In what many are likely to consider high praise of the prime minister, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson and the former governor of West Bengal has said: “In calendric terms, like Vikram Samvat, this is Modi Samvat”.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi said that far more than Hindutva, the prime minister represents to the Indian people the sentiment “this is possible”.
In a sense, Gandhi said that the prime minister is “a supremacist”, i.e. he wants to make India supreme and he represents the belief that this this is possible.
In a 35-minute interview to discuss his forthcoming book The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India, which will be available on Amazon from April 1, Gandhi said of Narendra Modi: “His personality has made a mark which has to be respected and accepted by everybody.”
However, Gandhi maintained that the prime minister remains vulnerable and just as his popularity has grown phenomenally and quickly, it can equally fast collapse and disappear.
India, he said, is a country of “surprises”. Who in 1977 would have expected Indira Gandhi to return to power in 1980, he asked.
Gandhi said, “I cannot say the light of India has brightened after independence”, adding that in five areas that “light [is] getting dimmed by the hour”.
Three of those five areas are discussed in this interview.
They are, first, spreading majoritarianism, second, the way the constitution’s guarantees are falling easy prey to those who wish to subvert them and third, the weaponisation of history to target, in particular, Muslims.
The interview also discusses at length the way fear has descended on what Gandhi calls “the country’s thinking mind” i.e. the media.
There’s also an extensive discussion on Modi, who Gandhi describes “as a man who has risen from utter non-privilege, with no ancestry to flaunt, no estate, factory or enterprise to display.”
There’s a considerable discussion of how Gandhi perceives the character of the Indian people, who he says “adore the legendary, revere the mythical and worship the fabulous … we make of the historical figures we love superhuman phantasms”.
In this context, he believes India is now “restless not to be great, just, noble but strong, powerful, super … not a nation but a power, and a major power at that. In fact, a superpower”.
Gandhi believes in this quest “the end is what was important to India now, not the means”. That is the extent to which India has moved away from the Mahatma’s thinking.
Speaking with remarkable honesty about himself, Gandhi admits that he was disappointed not to be offered an extension as governor of West Bengal or the governorship of another state. He also admits that he was very disappointed in 2011, when speculation that he could become vice president or even president, turned out to be wrong.
Finally, Gandhi reveals that in 1990, T.N. Seshan, then-chief election commissioner, on the night Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, was willing “to play [a] role beyond his office of CEC and if [the [resident] thought fit, could serve as the country’s home minister”.
