“As far as the personal attacks, I’m very angry at her because of what she’s done to the country. I think I’m entitled to personal attacks. I don’t have a lot of respect for her. I don’t have a lot of respect for her intelligence, and I think she’ll be a terrible president.”
This cultivated disagreeableness was displayed by the former American president and the current Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, during a press conference on Thursday. The “she” he refers to is the current vice-president and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. Trump has marketed himself as a rough bruiser and an unapologetic abuser. Eight years of Trump’s pre-eminence in the US presidential stakes have not only turned American democracy into an extremely unattractive model for other democracies round the world but have also normalised meanness and bad manners as unavoidable by-products of political contestation.
This in-your-face regression is relevant to us because the Modi crowd has always sought inspiration and legitimacy from the America-based diaspora. Many Modi watchers have suspected involved prompting and tutoring from North America-based Hindu radicals. This may or may not amount to a “foreign hand” at work but there can be little doubt that all this balderdash about “vishwaguru” has its origin from New York and beyond.
Just as the Trump crowd has not been able to reconcile itself to the 2020 defeat, Modi’s handlers in the US seem to be telling him not to get disheartened by the rebuff voters administered to him in June 2024. According to a report in the Indian Express, the truncated prime minister will be feted at a “mega diaspora event” in Long Island next month when he travels to New York at attend the annual UN General Assembly.
Denied a clear-cut majority—and a number far from the war-cry of “aab ki baar 400 paar”—Prime Minister Modi’s advisers and handlers in India seem keen to garner validation and applause from the “global community.” The incongruity of a 56-inch deshbhakt seeking respectability from those who have chosen to abandon Mother India and recuse themselves from its trials and tribulations can only be explained by the Nagpur-based commissars; but, democratic India needs to keep a vigil against bad American political habits and practices seeping into our narrative-culture.
Some can argue that it is already too late in the day to try to firewall the ruling dispensation from Trumpian temptations. Those who had hoped that the BJP and its various power-centres would be able to pull Prime Minister Modi back from his natural confrontationist impulses have lost the battle. His August 15, 2024 performance was deeply disappointing on more than one count.
Relegating the Leader of Opposition to the last row at the Red Fort was unmistakably a trick out of the Trumpian tool-kit. Petty and small-minded. That the responsibility for the Independence Day show at the Red Fort is the administrative burden of the Ministry of Defence suggests that Trumpian spitefulness has perhaps seeped into our vital institutional fabric; or, worse, defence ministry officials were acting under instructions. Slice it either way, the Modi crowd has normalised shabbiness in our public life. Trump, though, would approve.
More than where Rahul Gandhi was made to sit, what was disappointing was where Narendra Modi chose to pitch his faded rhetorical tent. This Independence Day, the prime minister had one and only one duty – in fact, a sacred obligation – to indicate to the nation that he was willing to mobilise democratic energy and enthusiasm to repair our tattered national consensus. But the truncated PM seemed oblivious to the changed mood and expectation among the masses.
Like Trump, Modi too subscribes to the view that divisiveness—along any kind of local sore points and ethnic cleavages – can be tapped to garner electoral dividends and political consolidation of “the base.” His rhetorical posturing and positions, especially of the mangalsutra variety, in the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, were calculated investments in the power of divisiveness. It is a different matter that Modi’s dog whistling went largely unheard in the very Hindi heartland for which he had intended it.
Yet like Trump, the prime minister is unwilling to eschew divisiveness as is evident in his call for a “secular civil code”, an ill-disguised euphemism for the original “uniform civil code.” Clever guys are always in thrall of their own cleverness. Narendra Modi is no exception.
Trump’s relentless fulminations against his opponents at home and abroad are not just a whimsical trait; this is “strategy,” devised and finessed by highly-paid consultants and advisers. The allure of divisiveness, insults and abuse is now as American a fixture as hot dogs, baseball and apple pie. Like Hollywood’s movies, it is also an exportable item – Washington’s gift to democracies around the world.
The Modi establishment has been shopping at the American political supermarket of discord and divisiveness. Just as Trump has made boorishness and rudeness part of his political persona, Modi too has re-defined the art of insult and invective, belittling the historical contribution of nation-builders, mocking his rivals, and demeaning the dignity of his own office.
It is now the responsibility of democratic voices and constitutional institutions to not allow a truncated prime minister to further coarsen our national political culture. Donald Trump is that quintessential Ugly American of yore, and we do not need to ape him or his pugnaciousness. The nation needs healing, not more of the same meaningless and bogus communal slogans.
(Harish Khare is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune.)