Narendra Modi is the longest serving elected Prime Minister of Bharat. He recently beat the record of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. He remains as strong as he was on day one and his undented popularity beats the conventional anti-incumbency logic.
Many have been seeking to decode the secret of his success.
There is a tendency to compare Modi with Nehru since he broke the first Prime Minister’s record that had stood for over half a century. The comparison, however, is often confined to the prevailing state of the nation and the geopolitical situations then and now. They miss the fundamental difference between them: their emotional orientation to the nation.
Pandit Nehru as the first Prime Minister began the nation-building enterprise as if independent Bharat had started with a clean slate. He ignored the civilisational resilience and cultural continuum of Bharatiya society. He sought to build a modern state inspired by British parliamentary democracy, European secularism, Soviet-style centralised planning and State-controlled development.
He seemed convinced that the long-enslaved people of Bharat, lacking in Western education and orientation, could not be trusted to undertake a modern enterprise.
Using the inherited colonial institutions of governance, he tried to build a secular
modern state on the foundation of European individualism and rationalism in a traditional and profoundly religious society with an integral view of life and creation; a view that held life sacred and believed that the individual and society existed in inseparable symbiosis.
The modern State that Pandit Nehru sought to build was at odds with the civilisational consciousness of Bharat. The dissonance between the modern secular State of Nehru and the civilisational society of Bharat generated unpredictable centrifugal social entropy turning diversities into differences.
People living for long in harmonious coexistence began seeking separation from each other. More and more linguistic, ethnic, tribal and communal states, districts and administrative councils were created to satisfy the increasing demands for exclusive identity-based homelands. The number of castes and tribes multiplied in every census.
The nation was put in a centrifuge. Hindu religious institutions became suspect and textbooks were purged of all references to the epics of Bharat. As if to overcome his sense of moral defeat at the communal partition of the country and spite Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pandit Nehru courted the Muslims who had not migrated to Pakistan with demonstrative appeasement and took ostensible measures to distance himself from Hindu religious institutions.
He did not resonate with the civilisational consciousness of Bharat and could not connect with its ethos.
Modi, on the other hand, is a manifestation of the civilisational soul of Bharat. His unique personality has been forged by the circumstances of the life that he chose from the days of his youth. He is the only Prime Minister who, as an RSS pracharak, has lived in at least one village for one night in all 800 districts of the country.
His intimate and granular understanding of the socio-cultural-economic and geographic landscape of the country and the travails and tribulations of the ordinary people in their everyday life is unparalleled. His parivarbodh (familyhood) for Bharat — that all the citizens of the country are children of Bharat Mata and constitute one family — is an everyday lived reality for him.
Unlike Nehru who governed Bharat with State institutions, Modi leads the nation like running a family with the cooperation, effort and trust of all the citizens and for all.
His seed mantra of governance — “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas, Sabka Prayas aur Sabka Vishwas” — beautifully captures the secret of a successful family leadership. No one is left out. He reaches out to the Antim Jan — the last man.
A scheme like PM-JANMAN — designed for targeted, time-bound mainstreaming of some 40 lakh Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), a minuscule number in a country of over 145 crore, scattered over the country and kept out of reckoning by the electoral arithmetic of power politics — could be conceived and implemented only
by someone who considers the less fortunate, too, as his family.
For Modi, citizens are “us”, not “they”. There is no third person in Modi’s Bharat.
Born in poverty, Modi has lived with its gross reality and subtle nuances, and knows how it degrades the human agency and compromises the material and moral self of the poor. Poverty eradication for him is not merely a constitutional or political obligation but an emotional and moral imperative to redeem every poor person from the vice of poverty and restore to them their human dignity.
While Nehru unsuccessfully sought to mitigate poverty through his socialist policies and State patronage, Modi creates an enabling environment for the poor so that they rise above poverty with a sense of dignity and self-enterprise.
Universal access to home, health, education, electricity, drinking water, cooking gas, toilets and bank accounts within the span of a decade is testimony to Modi’s parivarbodh for the nation. Such an incredible feat of saturating every citizen with all the essential ingredients of a healthy citizenship could not have been possible for any leader who did not feel their pain and pangs as those of his own family members.
As a result, over 25 crore poor are out of multi-dimensional poverty within a decade.
Modi believes that a person, even if not formally educated, is endowed with some latent enterprise. Given an opportunity, he or she can leverage that to come out of poverty with dignity.
The crores of beneficiaries of the Mudra loan, a collateral-free access to capital for enterprise, have demonstrated it. Only a leader who resonated with the poor and marginalised could have the clarity of vision to conceive and launch a scheme like the Mudra loan.
In dealing with the issues of the nation, Modi is not conditioned by the received wisdom of the ideologues and experts. His genius lies in finding innovative ways and means to solve the problems of the nation. He communicates with the citizens in a language intelligible to them and uses folk idioms and expressions.
When a major crisis confronts the nation, he knows how to ride it out by harnessing the collective strength of the citizens.
During the Covid-19 crisis, the world witnessed in utter amazement how the entire nation responded to Modi’s call and lit torches and candles and clanked spoons and plates at an appointed date and time and defeated the despair of the unending pandemic.
When it comes to defending the honour and pride of the nation, the contrast between Nehru and Modi could not be more obvious. Nehru allowed Pakistan to illegally and forcibly capture nearly half of Jammu and Kashmir. His naivety made the other half a running sore for decades on the body of the nation until Modi abrogated Article 370 and fully integrated Jammu and Kashmir into Bharat, correcting the historic blunder.
Nehru had an innate dislike of the military. He often disparaged the generals. His public humiliation of the then army chief, General K.S. Thimayya, in Parliament for raising concerns over the growing military threats on the northern border in 1959, and calling the general’s national security concerns “trivial”, led to the loss of Aksai Chin and national humiliation in the 1962 border war with China.
In contrast, Modi is heavily invested in building a strong and self-reliant military as the bulwark of the nation’s defence. No other Prime Minister did that.
Like a proud community chieftain, he leads from the front and defends the nation’s interest, honour and pride. Be it a tit-for-tat response to China’s military misadventures in Ladakh and Doklam, calling the bluff of nuclear blackmail and punishing Pakistan with Operation Balakot and Operation Sindoor, hitting the enemy deep inside their territory, standing up to the tariff blackmail by the most powerful bully and keeping intact the growth trajectory of Bharat as the fastest-growing large economy of the world are testimonies to Modi’s gutsy leadership.
Modi may stay on longer in power because he resonates with the nation as family.