Swadesh Singh is an author, teacher and activist. He completed his education from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi. In a career spanning over 15 years, including in academics, he has worked with reputed media organisations in the national capital. He now teaches political science at the University of Delhi. He has four books to his credit and regularly writes for newspapers, online platforms and academic journals. His core areas of interest are caste, social justice, party system, Hindutva and the media.
India is a wounded but organic civilisation that faced invasions and foreign rule for over 1,000 years, yet survived these onslaughts regardless of the odds. The memory of this civilisation is perpetual and its ability to heal is eternal. Due to this, various attempts have been made by invaders and foreign rulers to dismantle India and establish themselves, but this has never yielded the expected results.
After the British left India, it was expected that efforts to revive and heal the wounded Indian civilisation would be made by the new rulers. But, the new ruling class in one way or another continued the approach of the earlier invaders and colonial rulers. They turned a blind eye to India's traditional knowledge system and looked to the West for inspiration. The light of Buddha, Chanakya, Shankar, Vivekananda, Bose, Gandhi and Ambedkar did not guide India's path any more.
In the first 50 years after independence, India did make some progress, but as compared to other countries which started their journey with us, the achievements cannot be called satisfactory. We lost a big portion of our territory to Pakistan in 1948 and to China in 1962. We won the war in 1971 but did not negotiate properly even when we held thousands of Pakistani army men captive. Our ideological direction in domestic policy or foreign policy was not clear. The value system which we created in the 1950s crashed by the 1980s.
After more than 50 years of Independence, as India was stepping into the new millennium, a few things became very clear our colonial past was not yet over, we were still confused about our national identity, our economic goals were ambiguous and our social structure was hanging by a thread. But even in this morass, the regenerative spirit of India was nurturing several glimmers of hope. One such glimmer was Narendra Modi. In an article profiling him for the India Today magazine in the year 2000, I wrote that soon he would become the chief minister of Gujarat and that would be the first of many milestones. Finally, on 7 October 2001, Narendra Modi took the oath as chief minister of Gujarat, and the rest is history
For over 22 years now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in public office-first, as the chief minister of Gujarat for almost 13 years and then as the prime minister of the country for almost 10 years. These years established him as an extraordinary leader in the league of top politicians not only in India but also in the world. The three things that make him stand out are his thought process which is free of all colonial burdens, his governance style which is hands-on and innovative and his personality which exudes a mix of confidence and humility with a firm commitment to nationalistic pursuits.
Following Narendra Modi's work, politics and functioning for more than 35 years, I have found many opportunities to meet, interact and travel with him. As a journalist in the thick of things, I witnessed his steady and undeterred rise from a pracharak of RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) to the state organising secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to his foray into national politics where he rose to the post of the national organising secretary. In Gujarat, he expanded the work of the party from 10,000 to 16,000 villages in just a few years. As Gujarat BJP's organising secretary, he devised the strategy of the Rath Yatra for sending out a political and social message. Later, the term 'yatra' graduated to the national level with L.K. Advani's Somnath to Ayodhya Yatra in 1990. Following this, Narendra Modi himself successfully steered the Ekta Yatra of the then BJP president Murli Manohar Joshi at Lal Chowk in Kashmir.
In October 2001, when Narendra Modi became the chief minister, Gujarat was at a difficult juncture. The state was in the throes of political instability under the impact of natural calamity and not free from corruption in the administration. In political terms, it was a situation where one could win a battle and yet or the war. Yet, Narendra Modi withstood it all. He ensured impeccable rehabilitation work after the Bhuj earthquake and dealt with corruption with an iron hand.
The journey of this book started somewhere in June-July 2019 when I got the chance to participate in brainstorming sessions organised by two leading think tanks. These sessions made me think about the political developments in recent years and how they are aligned with the modern Indian political history of the last 150 years.
In the first session, I presented the argument that the victory of the BJP could not be understood only through the prism of Hindutva politics; its politics of antyodaya (governance) and nationalism, organisational strength and use of modern technology should also be taken into consideration. This meeting was attended by academic stalwarts who posed some tough questions over this line of thought. It opened new areas of inquiry for me and pushed me to contemplate further on the subject. In the second session, I was part of a panel discussion around a topic related to liberal unease and Indian national identity. Estimating that my co-panellists would speak on the liberal unease aspect, I decided to focus on the roots of Indian national identity. Since then, I have been researching and engaging with this subject.
After attending these brainstorming sessions, I continued my research around these two areas of inquiry the current sociopolitical intellectual discourse keeping BJP and its politics in mind and the roots of Indian national identity. This book is, therefore, an attempt to understand the current sociopolitical and cultural developments in the backdrop of the last 150 years when a civilisational awakening took place in India and a new consensus based on certain principles was formed.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1086)
Archaeology (753)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
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