By Harish Khare
If Narendra Modi and Amit Shah had not depleted their political capital so extravagantly these last ten years, they could perhaps protest Mohan Bhagwat’s speech at the annual Vijayadashami rally in Nagpur because the RSS boss’s oration can easily be read as an indictment of how the Prime Minister and his Home Minister have administered this country.
Deploying a trainload of platitudes and cliches the RSS Chief bemoans a society suffering from all kinds of fault-lines.
One has to wonder what the Union Home Ministry and other custodians of national security would make of Bhagwat’s alarming understanding of our internal landscape: “Today, Punjab, Jammu-Kashmir, Ladakh on the north-western border of the country; Keral and Tamil Nadu on the sea border; and the entire Purvanchal from Bihar to Manipur are disturbed.”
A damning verdict. Even after five years of the ministrations of the strongest and the shrewdest Home Minister the country has had since Independence, the great sarsanghchalak finds reason to express his unhappiness at the state of the nation.
Except an indirect reference – “Everyone feels that Bharat as a nation has become stronger and more respected in the world with an enhanced credibility in the past few years” – there is no mention nor any word of praise for the Modi-Shah regime.
If truth was to be told, this year’s speech could have been made by any other sarsanghchalak at any other time: The same Rotary Club kind of exhortations of togetherness and brotherhood, the same belabored incantation of the “auspiciousness and righteousness,” the same cataloguing of character-building formulas dished out by the style-gurus in airport paperbacks. At display is an imagination that has run dry.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
