Modi's Masterclass on How to Eat Your Own Words Without Flinching an Eyelid

Hold fast to your seat, lest you should fall over in a paroxysm of uncontrollable disbelief, and go looking for the good doctor Freud.

Narendra Modi has said “the day I do Hindu-Muslim I will be unworthy of public office”.

If you believe that the day Modi speculates about has already been here for a good long time, you got that right too.

Many will argue that the Hindu-Muslim career of the numero uno began as far back as 2002 – when, famously, the then-Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, admonished him as chief minister of Gujarat to observe raj dharma – and has continued, unbroken, to this day.

Just sample this short list at random:

• He will sport any headgear (and no prime minister has worn a greater variety) but the skull cap;
• He contrasted shamshan ghats with qabristans, and Diwali with Eid, and said the opposition favoured the Muslim form of disposal of the dead and celebration
• He has said mian this and mian that;
• He said the Congress aims to make Hindus second class citizens;
• He said the Congress will snatch reservations from Hindus and pass the favour on to Muslims;
• He said the Congress will take away all the gold from Hindu women, sparing not even their sacred mangalsutras, and bestow the bounty on Muslims;
• If Congress comes to power, Modi said, “infiltrators” and those who procreate furiously will take over the property of Hindus; (and here is the height of innocence: Modi now says he did not mean Muslims in making those aspersions; you are free to believe him at the cost of your integrity; recall that a so-called survey of the rate of growth of the population among various denominations of Indians mysteriously surfaced on electronic channels coterminously, claiming that the Muslim population has increased by, hold your breath, 43 and some percent!);
• Not to forget the choreographed contrapuntal references to the Ram temple and Pakistan as defining, in his view, the two opposed  loyalties that define a true nationalist or a confirmed traitor.

Is it the case that Modi does not quite listen to himself anymore, assuming that he did heretofore?

If so, is it a genuine occurrence or an art form raised to yet unprecedented heights of sophistry?

Has Modi truly attained mystic stature whereby he never doubts that all but the wrong-headed will swallow any and all of his prevarications and equivocations as the revelatory expressions of a man beyond good and evil?

Can the republic and the democratic order, what is left of it, be safely handed back to a man who can disown what he may have said one minute ago even to a recorder of unimpeachable quality?

Modi’s latest averments are not just cause for anxiety about the soundness of an individual’s mind. At stake is the collective sanity of India.

Badri Raina taught English at Delhi University.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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