(Pawan Khera is a political analyst with the Congress party.)For a change, I agree with Narendra Modi.
He is right in blaming the rural background of Sadhvi Niranjan for her abusive language. Having worked in villages of different parts of the country for more than a fourth of my life, I can say this with confidence that despite being highly political, our villages are brutally honest about what they feel on any given issue. Unlike city dwellers who have to interact with people from different regional and cultural backgrounds, and hence learn to nuance their feelings in grey cloaks of worldliness, our villages are a riot of color in their attire, food and culture, but essentially black and white in their articulation.
With varying degrees of urbanization of conduct through successive generations, today's city wallahs have all originated from villages. We gradually learn to cover our instinct, sometimes with guarded expressions and sometimes with studied silence, learning to adopt a shield of elitism to help us comprehend and manipulate the micro-environment of our interactive space. As city dwellers, we all go through this learning curve to appropriately alter our conduct acquiring a 'somebody elseness' in our interactions with the outside world. In the closed doors of our habitat, we sometimes abandon that 'something elseness'. Homogeneity lends to our villages a plain speak that comes with generations of coexistence and familiarity.
Hailing from a village in Gujarat and having traveled and worked in several villages around the country, the Prime Minister certainly knows what he is talking. That the Sadhvi was being absolutely true to her thought process when she plainly categorized the voter of Delhi into "Ramzaada" and "Haraamzada", is beyond doubt. That her expression had rural honesty, and her apology was an urban compulsion, also comes out clearly. What does not come out clearly is what Narendra Modi's veiled defence of the Sadhvi seeks to achieve.
Modi either did not think through his defence of the abusive Sadhvi, or he is deliberately paying her a back-handed compliment for what she stands for. What the Prime Minister cleverly does through his defence is that he criticizes her expression while attempting to veil the underlying thought process of the Sangh Parivar, which the Sadhvi so aptly represents.
Where is the earnestness in the so-called regret from our Prime Minister? Assuming that most city dwellers would not have been through a proper rural experience, he is indulging the offended urban elite into silence by condescendingly blaming Sadhvi Niranjan's language on her 'social and rural background', but completely ignoring her thinking.
That such elements get elected to law-making institutions is in itself a riddle of our democracy, that we give them a place in the cabinet defies all logic for a government that has no coalition compulsions whatsoever. The Prime Minister needs to do more than issuing such half-regrets. Compliment the Sadhvi and the millions of villagers of India for honesty of expression if you want to, but sack her from your cabinet for what she stands for. She may represent the villages of India in her expression, but to say that the villages of India think in such polarizing terms is an affront to our villages and our Indianness and to Hinduism too.
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