A 21st century account of India’s hope, despair and resilience
The author came across Nirmala, a village girl who was the only survivor of her family. Undaunted by THE TSUNAMI, SHE SAID SHE WANTED TO BE A POLICE OFfiCER. NIRMALA’S WAS THE SPIRIT OF NEW INDIA.
who make news, sharing roadside meals at dhabas with common men, business tycoons, politicians of all persuasions and ambitions, just to understand the new India. His eye for detail is rather acute and memory of small little anecdotes sharp for him to illustrate the big story.
His India story begins with tsunami and how Dr Manmohan Singh declined George Bush’s offer of aid. On the contrary, under his NSA, J. N. Dixit’s advice, rushed aid to other countries from Indonesia to Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Africa. India has arrived, thinks Ravi. In Tamil Nadu, where the Nagapatnam district was the worst hit, he met bureaucrats who had put in exemplary effort to give relief to the victims, most of them poor. He came across Nirmala, a village girl in her teens who was the only survivor of a poor family. Undaunted by the tragedy, she said she wanted to be a police officer.
Nirmala’s was the spirit of new India. But the exploits of Abhinav Bindra at the Olympics by winning a gold medal in shooting, of Hyderabd’s Sania Mirza giving a tough time to Serena Williams in the Australian Open tournament, the Slum-Dog Millionaire which won Oscars with laurels for A.R. Rahman of Jai Ho fame, Gulzar and Resool Pookutty, placed India on the world’s mental map.
Ravi Velloor loves the economic reforms launched by Dr Manmohan Singh in 1991 under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, the rise of India’s IT industry and the growth of the new middle class as an instrument of change. The business climate and the economy and the people’s mood got a boost. Dr Manmohan Singh’s high point in his first term was the signing of the nuclear deal with the United States, pulling India out of the nuclear apartheid it had been pushed by the nuclearhaves after the 1998 nuclear tests ordered by Atal Behari Vajpayee.
What underlined the Manmohan Singh-George Bush nuclear deal was the China factor. Beijing has become more assertive, throwing its weight around on its neighbours, India, Japan, ASEAN countries. The Soviet regime had collapsed and India has been fast adjusting its foreign policy. Worried about its security, Dr Manmohan Singh readily responded positively to Bush’s overtures.
The signing of the nuclear deal with the US was not easy for Dr Manmohan Singh’s minority government. There was also opposition from within his own partymen, who thought Dr Singh was getting closer to the US, and giving up the policy of non- alignment. For him, India had to accept the world was changing and India had to alter its policies to be a global player as well as guard its security.
For a change, Dr Manmohan Singh was in an assertive mood and staked his prime ministership to win his party’s support. In Parliament, the BJP and Left opposed the nuclear deal but the Congress was able to line up the support of May- awati’s BSP and Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party for parliamentary approval.
Simultaneously, Dr Manmohan Sigh was getting closer to the Japanese, riling the Chinese most. Beijing toughened its stand against India, believing India was being sucked into the American game plan to contain China, but forgetting that the Sino-Pak nexus, which began as far back as the 1962 Sino-India conflict, had created a two-front situation for India which had compelled it to sign the N-Deal. It was Dr Manmohan Singh’s second term that hugely disappoints Ravi. Victim as he was of a diarchy that had emerged under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership, which eroded the prime ministership, despite the fact that most observers attributed Congress victory in 2009 election to Dr Manmohan’s performance in the first term. Dr Manmohan Singh could have indeed announced his retirement after the 2009 elections, but in the second-term he lost initiative and courage to decide. Honestly and integrity and creditably were his assets, but those had to be backed by the courage to say “No”. As a Prime Minister he often met with embarrassment, which he put it to compulsions of coalition politics than any other factor. He swallowed even Rahul Gandhi’s tearing-off a copy of the ordinance his Cabinet had approved at a dramatic press conference at the Press Club. Also many other decisions had to be rolled back.
The Congress government was going down. Scandals like the Commonwealth Games, the G-2 and the coal scam had fouled up the air around just as three men, Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Vinod Rai, the then Comptroller and Auditor General of India sank Dr Manmohan Singh Government. The Congress party saw the worst of its defeats in its long history of leading the nation.
On Pakistan, he invested a lot of effort to work out a framework of peace with Pervez Musharraf. They almost worked out a sort of settlement envisaging a no- change of boundaries or exchange of territories. The two worked out ways to make borders irrelevant in their reckoning. That was the last attempt at making peace with Pakistan. But the 26/11 attack marked the end of another search for peace between the two nations. Ravi’s account of the tragic events opens with telephonic conversation between a senior Mumbai police officer and his handyman, Henry, who was celebrating his birthday in Colaba, when the shooting had just begun nearby. The battle went on between the terrorists and the Indian security men for over two days, leaving behind a gory tale in the chequered history of the two neighbours. For Dr Manmohan Singh, like Atal Behari Vajpayee who also wanted to peace between India and Pakistan as personal legacy, 26/11 came as a personal disappointment. Clearly, good intentions alone are not enough for peace making.
Narendra Modi came to power on the wreckage of the Congress party in the 2014 elections. Ravi Velloor’s gut feeling is that he wants to push ahead on the growth track and achieve a lot. Ravi has hopes from Modi, but with trepidation that he might not succeed because of the company of the Hindutva brigade around him.
Ravi Velloor has not been prescriptive in his wellwritten narrative, but suggests towards the end of the volume that Narendra Modi should cut loose from the Hindutva crowd to be the ruler of India for a longer period of time than his current five-year term.
Ravi concludes: “Not only will he have to cut loose from the RSS, he may need to cut away from the BJP too. Certainly, he has the national standing to cast a political grouping in his name. Indeed, as he savoured a run for national office, and met stiff resistance from the old warlords within the BJP, he had, for a time, considered setting out on his own.”
Will Narendra Modi listen to his advice? Does not look likely. H.K. Dua is a senior journalist, former media adviser to Prime Minister, an ambassador and Rajya Sabha MP. He is now working with ORF, a New Delhi think tank.