Journalists often have to rush against time. They are said to be married more to their deadlines than to their spouses. A spouse can be mollycoddled with an ice cream or any other object or act of desire. A deadline once passed is passed and no amount of persuasion can bring it back. Now, you can comprehend my predicament.

I was commissioned to do an editorial on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address on the no-confidence motion, moved against him by the Opposition. It was the second time the Opposition unleashed its ultimate weapon against the government since 2014, touted by the blind faithful as a watershed in Indian history. 

There was no chance of the motion getting passed and the government falling as a result of it. That was because Modi enjoys a brute majority in the Lok Sabha. In fact, the Opposition was compelled to move the motion only to force him to give up his silence on Manipur and speak about the plans he has up his sleeves to restore peace in the state.

Ordinarily, the Speaker should have initiated a debate on the no-confidence motion once he found that it was in order. He preferred to keep the Opposition and, thereby, the nation in suspense before earmarking three days for the debate.

I expected Modi in the House when the debate began. No, he was nowhere to be seen. I expected him to turn up when Rahul Gandhi spoke. That is not how prime ministers behaved when Parliament discussed a no-confidence motion against them.

I won’t say that Gandhi’s speech was great. He wasted more than 10 minutes of his allotted time to highlight his Bharat Jodo Yatra to come to the subject of Manipur. The Lok Sabha TV focussed the camera more on Speaker Om Birla than on the speaker. He could have marshalled more facts, figures and arguments to drive Modi to a corner.

Be that as it may, Modi’s arrival in the House around 4 pm was in regal style. Members on the ruling benches had reason to be joyous and cheerful, for it is only on the rarest of rare occasions that he attends Parliament. By the way, he did not spend even a second in the Rajya Sabha during the recent Monsoon session.

As he reached the seat, once occupied by the likes of Nehru, Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, PV Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh and A B Vajpayee, there was slogan-shouting by the BJP MPs forcing Birla to remind them about parliamentary decorum. Modi should remember that his primary job is to sit in the House, listen to the debates, draw the necessary lessons and take appropriate action.

I was waiting for Modi’s words of wisdom on Manipur. He had a bunch of notes, prepared by his staff, to help him address the House. Right from the word go, his speech was a frontal attack on the Opposition, especially the Congress. 

Modi wondered why the leader of the Congress in the Lower House, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, was not fielded as the first speaker from the Congress. The honour went to Gaurav Gogoi from the region. He was merely trying to score a brownie point.

Modi would have done well to explain to the nation why the BJP did not field at least one of its two MPs from Manipur to speak on the motion. Modi did not want a risk.

As my deadline was fast approaching, I was waiting for his views on Manipur. Instead, he was pouring scorn on the Congress. It was the first time a Prime Minister took the lead in shouting slogans against the Opposition, which the party MPs would repeat in the full knowledge that any failure on their part to do so would be noticed.

Modi was large-hearted to mention that he had listened to some speeches. It was like you and me watching Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha TV. He can do so all his life once he retires from politics. Right now his job is to attend Parliament and not escape from it.

Modi also tried to regale the MPs by mentioning WhatsApp jokes and forwards. He even mimicked Rahul Gandhi taking part in the sowing operations in Haryana with a mic pinned to his shirt. Was it a time to crack jokes and lampoon fellow MPs? By the way, there are thousands of videos and photographs that do not show the great leader in a good light.

Ninety minutes had passed since he began his address. He also drank water three times. And he had not said a single word on Manipur. My deadline was almost over. Unlike the Opposition which walked out over his eloquent silence, I had to wait for him  to conclude.

Modi never expected the walkout. He thought they would wait till he concluded his speech. There was a possibility that he would not have said a word about Manipur. The Opposition did the right thing to boycott.

Modi is no longer accustomed to anyone saying no to him. He wants to speak but does not want to listen. He has a very short attention span like some children who are addicted to electronic devices. He is like the Emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous short story titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

For a few seconds all his confidence was gone. He accused the Opposition of not willing to listen. Barack Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention endorsing presidential candidate John Kerry on July 27, 2004, transformed him into a national figure and paved the way for his journey to become the first POTUS of colour. In his autobiography, A Promised Land, Obama says that with that speech he lost his privacy.

