He said we were blessed with natural wealth but didn’t say why his new environmental policy was eroding safeguards to protect this wealth. I wish however that he had told us why our economic growth had been declining for 10 consecutive quarters and this year our GDP will contract. But it is fine not to expect details and granularity from him because that is not Modi’s style. He said something about finished goods and value addition (finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman looked suitably stricken when he said this).īut there was nothing of any depth. The world is interconnected and interdependent, as he has himself said so often and he repeated on Saturday. He spoke again of Atma Nirbhar Bharat, without explaining what it meant or how it was different from the licence raj and 1970s-style import substitution, which has demonstrably failed. Television news channels do not report such things as much as they do Bollywood suicides. Last week, Amit Shah’s police in Delhi filed an FIR for against them for protesting. I am not sure if Modi knows that six lakh Accredited Social Health Activist (Asha) women are on strike, being paid only Rs 2,000 per month and not given protective clothing while doing their contact tracing work. He also made some historical errors in his explanation of the freedom struggle, which we can explain away as his usual lyrical flourish. Perhaps he was speaking for the others who participated, though he did not mention the Congress or its leaders. In his speech, Modi made much about the freedom struggle though, of course, his Sangh Parivar had abstained from it. Defence minister Rajnath Singh did not salute with the Prime Minister, which I thought was the right gesture.
The salute is a military gesture and civilians should abstain from it. Modi unfurled the national flag and saluted, which I didn’t think he should have done. I stopped watching Modi speak a long time ago but thought it was important to hear him on Independence Day. Modi is like that in some ways, though the content is not the same. Certainly, he speaks a lot.Ī former Australian high commissioner to India, Walter Crocker, wrote a biography of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in which he observed that Nehru sometimes spoke three times a day. He is an entertaining speaker for some (not for me, because I like intellectual material, and his style does not appeal to me). I think it was a good speech as his fans have come to expect from him I can say with certainty that it was a long speech.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the usual speech from the Red Fort for Independence Day.
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