Modi became the first political figure in the country to seize the platform provided to a chief minister on Independence Day in his state to mock the Prime Minister and his party
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can make a studious speech with a perspective, as he did on our 67th Independence Day, and he can excel at close analysis as might befit a professor who surveys the scene from above.
But Dr Singh can’t for the life of him make a muscular speech with flourish, even on a special occasion like Independence Day when the historic Red Fort forms the backdrop and the context is the belligerence of Pakistan on the Line of Control. That’s not him at all.
BJP leader and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi is more your man if you want your top leader to be throwing a challenge at political adversaries as a matter of simple routine, whatever the occasion. Mr Modi did just that from Bhuj in Gujarat on Thursday, becoming the first political figure in the country to seize the platform provided to a chief minister on Independence Day in his state to mock the Prime Minister and his party while delivering rhetoric that didn’t add up to much. It certainly was a breach of protocol even if the next general election in a few months is factored in.
If the 27 other chief ministers of the country took to the podium on Independence or Republic Day in the same fashion, or went about upbraiding one another, it is not hard to see that utter confusion would result. It is, then, not unlikely that Mr Modi’s own supporters may have been disappointed.
As is his wont, the Prime Minster spoke in a tepid manner for half an hour, but made two important points. One, that the past decade under his stewardship had yielded an annual average growth rate of 7.9 per cent, never achieved before in a comparable period (nor perhaps anywhere in the world with the exception of China), and this had accelerated the rate of decline of poverty no matter how poverty was measured. Two, Dr Singh spoke of “new rights” given to the common man as he enumerated RTI, MGNREGA, the right to education and the food security legislation. Between 2004 and 2011, consumption had risen four times, he pointed out.
The Prime Minister might have noticed that he received applause only once, when he said 10 lakh youth will receive `10,000 per month under the skill development programme once they acquired a new skill. This shows that perhaps more than anything else people care if their daily lives improve. It is pertinent to point out in this context that Dr Singh did not refer to sustained price rise even once. Electioneering? God knows.
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