Tavleen Singh writes: Birthday blessings or a bad idea? - The Indian Express
Did you light a diya of ‘blessing’ on the Prime Minister’s birthday last week? I considered doing so for a moment. It seemed like a simple enough request. But when I saw whole streets covered in diyas by Narendra Modi’s shamelessly sycophantic chief ministers, I changed my mind. So, if truth be told, the Prime Minister should have asked for something else as a birthday present, and I shall tell you why. He has carefully cultivated the image of being a man of the people, a true son of the soil, as opposed to the entitled, spoilt princes who are his main political opponents. What went through his mind when, late on the night of his birthday, social media filled up with pictures of small children collecting the oil from these clay lamps to take home to their mothers for cooking their meagre meals?
Did those pictures make him feel bad? Or is he now in such a lofty cocoon that he does not notice such things? Did it hurt him to see those reels on social media of flooded villages in Bihar and Assam in which there was, in some cases, no dry land left on which to place the clay lamps he urged people to light? Did it hurt him when the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party lit a diya in the broken window of a crumbling school only to declare that his birthday gift to the Prime Minister was this school? Did he approve of the hundreds of crore his chief ministers spent on carrying out his wishes? Did he approve of the huge sums spent on advertisements by his minions and supposed well-wishers?
As someone who has not had a personal chat with the Prime Minister for more than ten years, I have no way of finding the answers to these questions. What I do know is that the man I openly supported during his first term as Prime Minister was not a man who would have missed the damage done to him by his birthday request. Personally, I was sickened by the tributes that played out on social media all day. Some were so exaggerated that I saw them as mockery and not genuine praise. The tribute I found most nauseating was one in which Modi dressed as Lord Rama was worshipped as a god. Were those who did this seriously praying or having a laugh? This is a question that the Prime Minister needs to ask himself in a private moment of musing and reflection.
What I found particularly tragic about the outpouring of obsequiousness on the birthday was that there is much that Modi has done that is truly praiseworthy. Infrastructure has been built on a scale never seen before in our ancient land. And the Swachh Bharat mission has been transformative, as have his efforts to introduce digital governance and banking. There is also no question that the Prime Minister has made it his mission to teach Indians to dream big dreams and to be proud of being Indian. Here, I need to add that it would have made me happier if he had gone beyond religion and exalted some other real achievements, in times of antiquity, that for too long the world has overlooked.
Modi’s obsession with infusing religiosity into everything made him forget when he said that the story of Ganesh was evidence that plastic surgery was invented in India long ago. It was. But it was by Shushrut, whose surgical wonders are remembered in medical colleges in foreign lands. And almost unknown in India. It goes without saying that if mathematicians in ancient India had not invented numbers and the concept of zero as a number, the world as we know it today may have been a different place. In any case, Modi can certainly take credit for being the first Indian Prime Minister to have at least drawn the world’s attention to these ancient wonders.
lives. The most important is the criminal neglect of schools. This neglect has been there since we became an independent nation, so it is something that Modi inherited. The problem is that he did nothing about it when he could have. Most large Indian states are under the governance of his chief ministers.
The saddest thing that can be said about the birthday celebrations of last week is that Modi appears to have forgotten that he has been elected and re-elected twice because voters saw him as one of their own. Had he remembered this, he would never have encouraged the snivelling tributes and would not have asked for diyas to be lit on the scale that he did. These are things that only kings living in remote palaces did in pre-modern times.
In more modern times, these celebrations give pleasure to politicians, no names will be mentioned, who secretly wish that they were kings or at least absolute rulers. The old Modi would have remembered that he asked Indians to eat less oil in their food for reasons of nationalism. The old Modi would never have asked for thousands of diyas to be lit, just to wish him ‘happy birthday’.
