Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is the weakest leader to have led India since Bahadur Shah Zafar. He is a fantastic human being no doubt about that may be a great economist too and undoubtedly India is indebted to his original economic liberalization policies in his stint as the finance minister in early 90’s. Unfortunately that is where his list of achievement ends. Zafar, the last Mughal king was also a great human being and a 1st grade poet but history only remembers him as a weakling. History, despite being a mere account of victors over the vanquished, has never been kind to cowards for it can never accommodate capitulation even in the most gloriously rationalized form. Mr. Singh will always be remembered as an accident that happened to India after a certain fair skinned lady relinquished the throne in an act of political master stroke of 2004. Furthermore, it was an accidental convergence of disparate forces of Indian political landscape bound by the noblest of ideas in the form of single thread of ‘secularism’ (pun unintended). What started as an accident finally culminated into the farce of May 2009 when continuity was reaffirmed once again and they lived happily ever after...

Continuity is the single most important virtue that Indian civilization has bestowed upon its populace. In continuity, we find continuous sameness being propagated continuously. The same leaders affecting the same events and the same editorials being written by the same “conscience keepers” of the nation and the same mass of people looking up to the sky and wondering about the same problems they have had since time immemorial. We are a nation in permanent déjà vu for in continuity there is great capacity to accommodate similarities and discard the forces of change. Take NREGA as an example, the single biggest achievement that UPA & the media in India has been harping about over the last 5 years, it is so typically Congess-ised in nature; dressing the wound but leaving the disease untouched. While Vajpayee had the vision to build roads and hit at the very crux of the issue; the supply chain mechanism of the agricultural produce of rural India; congress believed in the quick-fix temporary solution of loan waver. In loan-waiver policy there is continuity of the vicious cycle of a farmer’s plight, whereas road building smacks of change because it addresses the underlying disease and if there is no disease then how does one dress the wounds? As an afterthought one might also add that the four-corridor project has been virtually halted since 2004, but then it could never fit into the agenda of continuum.

Everybody has an agenda in continuity, for continuity alone provides the leisure of having individual agendas. Print and electronic media in India is so strong and has such strong belief in continuity that any force that might not be confirming to the tenets of status quo is not only frowned upon but also decimated by building opinions against it. Intellectuals and intelligentsia in India have their own vested interests to guard and “like vultures flying high in the sky with their eyes on a lowly crawling snake on earth”, they always have to spice up their arguments with the bitter salt of secularism to provide legitimacy to perpetual continuity. Thus a Indo-US nuclear deal is exalted to the level of being a stepping stone of India’s legitimate claims of a global super power status while a Pokhran exercise or a Kargil victory is painted as a step backwards or as a colossal intelligence failure. Indian media continues to ignore all the proprieties (or the lack of them) that the ruling first family is employing in order to fill every constitutional post in the country. The intellectuals see virtue in our first woman president and paint APJ Kalam as a Hindu in Muslim disguise. Madam Sonia Gandhi already has her stooges in the offices of the President and the Chief Election Commissioner and the media would make no noises whatsoever if Supreme Court judges and army generals are the next in line. When media is not obsessed with Incumbency/anti-incumbency theories, opinion polls, secular communal divide, the young-politicians-appeal-to-the-masses hypothesis, they are debating reality shows on TV or the rise and fall of stock markets or Taliban’s atrocities on women in SWAT valley. Where is the time and inclination to question the legitimacy of continuity?

Is continuity really bad? Is change desirable or even necessary? Hasn’t continuity accommodated all and kept everyone happy? Continuity is what is. Whereas change is ‘what could be’. Change is that potential horizon India can attain which has been missing in its CV for thousands of years. Change is the alternate possible destiny of a nation that could catapult it to the summit of human endeavour at a time when civilization would achieve its final goals. Change may not always be desirable for continuity in its confines offers the cosiness of being, the comfort of knowing the sameness; but change is a necessity for greatness, a necessity to complete the cycle of civilization. Change may not be hanging around the corner or may not be foreseeable in the visible horizon for haven’t we stamped our authority on continuity? Make no mistake in realizing that India is at crossroads again and if we don’t choose the right path this time, then future generations will wonder about another lost opportunity and the loss shall again be that of the nation’s.

Events may not shape the fate of a nation but the way a nation reacts to events definitely has a bearing on the final destiny of the nation. The 26/11 attack on Mumbai was one such event that changed the way we perceive terrorism forever, but the way the nation reacted has been appalling to say the least. It was almost as if New Delhi wanted to forget the event as quickly as possible and verdict 2009 seems to have given them a perfect opportunity to do exactly that. The media has been busy harping about India’s ‘unprecedented’ pressure on US and its allies following 26/11, when it is not putting the ethical and moral blame on BJP of politicizing the terrorism issue! The entire media bandwagon was jubilantly celebrating BJP’s loss in elections to Rajasthan and Delhi assembly soon after the 26/11 attacks for it legitimized the theory of 26/11 attacks being just another form of modern day reality and necessitated no serious introspection! When electoral successes/failures determine our long-term policies towards such serious issues as terrorism is it not pertinent to raise the question of vote-bank politics being detriment to the fate of the nation? In the same vein, is the media so callous as to portray terrorism as a trivial political turf battle or is it guarding its own self-interest in the grand scheme of continuity? Any impartial observer from an alien planet keeping an eye on India could make out quite clearly that the media in India is biased towards forces of status quo and against forces of change. It is incidental that BJP is perceived as a party of the Hindu right; it is in reality the ‘other’ force, the parallel truth, the alternate path to destiny. But, it is convenient for the intellectuals and media to hammer the communal angle in order to suppress the challenge to continuity.

Gujarat is already on that alternate path and that is what makes it so unpalatable to the mainstream media, the intelligentsia and the ‘secular’ forces of India. Gujarat widely described by the media as laboratory of Hindutva is a laboratory alright, but a laboratory of a nation’s alternate path to destiny, a laboratory of no-nonsense governance and unprecedented progress. Despite the severe constrains of India’s flawed federal structure Gujarat is a story of stunning never-seen-before success of modern day India. Time and again empirical data has shown that Muslims of Gujarat are better off than their counterparts in the rest of India and such an effort to bring a whole community of people into the mainstream would again represent change and the forces of continuity can never be comfortable with such a formulation. The very basis of argument against the over-performing Gujarati government; the post Godhra riots; is built on historic falsehood. Gujarat has always been a communally sensitive state and has seen many a riots in the past that have sometimes lasted weeks and months of unabated violence under the very aegis of the ‘secular’ congress governments of the time, but never have the ‘conscience keepers’ of this nation seen villainy or conspiracy in the actions of Madhav Sinh Solankis or Chaman Bhai Patels. It is to the credit of Mr Modi that the 2002 riots were brought under control in a matter of days and no riots have been witnessed in the state since, but the likes of Ms Setlvaad keep propagating fraud on the nation through their argumentative falsehoods. This is the conspiracy of status quoists that has brought them rich dividends in terms of verdict 2009 and if not checked in time India’s very statehood will be questioned the next time the nation goes through a crossroad.