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Independence Day is India's annual general meeting. Its chief executive officer (CEO), the Prime Minister, presents on that day the annual report for the year past and lists the agenda for the year to come to the shareholders, the Indian people. This is how prime ministers in the past have treated it.
On Friday, Narendra Modi could not have reported on the past because he has had the job for only 81 days so far. But he presented what I call a moral balance sheet, holding up a mirror to all of us and indicated where we ought to go.
He could have chosen the time-honoured path of incoming CEOs, to write off all bad debts and blame the previous management for all ills. Instead, he graciously gave credit to all his predecessors for having raised India to its present position. That was a first-rate act of statesmanship.
He could have rightfully talked of rule through majority in view of his decisive electoral triumph but he stressed consensus. He deplored divisiveness caused by religion, caste, region or politics. He urged that shoulders be used to carry ploughs rather than guns, making the earth green and not drench it in blood.
The Modi government is lauded for its punctuality and cleanliness drives but he wondered how low we must have sunk for these minimal requirements to be considered achievements. He stressed that spirit of service must inform our work ethics and proudly called himself the First Servant of India.
He did not shy away from talking of squalor and the need to fight it, be it in the moral realm of gender and opportunity imbalance, or economic in terms of shoddy output or even the physical filth threatening our cities and villages alike.
The prime minister was acutely conscious of the overarching economic dimension to our objectives. He targeted rural poverty and distress while proposing inclusive banking and insurance cover for even the poorest. Skill development was needed for boosting manufacturing. The goal of e- (easy, effective and economic) governance through a digital India required greater urgency to making components at home. He invited the world to "make in India" and asked us to take pride in the Made in India label. That would be possible only with zero defect and zero effect (on environment), prerequisites to India claiming a rightful place in the global comity.
Modi wove his many themes deftly into a compelling narrative. Gender issues were connected to the outrage and shame at reported rapes, women's dignity to toilets, tourism to cleanliness, and rapid economic growth to manufacturing and skill development. The appeal to unity against divisiveness was linked to the universal desire for peace and harmony.
Apart from banking and insurance cover, only two overtly economic announcements formed a part of the prime minister's address. The first was a scheme for every state and central legislator to develop a model village in the constituency before 2016 and three more by 2019. Obviously, these 15,000-odd villages would form the nucleus of rural change. The Planning Commission is to be imminently replaced by a new body, more attuned to the current economic situation within the country (with states playing an increasing role) and abroad. Only the cussed will find fault with these.
Modi constantly reinvents himself - from the belligerent state chief minister to the aggressive campaigner to the ambitious leader firing up the enthusiasm of the party cadres to the statesman addressing the nation, exhorting it to clean up its act everywhere if it were to meet its own lofty aspirations - they are all various aspects of the same persona. His symbolic description of himself as the First Servant or addressing extempore, from the heart, as it were, and forgoing the security of the bullet-proof enclosure (that must be tempered at all costs) all fitted to a T to the message he wanted to deliver. Another rock star of a leader, Pope Francis, has been doing much the same lately.
This was the best Independence Day address I have watched and I have seen them all since 1985.
The writer taught at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and helped set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand
