It doesn’t always take a village

Prime Minister Na-rendra Modi made his first Indepen-dence Day speech this week, and he showed again what a terrific orator he is.
He has, particularly in Gujarati and Hindi, the ability to use conversational and everyday language in formal speech. He is a better communicator than any leader we have had for a very long time in national politics. Speaking simply and clearly, he is a master of what the ancient Greeks and Romans knew as rhetoric, the art of speaking persuasively.
So, what was the thrust of his message from the Red Fort?
The most important aspect of the speech to me was that Mr Modi broke from the language of the campaign. When he was seeking votes, Mr Modi told Indians that their problems all lay in government, and that it was merely a change of political parties that would transform India. He told us that he would solve the big issues once he came to power because it required the talent and hard work of one man — him.
In his August 15 speech, Mr Modi said, correctly in my opinion, that many of the major problems of India lay not in government but in society. A couple of examples are what he said about female infanticide, which is very high in parts of India, particularly Haryana and Gujarat, and what he said about cleanliness, telling Indians that we should be ashamed of how filthy our nation is. Mr Modi acknowledged that some of this work was beyond the government (his exact words were “yeh sarkar se hota nahin hai”). A third example was what he said about rape in India. Families which are eager to control the whereabouts of their daughters should also focus on what their sons are up to, Mr Modi said, and he was quite right in framing the problem in this way.
It is not some faceless hooligan who indulges in criminal acts but members of our society and parts of our family.
Unfortunately, having framed the issue in this way, and having diagnosed the problems correctly, Mr Modi strayed when it came to handing out the medicine. For instance, he said that the way to transform rural India was for members of Parliament to develop one model village each in their constituency each year. These ideal villages would then become role models for surrounding villages and the whole of rural India would magically transform itself. This is harebrained and totally off, in my opinion.
On one hand, we have had many such experiments before. Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtra is supposed to be an ideal village, nurtured by Anna Hazare not for a year but for decades. It is apparently green and prosperous and pious. In achieving this perfection it has banned alcohol (people caught drinking are tied to posts and whipped).
Even assuming that it has become some sort of perfect village, which I doubt, Ralegan Siddhi’s transformation has not affected the villages around it.
The other point is more important. Is this how Mr Modi imagines a 3,500-year-old civilisation transforms itself? From the top down and through politicians? There is a reason why India, among the most ancient cultures of the world, is the way it is and I don’t think that is because of its parliamentarians. Some deeper thinking was required here but it was missing. On other issues, Mr Modi’s speech was a bit of a hit and miss.
He made a glancing reference to Indian men who were off to West Asia to fight jihad for ISIS, but media reports say that there have been only 10 or so instances of this, so I do not know if this was an important enough thing for him to raise in this speech.
Mr Modi reached out to India’s neighbours and said we should concentrate on alleviating poverty. This was a warm and good thing to say, however it doesn’t respond substantively to the problem. Pakistan also accepts that South Asia’s major problem is poverty. However, its leaders add that the reason for South Asia’s poverty is the conflict between India and Pakistan. If this conflict ends the countries can reduce defence spending and focus on development. So what Mr Modi said really takes us nowhere.
But overall it was a fine speech and it cannot be denied that in many things Mr Modi is well meaning. He is right, as I said earlier, in accepting that not all things are the fault of government. I hope this realism extends to some of the solutions as well. India doesn’t need a messianic figure to lead it out of darkness and into the light. What it needs is internal change and social reform, and most of that is not the work of government.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist