The sheer misery, the excruciating embarrassment, of  watching the Prime Minister of a sovereign (but not secular or socialist) nation desperately, inappropriately, capering about to show off his imagined intimacy with an American President who steadfastly kept his distance and his dignity, is now passing. Time does heal all wounds. (And hopefully, as Groucho Marx put it, Time will also wound all heels) [1]

But the burning question remains – is Modi more shameless than he is ignorant? Much has been said about Modi’s suit that exceeds the worst excesses of the late unlamented Marie Antoinette. Vrinda Gopinath points out:

While the last world leader to don such a suit (it costs around 15,000 sterling pounds or Rs 15 lakhs today) was deposed Egyptian tyrant Hosni Mubarak, it certainly out-dazzled Obama’s working dark grey suit (to cut down on non-vital decisions, the US Prez only wears grey and blue ). However, if Modi was thinking hip-hop bling and ice accessories (his fave diamond Movado watch), it certainly got Obama to make a mention at the President’s banquet when he foxily pointed out how a newspaper back home wrote, “Move aside, Michelle Obama. The world has a new fashion icon.” It must have not passed Obama’s notice that Modi had changed his attire thrice that day.

And on The Suit, the inimitable Mitali Saran:

A suit embroidered all over with the word “India” would have said “We are feeling on the acceptable, though still wildly inappropriate, side of juvenile today”; but a suit emblazoned as it was with the words “Narendra Damodardas Modi” over and over and over again just says: “I have no idea how crass it is for me to dress like a plutocrat welcoming you to a party on my personal yacht, rather than like the prime sevak I claimed I would be of a complicated democracy in which hundreds of millions go to bed hungry.”

 

(And oh look, The Name is written in English, not in Hindi or Gujarati. Just by the way.)

And all this desperate sucking up to Obama, with nothing to show, really, except the ‘breakthrough’ in the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, which Nityanand Jayaraman points out, has simply set the stage for the Indian taxpayer to cover US companies’ untested technologies and the expensive electricity they generate.

On another front, amidst concerns that US is pressuring India to push for liberal policies in favour of pharma MNCs seeking patent protection for their products in India, leading US health groups wrote to Barack Obama urging him to support India in providing “high-quality, low-cost generic medicines essential for health care around the world”, instead of using his trip to “promote the narrow interests of one segment of the pharmaceutical industry.” The concern is that a new US-led IP empire in India will put access to medicines at risk, that the Modi government’s “accelerating flirtation with the US and its investors is dangerous to hundreds of millions of people worldwide whose lives depend on Indian generics.”

Ajai Shukla lists three likely outcomes of Obama’s visit:

a) The dilution of Indian nuclear liability law that places the onus of responsibility in the event of any accident, on the American companies that supplied the nuclear reactors and facility. The US companies want to limit their liability to a certain cap and there is a negotiation going on for a deal on that. This may be one of the big outcomes of this visit.

Remember Bhopal?

b)  India would accept green house gas emission caps. Obama said:

I know the argument made by some, that it’s unfair for countries like the United States to ask developing nations and emerging economies like India to reduce your dependence on the same fossil fuels that helped power our growth for more than a century. But here’s the truth: Even if countries like the United States curb our emissions, if countries that are growing rapidly, like India, with soaring energy needs don’t also embrace cleaner fuels, then we don’t stand a chance against climate change.

I agree that there has to be a global scaling down of emissions, BUT – ‘cleaner fuels’ for Obama means simply nuclear energy, to be provided by US companies.

For the Kafila opinion on nuclear energy, see the first ten links here. Not to mention a) above.

As Sagar Dhara points out, dealing with climate change requires a fundamental transformation of our notions of progress and development, globally – Keep the Climate, Change the Economy, he says. In other words, Obama’s perspective will not suffice, within which, even renewable sources of energy are envisaged as necessary only to ensure endless consumption. In his Inaugural address after his first election, Obama declared poetically, “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil” – to what end? “To fuel our cars and run our factories”!  There is no sense here that assumptions about consumption, urbanization, and endless growth will have to be drastically rethought to deal with climate change.

c) extension of the tenure of the defence framework which is likely to extended between 2015-2025.  

Again, what does this mean? You guessed it – more business for America, basically at the cost of Indian made systems.

So much for shamelessness.

But the ignorance, ah, the ignorance.

Modi started his radio address “Mann Ki Baat” by explaining the meaning of US President Barack Obama’s first name

Some people wonder what is the meaning of Barack… in Swahili, which is prevalent in African nations, Barack means he who is blessed…African countries follow Ubuntu philosophy, which is about unification of humanity. There is a gap of centuries, and of boundaries, but the sentiment that prevails in India – Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (world is a family) – the same sentiment grows from the forests of Africa.

Ohhh. Where to start.

