Skip to main content

Two Superpowers Meet in Delhi


The American President, Barack Obama, has already embraced the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, in the highly girdled airport in Delhi.  This is the second jaadu ki jhappi between the leaders of two nations with similar global interests.  Obama’s country has been the world’s moral police since the second world war and Modi’s India aspires to wrench that hegemony. 

About two decades ago, Samuel P Huntington wrote in his famous and controversial book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, that “If at some point India supplants East Asia as the world’s economically most rapidly developing area, the world should be prepared for extended disquisitions on the superiority of Hindu culture...”  Interestingly, Huntington added that the disquisition would have to be about “the contributions of the caste system to economic development” and a fundamentalist assertion of indigenous culture.  Huntington was not a divinatory astrologer but a Harvard University professor of political science. When he wrote those words India was still struggling to grow up from what was mockingly labelled as the Hindu rate of economic growth.  And now India has succeeded in creating a new caste system: a duplicate of what Obama’s country created originally.

Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister at a time when India had already achieved what Huntington calls “material success.”  So it is easy for the Prime Minister to proceed to what Huntington predicted as the natural outcome: “cultural assertion.”

The double jhappi between the leaders of the two global superpowers is more significant than the semi-literate Sangh Parivar missionaries of medievalist travesties such as ghar vapasi may ever be able to comprehend.  What Modi is trying to show the world is that India is not merely an economic superpower but also America’s competitor.

But what is the competition about?  That’s the billion dollar question really.  Is it an assertion of the Hindu civilization, as Huntington argued?  Or is it a political dominance, an assertion of power?

“Cultural assertion follows material success,” wrote Huntington.  “Hard power generates soft power,” he added in the same sentence.

That is exactly what Modi is trying to do.  He won’t be satisfied with mere material success.  He is like Hitler who will not be contented with anything less than racial garv.  That’s why he kept mum when the religious institutions of the minority communities in the country were vandalised time and again in different parts of the country including the national capital soon after he ascended the throne in what his minister, Venkaiah Naidu, wanted to be rechristened as Indraprastha or Hastinapur.  That is also why he keeps mum on issues like ghar vapasi.  That is also why the Central Board of Film Certification is being infiltrated with RSS minions.  Even the Central Board of Secondary Education has been similarly infiltrated and the history textbooks are being tinkered with. 

And yet, Modi is not a man to keep mum.  It is simply not in his nature to do that.  As an Aam Aadmi Party leader, Kumar Vishwas, said yesterday, “There was one prime minister who never spoke for ten years and there is another now who doesn’t stop talking.”  And yet, Modi chooses silence on certain issues.  We (should) know why.

He won’t say.  He would rather hug Barack Obama in what the most famous magazine of the latter’s country (which put Modi on its cover a couple of years back and called him “the most polarizing politician in India”) labels “a Soviet-style jamboree” and engage us, the gullible citizens, with Man ki baat on the All India Radio.

Wish you all a highly entertaining, patriotism-injecting, goose bump-raising Republic Day.


Comments

  1. Replies
    1. That's the harsh truth. But India is behaving like a superpower not only felxing its muscles on the Pak borders but also claiming a significant number of economic giants in the form of industrialists. Economic power is the real superpower in today's world.

      Delete
  2. Wonder what good all this will do to India!
    But no doubt his agreeing to be our guest has boosted our morale.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On the one hand, we can view Obama visit as a morale booster. On the other, it can make us think :)

      Delete
  3. Modi believes in positioning himself well and consolidating power not only within the country but outside as well. His moves are thoughtful as well as to some extent immensely bold, and if I may say, dangerous as well. Hope the country and the countrymen benefit out of his sky high political aspirations. Regards

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dangerous in many ways. The number of times he changed his attire and the inscription of his name on his coat are indications of narcissism and potential totalitarianism.

      Delete
  4. Very subtly made points Matheikal. Well yes Obama's visit is a great PR victory. I question the need for expensive Republic Day celebrations at all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only subtlety is effective here given the situation.

      Delete
  5. RD is behind us as I read and comment. Yes, it was a grand photo opportunity. In the assured smugness that they would be focused at by the camera, a couple of well fed and obviously connected teenagers were also showing "We love Obama" posters in the RD enclosures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Obama as a person is much more admirable than Modi as a person, I think. As Vinod Mehta writes in his autobiography, What sustain Modi are money power, managerial power, RSS power and people power. Not true q,qualities...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...