PM Modi's speech on Constitution Day further blurs the line between Legislature and Politics

Close on the heels of the Congress-led Opposition presenting a united front to take on the BJP government during the Winter Session of the Parliament, PM Modi fired a fresh salvo in a not-to-subtle dig at the Congress Party. In his speech celebrating the ‘Samvidhan Diwas’ (Constitution Day) on 26 Nov, PM Narendra Modi called it an unhealthy sign for India’s democracy “if a party is run by one family for many generations”.

14 Opposition parties, including Congress Party, Trinamool Congress, Shiv Sena, and the RJD skipped the Constitution Day celebrations in Parliament which was attended by President Ram Nath Kovind and Union Ministers. Slamming the Opposition over their boycott, PM Modi expressed no confidence in the current political climate where these parties, if required to, wouldn’t be able to draft a single page of the Constitution by setting aside their differences. “Imagine what would have happened had we been entrusted with the task of writing the Constitution today. Despite the long and dark shadows of the Independence movement or the horrors of the Partition, everybody had the national interest as their supreme priority. In today’s context, I do not know if we could have completed writing even one page of the Constitution because over time politics has had such an impact on the values of nation-first that even national interest gets left behind at times. The makers of the Constitution also represented various streams of thought, but they sat together with the belief that national interest is supreme” he said.

Every year since 2015, India has been observing November 26 as ‘Samvidhan Diwas’ (Constitution Day) to commemorate the adoption of the Constitution, one of the longest in the world, by the Constituent Assembly in 1949. In another dig at his political adversaries, he added, "We should’ve started the annual tradition of celebrating Samvidhan Diwas much earlier as we would’ve learned what the Constitution meant. But some people have failed."

Hypocrisy - the cry of the Opposition

Modi's thoughts were appreciated by his deputies as the visuals showed all his Ministers thumping their desks in unison. Their sentiment though was not shared by the Ministers from other parties present in the Parliament. Calling it nothing but a PR event, Congress MP Manickam Tagore said the BJP government does not respect the Constitution as they don’t govern as per the Constitution. Another Congress MP Mallikarjun Kharge, also the leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha said, "There is no role for the opposition leaders, no proper invite, and no place or permission to speak at this event”. Shiv Sena, Congress’ ally in Maharashtra, defended the Congress party in its editorial in Saamna, saying, “The biggest threat to democracy is to come to power democratically and rule in an autocratic manner. Congress party believes in democratic values. Yes, there can be political differences with Congress, but it has not sold the pillars of democracy. Congress’ reins in the hands of the Gandhi family is akin to BJP’s reins in the hands of people who are under the Prime Minister’s thumb. This is unlike the BJP of the past which had illustrious leaders such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitely, Pramod Mahajan, Venkaiah Naidu, and wasn’t a dictatorship of one group.”

The biggest threat to democracy is to come to power democratically and rule in an autocratic manner - Saamna editorial

Modi - his fears and lack of statesmanship

Despite the bravado, Modi’s constant digs at the Congress party only reveal his fear of India’s grand old party as he leaves no opportunity to dent its stature in the minds of Indians. The speech on the Constitution day only further revealed Modi’s unstatesmanlike attitude as it was delivered in his capacity as the head of the Legislature to his colleagues in the Parliament on a neutral subject like the Constitution. However, just like many other occasions, the politician in him took over and made what should have been a session of celebrating India’s diversity and its Constitution, a diatribe against his political opponents.

What also didn’t go unnoticed was his acceptance of more than one individual from a family in politics “on the basis of merit and blessings of the people”. This was seen as a sharp turn from BJP’s earlier policy of not allowing more than one member from a family to join the party. This policy, as per many political observers, impacted BJP electorally in many dynast-controlled constituencies. Modi’s speech made it clear that the moral and political yardstick for dynasts in BJP such as Jyotiraditya Scindia who was lured from Congress, Anurag Thakur, Piyush Goyal, Kiren Rijiju, Dharmendra Pradhan, is not the same for dynasts in other political parties such as Rahul Gandhi (Indian National Congress), Akhilesh Yadav (Samajwadi Party), Karunanidhi family (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam), Uddhav Thackeray (Shiv Sena), and Abhishek Banerjee (Trinamool Congress). In other words – dynasts are good but dynastic parties are not. Irrespective of what others felt about his speech, Modi surely won over a few more potential allies by throwing open BJP’s doors for ‘meritorious’ dynasts.

Watch the entire speech below.