Curtsy:- OPINION:_ Criticism in the age of Narendra Modi 1635 Google +12 20 Comments Email Print Term Life Insurance Plan Choose a plan that suits your requirement. Enquire Now! licindia.in/Term_Life_Insurance Ads by Google modi-lead The UPA’s biggest disservice in its second term was to induce a kind of fatality about India. Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Posted: October 16, 2014 12:42 am Politics often works on psychological alchemy as much as on policies and programmes. Successful politicians create psychological resonance. What drew Jawaharlal Nehru to Gandhi, for instance, was not his moral authority or ideas. Rather, it was Gandhi’s ability to tap into something that suddenly lifted a pall of fear from Indians. There is a curious historical myopia in our contemporary debates over the appropriation of historical figures. There is a pseudo-intellectual war on how far apart Nehru and Patel actually were during their last days, with the right wanting to rid Patel of any vestigial Nehruvianism. But this debate is laughably narrow-minded. In the long sweep of ideas, in visions of modernity and the state, Gandhi was farther away from Nehru than Nehru and Patel were from each other. Yet these were relationships marked by complex psychological interactions, a more intricate appreciation of the demands of the time. At the risk of simplification, one can say that most intellectuals look for clear markers. Most statesmen or even lesser politicians, on the other hand, have what Isaiah Berlin once called “antennae of the greatest possible delicacy”, honed in not just to changing circumstances but also to moods and feelings. They juggle the complexity of human nature more deftly than those who write about them. Most politicians, therefore, escape neat grids and categorisations. It is intellectuals who are left gapingly surprised. This is also true of political leaders in relation to the larger currents of politics. Successful politicians, in their moment of insight, tap into their compatriots’ inarticulate thinking and feelings. The central anxiety that Narendra Modi honed in on, with persistence and clarity, was that there was a yearning to defeat defeatism. The UPA’s biggest disservice in its second term was to induce a kind of fatality about India. Policy paralysis was the anodyne technical term to describe this state. Underneath was a vast nervousness about whether India could actually change. It was not that change was not taking place. Growth had produced a new kind of mobility. And even many sticky social indicators, like poverty, moved quite dramatically. As Rukmini Shrinivasan reported recently, the most dramatic number may be the 10 percentage point decline in the number of underweight children born in India — even the bar on malnutrition moved. We can debate the underlying causes and, as always, they will turn out to be more complex than a simple left-right narrative would have us believe. But the UPA’s greatest political blunder was to transform even this underlying dynamic of hope into a self-image of despair. Pratap-Bhanu-Mehta01 More FromPratap Bhanu Mehta Maximum mistrust A new bully pulpit Katherine Armstrong traverses a vast arc, but this is ice skating, not deep sea diving This was the moment Modi stepped into with political finesse, with political antennae that now work overtime, drawing in a bewildering array of symbols and finely honed messages. The main draw was not the coherence of ideas; it was the overcoming of defeatism. This forms a crucial psychological backdrop continued… 163 - See more at: indianexpress/article/opinion/columns/criticism-in-the-age-of-narendra-modi/#sthash.xhWVf4qM.dpuf
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 03:17:41 +0000
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