This Article is From Oct 10, 2014

PM and His Party are Sending Very Mixed Signals

(Pawan Khera is a political analyst with the Congress party.)

Narendra Modi is not known to get distracted by facts when he is busy telling stories. His journey of weaving fiction that started from his talk at Delhi's SRCC college and took him to 7 Race Course Road should have ended once he became the Prime Minister. However, Narendra Modi, the poster boy of the BJP, is yet to reinvent himself as the Prime Minister of the country.

Never in India's electoral history has a Prime Minister campaigned so extensively for Assembly elections. Is it due to the setbacks the BJP received in the recently-concluded by-elections? Or is it because the stature of other BJP leaders stands so completely diminished that there is no one but Modi left to campaign?

While campaigning in Haryana, the Prime Minister reads an alphabetical list of states and declares Gujarat ahead of Haryana on development parameters. Getting confused between Nepal and Bhutan, renaming Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: all these can be examples of a slip of tongue. An occasional slip of the mind can also be ignored. After all, it is not easy to be Prime Minister of a dynamic country like India, with its 1.25 billion aspirations. Especially so when you have promised the skies without knowing the lay of the land in Delhi.

But Narendra Modi's speech in Maharashtra on October 7 cannot be dismissed as a mere slip-up. Debunking the demand for a separate Vidarbha, Modi left several red faces in his party and also amongst his various supporters. Devendra Fadnavis, president of the Maharashtra unit of BJP, who has passionately expressed his party's commitment to creation of a separate Vidarbha state, rushed to clarify that Modi was referring to Mumbai being separated from Maharashtra - an issue which exists on the flippant fringes of an irrelevant rumor-mongering industry.

If Devendra Fadnavis is right, this shows a dangerous tendency in the Prime Minister of a) legitimizing rumors by responding to them and b) creating and fanning divisive issues that do not exist.

And if the Prime Minister was actually referring to Vidarbha, then the BJP has a lot of explaining to do. Why did the BJP promise a separate state of Vidarbha in its manifesto in the Lok Sabha elections of 2014?

His remark that he will not allow the division of Maharashtra has also angered the Gorkhas and the people of the Dooars region in North West Bengal. In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, they came out in large numbers to elect from Darjeeling, the BJP's SS Ahluwalia, a rank outsider. They were responding to Modi's emotional support to their demand of a separate Gorkhaland. "The dream of the Gorkhas is my dream too", Modi had said while campaigning in Siliguri.

Jhansi was promised a separate Bundelkhand within three years of a BJP government in Delhi. In February this year, stories were planted in the national media on the role played by Narendra Modi in persuading BJP leaders to ensure the  passage of Telangana Bill in the Parliament to create a new Telangana state. What has changed now?

The BJP, realizing the far-reaching implication of the Prime Minister's comment, is bending over backwards to convince the country that his statement was not in the context of Vidarbha. Unfortunately, Modi does not believe in interacting with the media. One-way communication followed by red-faced colleagues interpreting his statements is the only way to know what is going on in the Prime Minister's mind.

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