Bharat Bhushan: Why PM Modi heard the call of the wild
NB: I would have titled this perceptive article The Fifty Seventh inch. DS
In the summer of 1966, 73-year-old Mao Zedong
jumped into the Yangtze River to participate in Wuhan’s annual swim. It was a
carefully crafted political theatre. The official Chinese news agency reported:
“The water of the river seemed to be smiling that day.”Mao, the Chinese propaganda machinery
claimed, swam 15 km along the Yangtze in 65 minutes. The Chinese leader, it
seems, was swimming a mile in eight minutes while the world record at that time
was under 20 minutes.
More than half a century later, on February
14 this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also jumped into a river flowing
through the Jim Corbett National Park along with a fading reality TV star, Bear
Grylls. He successfully built a makeshift raft with Grylls and managed to stay
afloat — not that there was any prospect of “the most important man in India”,
as Grylls refers to him, drowning. Whether the 68-year-old Indian PM also swam
in the river, one does not know. But he was familiar with rivers having
wrestled a crocodile as a young kid, as the apocryphal story goes.
Political observers now claim that Mao’s
Yangtze swim was a profoundly significant event in modern Chinese history. When
Mao entered the waters of the Yangtze at Wuhan, he was the old man of the
revolution. He emerged from it reborn — ready once more for his historic role
as the Great Helmsman. He used his replenished political capital to launch the
Cultural Revolution and purge his rivals from the party.
In February 2019, Prime Minister Modi also
seemed on shaky political grounds. The general election was around the corner,
the unemployment rate was the highest in 45 years, rural distress was acute,
farmers were restive, small businesses which had closed down because of his
rash demonetisation decision were struggling to survive, exports were declining
and manufacturing was in the doldrums. There was desperation to construct a
credible re-election platform. A film on the much-hyped surgical strikes
against Pakistan called Uri had just been released. And a biopic of the Prime
Minister was in the offing before the general election.
That is when Bear Grylls’ call of the wild
came. The Prime Minister’s managers must have grabbed it with both hands. It
was unfortunate, however, that while the Prime Minister was busy in shooting a
carefully scripted political documentary in the wilds, calamity struck. While
the two ageing stars were trying to get brand rub-off from each other, a major
terrorist attack took place at Pulwama, killing 40 paramilitary personnel...read more:
