There are actually two republic Day speeches. The traditional one on the eve is by President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, and the long gratis interview the Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi gave days earlier to select TV channels.
Presidents do not write their own addresses to the nation, either in sessions of Parliament or on national days such as this. These are largely written either by their staff, and often, sent to them by the Prime Minister’s office, with the head of state giving it a personal flourish or two. President Kovind therefore cannot be faulted for his speech and its contents, which many would call pedantic, vacuous and not addressing the core crisis the nation faces in its 70th year.
It is Mr Modi who must be taken on for entirely avoiding the core issues of security, safety, welfare of the common people, aphetically its most vulnerable sections, now in history when development has had serious hiccups in the way GST and demonetisation were introduced and where the Aadhaar card has become a pretext to spy on the people without even bothering to assure them necessities it was supposed to help deliver in a streamlined manner.
Mr Modi chose the private business club of Davos to speak of India’s cultural greatness and its cultural-social achievements in antiquity, but did not tell the world how he was going to ensure the happiness and life of the people even as he did improve the ease of business of foreign capital. He even made a mess of statistics, confusing between billions and millions. Back home, in his TV interviews he chose to speak in rigmarole and as is his wont, in the flowery speech he reserves for little children, a little different from the arrogant warmongering of his elevation mode rhetoric.
Now at the end of the first month of 2018, with less than 16 months to go for the next general elections, the prime minister of the country needs to spell out in some detail how he sends back to the bottle the genie of hate he and his party chief Amit shah unleashed in 2013, demonising Muslims, evoking medieval sexual imagery, alienating Dalits and reducing Tribals and smaller religious minorities to vassals. We have seen the bloody trail of that rhetoric in the last four years – the lynching of Muslims, branding them cow smugglers, is one indication, as I can vouch for after visiting most families targeted by cow protectors in the past 15 months or so.
Mr Modi needs to reassure the nation that his ministers are lying when they say the Constitution will be changed soon, and that his chief ministers are lying when they threaten religious minorities and Dalits, as they do in UP, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. He must, in passing, also tell us when will be ban, disarm and arrest every member of the Karni Sena responsible for all sorts of violence in the days leading up to the Republic Day. He owes us that.
[The writer is a political analyst and human rights activist]