THE NEHRU FIXATION

Be it dismantling the Planning Commission or now suspending the Indus Water Treaty, the larger aim is clear: downsize Nehru by highlighting his flaws and negating his many achievements

- Rajdeep Sardesai

Narendra Modi has always been a consummate performer: give him a stage, a mike, and a captive audience and the prime minister will more often than not be a showstopper.

For 102 minutes in the Lok Sabha this week, Modi was doing what he relishes most: talking about himself in third person while relentlessly targeting the Congress. The speech may have been a tad too long but since the PM speaks so rarely in Parliament, few will grudge him the extra air time. And yet, while Modi punched hard at his critics on the government’s handling of Operation Sindoor, there was a familiar name from the past that kept recurring through the speech. On 14 occasions, the PM referred to the ‘sins’ of one of his predecessors, Jawaharlal Nehru. Which leads one to ask: what explains Modi’s Nehru fixation?

Nehru died in May 1964 when Modi was in his early teens. Since then, India has had 13 different PMs, including Modi himself. The PM’s first tryst with politics was in the Indira Gandhi era. It was, after all, the fight against the Emergency as a student activist in 1975 that kick-started his political career. If there is any past PM that Modi should feel aggrieved with it ought to be Indira who arrested him and many hundreds of swayamsevaks in the Emergency years. So why is Indira so rarely the object of his derision while Nehru almost always is?