Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 24, 2016
URL:   http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/usual-suspects/modi-bashers-scoff-at-pms-tribute-to-rohith.html 

Last Friday, during a visit to Varanasi — his parliamentary constituency — Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave vent to the distress shared by all Indians over the suicide of Rohith Vemula, a research student at the Hyderabad Central University. “There will be reasons (and) there will be politics”, the PM said, “but the fact remains that a mother has lost her son. I feel the pain…” It was a dignified response befitting a Prime Minister and it appropriately steered clear of the inevitable political controversies that have followed the tragedy.

 The next morning, a leading paper from eastern India —one that has distinguished itself in recent months for its unfailing partisanship — mocked Modi’s anguish. It reproduced photographs from different prime ministerial programmes over the past five days showing him smiling for the cameras. The message was unambiguously clear: the PM’s anguish was a sham and in reality he was having a ball.

 On Friday, shortly after cremating her mother, the distinguished Mrinalini Sarabhai, her daughter Mallika — a known opponent of the Government and a person who had successfully forfeited her deposit contesting parliamentary elections in Gujarat — fulminated on the social media that the PM had failed to condole the death of one of India’s famous personalities in the field of culture. The accusation was misplaced since the PM had written to her brother last Thursday offering his condolences. But why should facts get in the way of having a go at Modi, even if it involved using a mother’s death?

 Finally, and again to milk the tragedy in Hyderabad for all its worth, a Hindi poet — once the poet laureate in the Court of Arjun Singh — who had returned his Sahitya Akademi award decided that he must also get into the act. He chose to return a honorary doctorate that had been conferred on him in some distant past by the Hyderabad Central University. Alas he didn’t know too much of the circumstances of the tragic suicide and was caught out by an intrepid TV presenter. As happens.  In such cases, the matter reached the social media and an almighty slugfest between “Bhakts” and “AadarshLiberals” ensued.

 These are three isolated examples taken from just one week. They are, in the larger scheme of things, quite inconsequential and won’t even make it to a footnotes section of a history of the Modi years. However, they do illustrate a larger point that should be evident to every Indian that keeps his/her eyes open and follows the media discourse even perfunctorily. The point is self-evident: the opposition to Modi has moved from the political and has degenerated into a no-holds-barred attack on the person. In this scheme of things, the Government is illegitimate (never mind the electoral verdict) and the PM is both politically and aesthetically to be assaulted.

 No doubt some of the sharpest attacks have come from faithful soldiers of the Congress and the ‘volunteers’ of the Aam Aadmi Party. However, it goes well beyond those with formal party loyalties. Two new sections have become fully involved in the battle to decimate and destroy Modi: The media and the intellectuals.

 The negativism of the media stems only partly from a philosophical belief that its job description involves having an adversarial relationship with Governments and particularly one headed by a person who doesn’t take them on his aircraft during foreign visits. It actually stems from a worldview that is at odds with its profound sense of entitlement. What makes it more galling is the fact that Modi doesn’t give two hoots for their beliefs. Modi survived and prospered in Gujarat for 12 years despite the sustained and unrelenting hostility of the media. And he rose further to become the PM not because of the media but despite it.

 This is as much true for the intellectuals — particularly the large group that believes that the State owes them, if not a honourable livelihood, at least oodles of respect — what is called ‘bhaw’ in Hindi. So when professors of Jawaharlal Nehru University suggest that India possesses one of the most “anti-intellectual” Governments ever, what they are protesting against is their own feeling of irrelevance from State-sponsored adulation.

 This is not a unique situation. All through the past week I was engaged in reading the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s magisterial biography of Henry Kissinger. Apart from dissecting the sheer viciousness of the culture inside academia, he has spelt out the sustained hostility of the American media towards Richard Nixon. Undeniably, Nixon’s human skills were pedestrian and he was slippery but his rejection by the media and the intellectual classes verged on the aesthetic.

 In another context, the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher suffered the same fate. The media and the intellectuals declared war on her from the moment she was elected and kept up the hostility throughout the course of her three terms as Prime Minister. The dons in Oxford so despised her that they even turned down a honorary degree for a long-serving British Prime Minister.

 The political careers of Nixon, Thatcher and, subsequently, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush weren’t made or marred by this hostility. Indeed, apart from Nixon who was undone by his own follies, the political legacy of Thatcher and Reagan extended well beyond their terms of Government.