Surgery on stone STATE OF PLAY: Narendra Modi’s masonry of a new empire

Narendra Modi File picture 

Sankarshan Thakur   |   08.06.22: “I have never been inclined towards drawing lines in butter, I have always possessed the courage to draw lines in stone.” — Narendra Modi

The above is not from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent trip to Japan, although he repeated the butter-and-stone thing in Tokyo too. The above is from when Narendra Modi was chief minister of Gujarat. Should you get astride a search engine and go looking, you’ll find that this has been one of Modi’s favoured themes, almost his leitmotif, this recurrent declaration of a will to score indelible changes, this baring of an iron fist seeking stone to leave its mark upon. At various times, in various contexts over the last decade or so, Narendra Modi has scoffed at those who run lines in butter and snarled an assault on stone. He cannot be blamed for not warning us enough. What’s happening — the rasp and scrape of multiple indelible lines upon and around us — is what he foretold with a brag. It’s a foretelling we refused to hear or fully understand. Or, more likely, on the evidence of successive electoral endorsements, it’s a foretelling whose meaning we grasped only too well and gleefully — here’s our man, a man with the courage of wanton convictions and the doggedness to see them through, no matter what comes in the way. Here’s a man who will drill tattoos into stone.

Narendra Modi is our prime minister, elected twice over; we will fail a proper reckoning of him if we do not make an effort to understand him and his motivations, megalomaniacal and fiendishly flawed as they are.

The routed central vista of Delhi is evidence of the Modi mien — he isn’t one to fumble around being butter-fingered, he runs them through stone. Damn history and damn heritage. Damn aesthetics and damn the screaming priorities of a pandemic raging at killer pitch. Damn, most indifferently, the uproar and the outcry, proceed doggedly with the surgery on stone. Demolish what may lie in the way and emboss upon the debris, in the manner of medieval emperors, the masonry of a new empire.

The scar raked across Delhi’s heart is part of a far more monumental tearing down and recasting. What we are being put through — and probably aren’t able to sense in full measure — is a radical changing of ourselves. In the years since Modi took power in 2014, we have been re-conditioned irreversibly. And there is little to suggest we will not proceed farther and farther away from where we were eight years ago.

In the eyes of many, the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 amounted to a second partitioning of our nation, the boorish scuffing of a line between the children of a greater god and the children of a lesser. Lal Krishna Advani, the man who summoned the destroyer hordes to Ayodhya and spun a languishing title deed into electoral gold for the Bharatiya Janata Party, would later call December 6, 1992 as the “saddest day of my life”. Few have been able to put any worth to those words, or the sentiment they attempted to express; not Advani’s detractors, even less those that made a rippling movement of his call to realise Ramjanmabhoomi.  

As he approached Ayodhya in the early December of 1992, Advani had allayed fears of any threat to the Babri structure with assurances that ‘symbolic kar seva’ was all that was intended at the disputed site. The counsel for Kalyan Singh’s BJP government in UP had promised the Supreme Court no damage would be done to the masjid. The path we have taken here has been paved with brazen and tragic lies. So what are we to make of the BJP president, J.P. Nadda, assuring that only the courts and the Constitution will decide what happens at the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi or the Idgah Masjid in Mathura? Or of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh boss, Mohan Bhagwat, arguing that there isn’t any need to go looking for shivlings under every mosque? That they will go this far — legally — and no further? Chance will be a fair thing. Pop the question to any sanghi of significance if there is a line drawn on the number of disputes they may resort to opening and they will more likely draw a line in butter. Remember, one of them reminded me recently, the BJP had opposed the Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act (passed by Parliament in 1991). The Act prohibited the conversion of any place of worship and provided for the maintenance of the religious character of all places of worship other than the (then disputed) Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi site, as they existed on the 15th day of August, 1947. Clearly, even in strictly legal terms, the sangh isn’t persuaded by that law.

The record of the sangh and its multiple ancillaries suggests, quite loudly, that to trust their word is to invite treachery and worse. The roil pirouetting around Varanasi and Mathura was spurred to life way back, in the ruinous dust of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. One of the more strident slogans that attended the assault on Babri Masjid was: “Abhi toh pehli jhaanki hai, Mathura-Kashi baaki hai. (This is just a preview, Mathura and Kashi remain).”

Two years ago, while Covid was in monstrous peak, Modi, himself no mean actor of the Ramjanmabhoomi movement, squatted across a fire in Ayodhya and performed the bhoomi-pujan over one of the most disruptively disputed plots of land in our heartland. Narendra Modi, chief executive and chief mahant, the merger of Church and State formalized in his singular person, an unabashed de facto departure from the moorings of a secular Constitution and nation, the casting of a line in stone.

A year earlier to the date, on August 5, 2019, Modi’s hands had had another tryst with stones — Jammu and Kashmir was stripped, sundered, downgraded and summarily converted into the largest prison-house on earth. Modi’s predecessor rulers in the BJP had forever promised the abrogation of Article 370 but their iterations were lines in butter. It took Modi to seal the promise in stone with the courage he says he has always possessed.

Wonder where it vanishes when it comes to, say, drawing a hard line in the defence of the Constitution he makes a show of kissing? Or to bar the daily and flagrant violations of civil norms his followers wreak upon fellow citizens? Or to stop the rampant loot of public money by carpetbaggers who, at one time or another, have basked in Modi’s company? Or even to draw that most critical line that needs to be drawn, across the rocks in eastern Ladakh gobbled up by the Chinese? What good is courage if it baulks from acting itself out when and where it most needs to? Our prime minister may wish to tell us.

sankarshan.thakur@abp.in