product of India just as Rahul Gandhi is a product of India. Both are made possible by India and that is the wonder of the country. It is routine for Modi bhakts to dismiss the Nehru-Gandhi years as lost years but India did not become great just because it elected Narendra Modi. That is the most misguided version of self-centred nationalism where the sevak is consumed by his saviour complex. The Prime Minister has until now been careful about avoiding ostentatious shows of self-aggrandizement other than that infamous monogrammed suit. Despite that Bal Narendra and baby crocodile story, he nixed the Gujarat Education Department’s idea of incorporating his story into social science text books. And now we hear that Doordarshan did not commission a mega serial about the great luminaries of the oil-presser community to which Narendra Modi belongs. Narendra Modi clearly understands that the public is not a fool. Decades of mythmaking hagiography around the Nehru-Gandhis did not translate into box office success for Rahul Gandhi. Yet something happens when Modi goes abroad where the diaspora has been among his strongest and most vocal supporters. The PM lets down his guard and laps up the adulation. Most of his missteps have been made abroad. Novelist Jhumpa Lahiri once commented how her parents would seem to grow in size and confidence when they set foot in India and shrink to more colourless selves back in the US. Narendra Modi, curiously, appears to swell in size every time he sets foot on foreign soil. That’s when he really feels the force is with him. After his Canadian slam at UPA scams, Modi faced a backlash from the Congress in parliament. But that was just political sparring by a stung Congress. But this time the Twitter outrage was bigger and noisier and #ModiIndiasPride was a late and hasty attempt to do damage control to #ModiInsultsIndia. And that might be reason for a little Seoul-searching because history cannot always be Shanghaied to suit a prime minister’s will.