As India enters its 70th year of Independence, it is time we acknowledged that our prime ministers may usually have told us the truth, but have consistently failed to tell us the whole truth. In particular, they have sought to prevaricate about the urgency and the importance of economic reform. They have looked for other explanations for policy changes; they have justified them as helping India's poorest even when they have not, directly. Today, Narendra Modi has a chance to become an exception. Let us hope he seizes it.
But first: What could be the purpose of something like the Independence Day speech, when prime ministers today can stay in constant touch with the people, directly? This prime minister has already revolutionised the communication-related aspects of the PM's role. As is only appropriate in India - a country often described as living in many centuries at once - some of the steps he's taken look to the future, such as speaking from multiple Twitter accounts and through an app. Others return to the mediums of the past: An Indian prime minister now has a Sunday radio address, something most associated perhaps with the American presidency in the turbulent 1930s, when Franklin D Roosevelt wanted to speak directly to the electorate about his giant reform plans.
It seems, however, that there is something particularly important about a set-piece speech. You can lay out a longer argument; you can seek to persuade, and to create a constituency and support base for what you intend. That was, in fact, what FDR sought to do; that was what Jawaharlal Nehru tended to attempt in his speeches; and, indeed, as far as social issues are concerned, that was what Mr Modi set out to achieve in his first Independence Day speech at least.
That great speech - in which he spoke of sanitation and of women's rights - went some considerable way towards extending the political honeymoon that followed his election. There was little you could fault in it. But, in retrospect, there was one big omission - the same error that has haunted most prime ministers since Nehru. There was no attempt to create domestic support for particular forward-looking policy reform. Even the 'Make in India' tag-line, first unveiled then, appeared addressed to foreigners.
In his very first address, Nehru unveiled his plans for land tenure reforms and for big dams, and said "production today is the first priority, and every attempt to hamper or lessen production is injuring the nation". He argued for "large and balanced industrialisation". But, he presented all these as essential to the "labouring" and "long-suffering masses". Like so much else, here he set the template; no form of forward-looking reform can be justified now in any other way. He may have been quite right to justify his economic policies thus, in 1947, given the specifics of the situation and what he planned. But leaders 50, 60, and now 70 years later can hardly use the same template, especially when the means to the end have changed so drastically.
Reading that first prime ministerial speech today is almost amusing, because of the echoes that Mr Modi's speech-writers put into his own first words from the Red Fort. Both called themselves the "first servant" of the people - Pradhan sevak, not Pradhan mantri. With the Partition spinning out of control, Nehru spoke of the violence as "coming in the way of consideration of the great economic problems of the masses of the people which so urgently demand attention". Again, echoes in Mr Modi's suggested 10-year moratorium on killing each other, so that we can "develop" first.
The Nehru template has meant that few speeches since then have sought to explicitly make the connection between economic growth and true freedom. This is a pity. The biggest opportunity, perhaps, was Narasimha Rao's - but, as usual, India's most overrated prime minister by far chose to do nothing with it.
Rao's first speech from the Red Fort makes for painful reading; he spoke guiltily and defensively of "bold decisions" solely as a matter of addressing the balance of payments; and then, for the bulk of the policy part of the speech, listed enormous numbers of welfare programmes that had been begun, even as the government struggled to control its spending. The epochal 1991 Budget was described, in Rao's speech, thus: "We have presented a new Budget in which we have formulated a number of schemes for public welfare, especially keeping in view the needs of our rural population". Really? The disingenuousness is glaring and unjustifiable.
Next year, indeed Rao used the word "reform" - but then, amazingly, described these "reforms" as being "in the shape of the Eighth Five-Year Plan, with an outlay of Rs 4.5 lakh crore". (In a further sign of limited ambition, Rao asked for "a moratorium on raising such problems as divide us" only for "the next two or three years".)
The danger of following this template is three-fold. First, it limits your ability to create a pressure group that understands why you wish to change policy, and will advocate on your behalf. That Mr Modi has forgone this opportunity is particularly puzzling, given that he is streets ahead of most Indian politicians in the ability to drum up noisy support. Second, it limits your choice of policy reforms to those you feel you can credibly sell using the "helps-the-poorest" template. Witness Mr Modi's confused attempts to apply that template to his land acquisition amendment.
But third, and most important, it leads to distrust among voters. Eventually, voters wake up to the fact that you're not telling them the entire truth. In India, in some sense, there has been a conspiratorial silence among all mainstream political parties about economic reform, while they all choose to implement various parts of the policy reform programme - up to and including the Communists, whether as constituents of the United Front in Delhi or as investment-seeking social democrats in their last years in Kolkata.
Similar quiet consensus over policy, accompanied by disingenuous distractions and justifications, has existed elsewhere. In America over trade, for example, and in Britain over immigration. We have seen where that leads. India's voters may be slower to indignation, but no less sure. It is time some prime minister explained to them exactly why economic reform actually matters, how it could change their lives, and sought their assistance in the project - just as Nehru first sought their assistance so many years ago, but accepting that the tools to hand to achieve the same ends have changed.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com
Twitter: @mihirssharma
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