Skip to main content

The Paradoxical Prime Minister


Book Review

Narendra Modi has two faces: one which is turned backward towards the cobweb-ridden hoary past of the country and the other which is grandiloquently futuristic. He knows how to use each with the best results for himself. Shashi Tharoor’s latest book, The Paradoxical Prime Minister, dissects with clinical precision both the faces and the entire paradox conjured up by them.

The 504-page book is divided into 5 sections whose very titles are self-explanatory: The Paradoxical Prime Minister; The Modi-fication of India; Moditva and Misgovernance; The Failure of Modinomics; and Flights of Fancy. While the first section gives a fairly detailed biography of Modi from his difficult childhood to the royal present, the other four sections deal in detail with the eponymous themes.

In the Modi-fied India, the whims of the intolerant majority reign supreme. Tharoor shows why the Prime Minister should take “a large share of the blame” for the prevailing atmosphere of violence and persecution in the country. “The rise of gau-rakshaks, the assassination of rationalists, mob lynchings, episodes of beef-related violence, virulent attacks on all and sundry by BJP trolls on social media and in various public forums” are integral aspects of the Modi-fied India.

Good governance leading to achhe din was one of the many promises that got Modi’s party elected to power. What the country got, however, was sheer misgovernance with one bad initiative following another. Demonetisation and GST are two glaring examples which Tharoor dissects in great detail. There is much else to be said about Modi’s misgovernance and Tharoor has not minced words while speaking about each factor such as intrusive surveillance of people and the messed up Swachh Bharat initiative.

The Modi brand of economics has all but ruined the nation. Modi’s Gujarat Model was supposed to be extended to the whole country which in turn would become a utopia of sorts. Four years after Modi’s reign, each promise of the Prime Minister ended up as mere sham. The fourth section of the book shows how.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the last section which tears into Modi’s extensive and expensive foreign travels and his highly flawed foreign policies. He has made more enemies than any other Prime Minister did. Pakistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangla Desh and Maldives have all turned away from India after Modi became the Prime Minister. Tharoor shows us how and why this happened.

Anyone who is interested to know what Mr Modi has done to the nation in the last 4 years should read this book. It is eminently readable in spite of the notoriety that the author has earned for abstruse diction. Use a dictionary if need be, but read the book at any cost is what I would counsel to every Indian.


Comments

  1. Though i dont have much knowledge in politics neither i try to know but the truth is...if really something big progress would have taken place in last four years then i should have heard it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perhaps the book needs to be translated into Hindi for the benefit of the Hindi heartland which forms the major part of the country...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...