The a-cerebral salvo being fired at Modi and his entire gamut of leaders, its affiliations and assumed-affiliations withand allegiance to different “right-wing” organizations in India is absolutely directionless. This ill-brandishing has only resulted in a waste of time and “efforts” of the nation in its entirety, while imperatively delimiting the positivist politico-economic leanings of the Modi regime to leverage benefits to the citizens of the country.

Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, had a good start with a majority in the House to back him which converged into the fact that decisions could be taken without bickering and hassles. His first few months in the office worked straight into leading the country towards an era of corruption-free governance and prosperity. It was a marked change in comparison to the former Prime Minister of the country, Manmohan Singh, who had “played puppet” to the “diktats” of the Congress supremo, Sonia Gandhi and the rest of the party cadres. But as months started rolling into years, Modi was face-to-face with a fierce resistance from the intellectual class of the country. His crime was his “dangerous” affiliation with Hindu right wingers, especially the RSS besides his “stately” affiliation to the 2002 Gujarat riots. Even though Modi had succeeded in leading Gujarat, as the Chief Minister of the state, into an era of unprecedented prosperity but people (especially mainstream politicians) are hardly remembered for their good and generally recalled for their “criminal” past – that’s is “realpolitik” in India. I am not attempting to absolve Modi of any wrong-doings at my personal end but rather trying to focus on the good he might and could obtain for India as a developing nation, especially when he is occupying the highest office in the country, that of a Prime Minister.

Looking back at the past two decades or so of politico-socio-economic history in India we have witnessed that the common people rarely got to benefit from successive regimes of governance. All mainstream political fronts ruling the country were more obsessively involved in scams and scandals in contrast to upholding the progressive portfolios which got them elected to offices of power. Whether we speak of the 1961 Jabalpur riots, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms, the Bhopal gas tragedy, the attacks on Kashmiri Pandits from 1989 onwards, the 1991-92 Bombay riots, or the 2002 Gujarat killings, all are examples of pogromed “incidents” of violence against minorities. The “misfortunes” of the poor, the tribal, the lower-caste and as a matter of fact all sections of the population of India have only been exacerbated by the stiff pathological unsympathetic attitudes of their leaders. Indian minorities have always remained peculiar targets for the country’s agenda of controlling its citizens through torture, custodial murder, and false encounter killings by police and security paraphernalia. A 2008 report by the Independent People’s Tribunal recounted: “Far from being viewed as criminal activity on the part of the police and the State’s armed forces, the practice of encounter killings is often rewarded with promotions, monetary rewards, and awards for the police officer’s bravery…. In Punjab, Kashmir, and the Northeast, security forces continue to construct fake encounters to kill suspects and ordinary persons in the hope of receiving rewards and promotions from the State.” Be it Christians in Orissa in 2007-08, Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, Sikhs in Punjab and New Delhi in 1984 and into the 1990s, Kashmiris since the 1950s, and Dalits on an almost daily basis, minorities’ rights have been operably always violated.

The downtrodden were always trodden upon while the corporate rich, who were busy filling the coffers of the political elite, stood diplomatically immune to all kinds of vicissitude. Farmers were out killing themselves while agricultural policies were limited to providing subsidiary succour to agrarian societies again marred by corruption to the extent that what actually reached the “farmer” was peanuts. The education system was in shambles like ever and so was health-care, sanitation and the whole plethora of systems that are identified as development indices of a nation. People would talk about these problems, lodge protests, agitate and get ignored. People would point the errors out and get simply shot dead or else labelled as “anti-social” and then shot dead. India was never shining. It was always painfully managing a survival. So what is it that changed once Modi assumed power? Why was Modi suddenly at the receiving end of the tirade of intellectual India? Why did the whole community of “people of the cause” find Modi only suitable for unbridled diatribes?

Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, turned out to be the “target” of “abuse” for the whole system of Indian intellectual class because he bore some kind of “allegiance” to the Sanghis. He was stipulated as the force majeure afflicting the very premise of India shining because he sought to reform the nation and salvage it from corruption and mismanagement while paying little heed to what he was breeding behind his back – a mismanaged vote bank which would have an imperative influence on his political career. Leaving that story to the critics, Modi went ahead and decided to play ball without getting bogged down by the lethargic salvo of arm-chair intellectuals. Modi chose to ignore the diatribe, for had he counted it in he would have lost focus as a leader, a mistake most of his predecessors to the chair had committed. Modi walked the aisle of nation-building selflessly while constituting to quash the interests of the corrupt. His slogan of “More Governance, Less Government” realized into a fortunate eventuality for the country with the uprooting of deadwood in the government functionaries and simplifying of procedures with minimal “babu” intervention. 

We had an entire gamut of Modi-haters whose only line of interest has been that they do not want to see Modi as the Prime Minister of the country. Who would they want to see in the PM’s chair has never been discussed. What should be the policy for a better India is not being put forth. What are the choices that Indians should make is not even considered. It is “dignified” hate-mongering. Returning awards is not doing the country any good. Dehumanizing their own Prime Minister is not doing the country’s image any good; it is only framing India into oblivion that the hegemonic West assumed it was always enveloped in. We are carving a negative niche for ourselves or rather digging our own graves by holding one man responsible for every “hit-and-run” case without ever looking at the picture from a retrospective point of view. The way we are behaving today, which is like cranky toddlers, we are doomed as a nation. 

Turning one’s ear away from cacophonies of the intellectual class in India, let us refocus on why Modi should be heralded as a better leader of the Indian nation. All actions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi translate into a corroborated adaptive approach to usher in an unprecedented era of refined development into the country. But let us also bear in mind that framing of policies and implementing them in a nation like India, which is marred by corruption and Babugiri, are not easily realized. Had the intellectual elite focused their energies on highlighting the issues pertaining or afflicting the poor and directing government initiatives on those lines we would have yielded beneficial results, while as the case remains that the intellectuals are happy harping on tunes of negativism that bear a serious note of nihilism.

While the intellectual class was at it why didn’t they find time to focus and talk about various implemented policies of the Modi government such as providing of toilets in all schools, contravention of leakage in LPG subsidy, launching of the Soil Health Card scheme to enhance farm productivity and reduce expenses, thereby enhancing farming community income, launching of a comprehensive social security scheme for the poor and marginalised, old and those with low-income levels, the Swachh Bharat Abhyan which was started to manage health and hygiene issues of the poor, setting up of the Skill Development Ministry to enhance employability of the youth in conveyance with Modi’s slogan of ‘Make in India’, reservation of women in the police forces of Union Territories, launching of the MUDRA Bank for financing 6 crore small vendors and businesses 61% of whom are SCs, STs, OBCs and Minorities, augmentation of the coal auction scheme for the uplift of the under-developed states of the country and more. 

Not to forget Modi’s Foreign Policy by means of which India now carries a “larger footprint” indicative of a new proactive foreign policy premised on shaping events rather than “depressively” only reacting to them. India is now pursuing multiple relationships across the globe simultaneously and thus making a global impact in opposition to the “lying low” policy of the previous regimes. India has transformed its image as a “first responder” in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief which was considered an imperative for India’s propensity to be recognized as a world power. Modi government has also sought to involve Indian diaspora settled abroad besides revitalizing ties with smaller states in its immediate neighbourhood, a land boundary agreement with Bangladesh, an energized U.S.-India relationship, and rescue and post-disaster operations in Yemen and Nepal. And all the critics come up with is the argument that Modi is a “selfie-freak” obsessed with the idea of his own image which is in entire opposition to the idea that had Modi sought to build a foundation for his future as a prime politician in India and elsewhere he would have been more responsive and outspoken towards the flak that he unintentionally draws and while conducting the opposite he is focus-ably losing his vote bank.

P.S.: I am not a Modi fan.