Modi should know that Obama spoke for only 17 minutes. And what did he say? Let me quote, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America…

“We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that is what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

The much-quoted John F. Kennedy’s Presidential address had just 1366 words. In comparison, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address had only 275 words. Lincoln said “fighting is horrible, losing is worse”. That day I wished that Modi spoke like Obama, Kennedy, Lincoln and Churchill, not like a Congress politician at Pathanamthitta where I had primary education. He could speak for hours if a microphone was given to him.

The boycott forced him to speak about Manipur. He said the previous day, Amit Shah had spoken about Manipur. All he could say was that he was anguished and he would restore peace in the state. 

Modi could have promised the nation that he would go to Manipur, listen to the cries of the people there and take appropriate action to restore peace. He could also have given an idea of how he would like to bring the Meiteis and the Kukis together. He could have announced that the Centre would bear the cost of rebuilding the houses and the churches demolished and destroyed since May 3 when violence broke out.

There is a precedent. Recently, a Naga woman, Lucy Marem, was accidentally killed by the Meiteis. They mistook her for a Kuki. Promptly, the government of Biren Singh announced a compensation of Rs 10 lakh to her kith and kin. What’s more, her daughter would get a government job when she comes of age. Modi could have made similar promises to the kith and kin of all the 180 or so who were killed in Manipur and to those who lost all their properties.

There is another precedent, though we do not mention it. The British authorities paid compensation of Rs 5,000 to the kith and kin of all those who were killed at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919. True, some of them did not make any claim. Today that amount is equal to at least Rs 1 crore. Will Modi bite the bullet?

What compensation did the victims of the Gujarat riots get? By not taking the people into confidence in Manipur, Modi missed a great opportunity. He understands politics better than many politicians. That is why he never discussed the Gujarat carnage. The only way in which he regretted the killings in his state was when he said that he felt sad even when puppies came under the wheels of a car. What a solicitous comparison!

Fortunately, his Independence Day speech would not have caused any problem to the editorial writers as it was delivered in the morning. Again, he was at his combative best. He seemed to be addressing an election meeting. Modi called the second millennium as a millennium of slavery.

What he meant was that India remained under Mughal rule for about 700 years and under the British for 200 years. He seemed to imply that India got real Independence only in 2014. India was not united. It comprised hundreds of states. Credit should be given to the Mughals for introducing a somewhat Centralised system of governance.

What Modi & Co do not realise is that the British captured power from the Muslims, not Hindus. The first Europeans to arrive in India were the Portuguese. When they occupied Goa, it was ruled by the Muslims, who were numerically a microscopic minority. The Portuguese could not have ruled for over 500 years without the support of the Hindus.

Savarkar was the one who described the 1857 mutiny as the First War of Independence. What happened then? The mutineers marched from Meerut to Delhi and captured the Red Fort from where Modi spoke. They installed on the throne of Delhi a doddering poet, Bahadur Shah Zafar.

It took only a few days for the British to dethrone him with the help of the Indian soldiers and recapture power. Modi would be surprised to know that merchants in Bombay, Calcutta and other places organised prayers for the British so that they were able to suppress the rebellion.

In that year, the British established three universities in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, which paved the way for modern education. All the Gandhis, Madhusudhan Dutts, Bankim Chandra Chatterjees and Vivekanandas were products of the university movement. That is how a middle class arose in India, capable enough to run a government.

Even when India attained Independence in 1947, over 500 Indian states like Travancore in Kerala and Patiala in Punjab were not ruled by the British. It was left to Sardar Patel and his right-hand man VP Menon to integrate them into what is known as India, that is Bharat. Modi tried to ridicule the Congress saying that it was founded by AO Hume.

Modi failed to provide a plan of action for Manipur. He said peace was returning to the state. There is a Christian cemetery about five kms away from Modi’s house in New Delhi. There is always peace there. Is this the kind of peace that he wants to prevail in Manipur?

Modi mentioned with pride the contributions of Sant Meerabai who lived five centuries ago. He forgot that she used to move in a large area comprising Nuh district in Haryana, singing songs in praise of Krishna. He did not say anything about how the Sangh Parivar has been unleashing violence in the area, aided and abetted by the state administration which suffers from what is called the bulldozer syndrome.

Modi is a good reader when it comes to reading out all the statistics various departments provide him. It needs patience. And quite a lot of megalomania to refer to himself in the third person. In the process, Modi’s two speeches lacked both genuine passion and substantive content, rendering them purely rhetorical in nature. What a tragedy!

ajphilip@gmail.com