Modi waves 4 'speed' years

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the country from the Red Fort on Independence Day. Picture by Prem Singh

J.P. Yadav , TT, Aug 16, 2018, New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi plugged himself as a messiah of change in his election-year Independence Day address, suggesting he put the country on the path to greatness after long decades of stagnation.

His 80-odd-minute speech on Wednesday appeared an attempt at spadework for the general election, due next summer.

Modi flagged the "transformation" India had purportedly seen during his four-year-old tenure and peddled the dream of the country soaring to greater heights, to a "new dawn" and to a "new India".

Sporting a saffron turban, he repeatedly called out to "my dear countrymen", making particular mention of the "poor, Dalits, backwards, women, youth, farmers and taxpayers".

He set himself up as a leader "impatient" to take the country up the "crescendo of development".

As former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh listened from the front row, Modi compared the pace of development in 2013 and that in the last four years.

He claimed that adherence to the speed of 2013 would have taken the country "decades", "generations" and even "centuries" to arrive where it finds itself now in the matter of building toilets, electrifying villages and providing cooking gas connections to households.

"If we don't look at where we started, we will not be able to understand how far we have come," he said.

"It would have taken centuries to build toilets for all with the 2013 speed. Electrification of villages would have taken one or two decades more. It would have taken more than 100 years to bring gas connections to mothers struggling with smoke. It would have taken generations for optical fibre cables to reach the villages."

Modi seemed to imply that all this had happened only because of his rule since everything else in the country had remained the same since the days of the previous government.