File photo of an Adani Group programme in session.Source: Adani Group
Counterpoint: ‘India first’ versus ‘Adani first’
By Vivekanand Jha*‘Indira is India, India is Indira’, was the most sordid and pernicious attempt to project Indira as equivalent to the nation. Significantly, where Indira’s loyalists stopped, ‘Modi Bhakts’ poignantly took up the challenge to even transcend the Lakshman Rekha. The coining of the slogan, ‘Har Har Modi, Ghar Ghar Modi‘, was overstepping the Lakshman Rekha when blatant attempts were made to equate a human with God. The coining of the slogan, ‘Modi hai to sab mumkin hai‘, is the vindication of projecting a Superman who has the divine power to bless the men of flesh and bones.
Today television channels orchestrate Hindu-Muslim disharmony to the hilt. In fact, the polarised nation, especially Hindus are constantly fed upon the propaganda of the Islamic takeover of this nation. Though some fringe reports vindicate the same, the hype given to this issue has provided the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union Government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi with some sort of licence to escape its omissions and commissions on the governance front. No matter whatever be the nature of omissions and commissions, Modi shall continue to be endorsed by Hindus.
This could be interpreted as the reason that emboldened the government to back Adani, irrespective of the stigma attached to the Adani Group today. Perhaps this explains why should the government machinery be silent on the Adani Group’s alleged stock manipulation and accounting fraud. The equation between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Adani Group’s chairman Gautam Adani is an open secret. Modi’s detractors swear that it is, in fact, a quid pro quo: you help me in coming to power, I will pay you back in rich and rewarding terms.
Regrettably, notwithstanding Nirmala Sitharaman going to reassure the nation about the robustness of India’s economic foundation, the over-exposure of the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India and the State Bank of India (SBI), going gung ho to finance the group, appear to be causing nightmares to the common men and women of this country.
Thus the report of Hindenburg Research, the short seller, accusing the Adani group of ‘pulling out the biggest con in the corporate history’, has proved to be an albatross around the neck of the Modi government. Unequivocally then, the Adani angle is evidence of ‘ India first’ having been relegated to ‘Adani first’, which is ostensible to one and all – the government’s tacit support to Adani when his group is accused of being implicated in the financial fraud.
But then, the irony of the whole episode is that after the Hindenburg report indicts Adani in no ambiguous terms, Gautam Adani finds an escape route by saying: Tiranga has been attacked. Also, when BBC made a documentary on Modi, the same logic was paraded: anti-national forces have conspired to attack the nation. The timing of the release of ‘India: The Modi Question‘, a documentary made on the riots in Gujarat in 2002 when the 2024 general elections are around the corner, is significant. The documentary which is alleged to have malicious content to tarnish Modi’s image, would have been blown into smithereens had the government not evinced any interest in the same; instead, the government went tongs and hammer to block it, and book those who were involved in broadcasting it. No wonder, the written objection by almost five hundred scientists and intellectuals demanding the withdrawal of blocking, is the vindication of the intelligentsia class having taken a deep offence of being regulated by the regimentation of the government considered to be antithetical to a sound and vibrant democracy.
However, such is the degree and magnitude of polarisation in the polity today, that no matter whatever the scale of omissions and commissions, the ‘India first’ and ‘Adani first’ slogans will continue to hold their respective significance, side by side.
*Author, Academician and Public Intellectual
