There now.
The prime minister has spoken.
When self-important legislators, who for some reason believe themselves to be essential features of democracy, demanded that he speak on Manipur in parliament, they yet again showed their lack of understanding of how Narendra Modi, chief executive non-pareil, has transformed the character of prime ministerial office.
Where lesser prime ministers who slavishly toed the straight and narrow thought themselves accountable to parliament, our kingly Modi ji recognises only the adoring praja, not their pettifogging representatives, or the institution which they use to float anti-national and anti-kingly queries.
Which is why he took the “nation” by the scruff of its obedient neck, and blared his profound agony at the disclosure of what three women of the minority Kuki community have had to suffer directly to loyal and ever ready channel watchers while “honourable” parliamentarians waited for him in the two “august” houses.
They forgot that this is still the month of July, not of August.
(Just to recall the anaemic stature of our previous prime ministers, Nehru would have scurried in with files stuck in his armpit, anxious to meet the uproar in parliament with an unduly shaken conscience. Not for nothing did prince Hamlet remark “thus conscience makes cowards of us all.”)
And, thunderously, Modiji sets the record straight too:
Not the double engine sarkar of Manipur, but 140 crore Bhartiyas, (who, ostensibly, include Modi ji as well?) have been put to shame by the barbarism caught maliciously on video, and revealed wickedly just a day before parliament was due to make ruckus.
Promptly, satraps have yelled conspiracy, both in the making of the video and its revealing. We will wait to be instructed by them if indeed the atrocity at all took place.
He made it known that nothing short of the noose awaits the perpetrators, taking upon himself the job of the judiciary as well in the extreme circumstance, something only a beloved monarch may do.
Clearly, Modi ji knows cannily that many millions who might now be ruefully suspecting some failure of the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Manipur will have been given just the nationalist booster to further fast-forward their undented admiration for our global prime minister. Many will look forward to the hangings with bated breath, already proclaiming how Modi ji has sorted out the so-called problems in Manipur.
In one fell stroke, he has obviated any need for legislators to exercise their brains or their lungs in parliament, having shared his miracle resolution with those who send them to parliament in the first place.
When has a complex conundrum like the one Manipur presents been sorted out with the sort of dispatch the kingly prime minister has displayed to the astonishment of the world?
And the European parliament can likewise go stew themselves in their unwarranted concern over our little secrets here at home.
Let them not pretend to be Vishwaguru, a vocation reserved by eternity exclusively for Bharat.
The exhilarating fact that our parliamentarians and other fussy busybodies of the democratic system fail to absorb is that Indian democracy is no longer on the ground, among mere hoi polloi watchdogs, but on cloud nine.
No better illustration of that than the circumstance that while our global prime minister is often seen making us proud abroad among other prime ministers and presidents, corporate honchos and generals, we weakly let him down by carping at niggling irritants like the situation in Manipur.
Large segments of old-fashioned Indians still will not realise that what makes a “nation” great is not the quality of its economic life at the grass roots, its social enlightenment, its political probity, the independence of its media, the grit of state institutions to be above fear or favour, the unfettered productions of its creative artists, writers, the originality of its academicians, the stature of its parliament, but the image of its prime minister.
So much the worse for them.
As if such values ever made an empire of any nation.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.