“The forests of Africa?” A white imperialist couldn’t have done better in putting down an entire continent. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam from ancient Indian civilization, Ubuntu from the forests of Africa. Remember, Modi’s goal is the elimination of forests as remnants of a primitive culture, to be replaced by “smart cities”. Remember also that he is the favoured representative of the “large number of readers” who complained to the New York Times about a cartoon on India’s Mars Mission, which showed a farmer with a cow knocking at the door of a room marked Elite Space Club where two men sit reading a newspaper on India’s feat.

Apparently these readers felt it “mocked India.” The editor explained:

The intent of the cartoonist, Heng Kim Song, was to highlight how space exploration is no longer the exclusive domain of rich, Western countries.

Yes, that’s how I read it, especially as India’s Mars missions was carried out on the proverbial shoe string budget. But the heart-felt desire of Modi-bhakt Indians is to be represented as fat cat businessmen in over-the-top suits, like their leader. To be represented as a farmer is to be “mocked.”

For such a leader to refer condescendingly to African philosophy as homespun wisdom emerging form the ‘forests of Africa’ can only be insulting to Africa.

But. But. But.

Barack in fact has its roots in Arabic and Hebrew, meaning thunder in ancient Hebrew and blessing in Arabic. It exists in the Swahili dictionary as a loan word from Arabic. (Barkat as an Indian name hasn’t come to us from Swahili!) North Africa has ancient connections with what we call West Asia today – look at a map of the Mediterranean and the countries around it. The sea acted as a carrier of ideas and people and goods and knowledge, back and forth. African languages were written in the Arabic script, till the gradual shift to Roman script, with the spread of Western imperialism and hegemony.

Mahmood Mamdani points out:

The written tradition in Africa before Western colonialism was primarily in the Arabic script. Arabic manuscripts were read and appreciated in West Africa since the conversion of rulers to Islam in the 11th century. Arabic was also the script of Kiswahili on the East African coast from at least the 17th century and of early Afrikaans in  South Africa from the 18th century…
The replacement of the Arabic script by Latin was a consequence of colonization and  is an important part of the historical narrative of Hausa, Kiswahili and Afrikaans, among other languages.

In other words, not only was Arabic script as ‘native’ to Africa as the Latin/Roman script, and Arabic words part of African languages, but Arabic names in Africa among Muslims are common. President Obama’s grandfather converted to Islam as a young man and took the name Hussein; his son (President Obama’s father) Barack, was brought up in a Muslim home, but converted to Anglicanism. Nevertheless, the first names of Barack Obama Senior’s son, brought up as a Christian, were drawn from Arabic – from his father and grandfather’s names, while Obama is a common surname among the Luo people. Hence – Barack Hussein  Obama, President of the USA.

Is this dismissal of Arabic, ignorance, really? Of Modi? Of his speech writers? (On whom, more here). Or is it that same vicious, virulent Hindutvavaadi politics that tried to replace Christmas with Good Governance Day, and made Modi the first Prime Minister not to wish Indian Muslims for Eid-ul-Fitr, (his minions quickly tried to make up by the next Eid a couple of months later, by tweeting his greetings for Eid-ul-Zoha). The kind of politics that makes it impossible for this man and his minions to acknowledge ancient cosmopolitan histories that link languages and religions, let alone to live with heterogeneity.

The same shady, dishonest politics that removed ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’ from the Preamble to the Constitution in a government advertisement, justifying it later by claiming it was the ‘original’ Preamble before the Emergency era amendment by the Indira-led Congress.

While the more sophisticated (slimy?) Hindutvavaadis harked back to the Constituent Assembly debates in which Ambedkar argued against the word “secular” in the Preamble, the Hindutvavaadi thugs openly claimed India to be a Hindu Rashtra.

Let us recall why Ambedkar thought the term was unnecessary – as Krishnadas Rajagopal points out:

The debates saw Dr. B.R. Ambedkar reason that there was no need to include the term ‘secular’ as the entire Constitution embodied the concept of secular state, which meant non-discrimination on grounds of religion and equal rights and status to all citizens.

In other words, Ambedkar felt the word secular was “superfluous” in the Preamble because the constitution already establishes a framework that protects the rights of minorities – the entire constitution is “secular” [2]. Hindutvaadis claim the Bhagvad Gita to be the “National Book”; surely, surely if there is such a thing, it is the Constitution that is the National Book? Should it not have been the Indian Constitution and not the Gita that Modi, as Prime Minister of a (still) secular nation, gifted to the Emperor of Japan and to Obama on his visit to the US?

It isn’t ignorance is it? It’s just really really shameless.

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[1] ‘Heel’ here is used in the slang sense of ‘bad guy’.

[2] Regarding socialism, Dr Ambedkar argued that apart from the Fundamental Rights, the Directive Principles of State Policy were “socialistic in their direction and content.  I fail to understand what more socialism can be.” Impeccable democrat that he was, he also said:

If you state in the Constitution that the social organisation of the State shall take a particular form, you are, in my judgment, taking away the liberty of the people to decide what should be the social organisation in which they wish to live. It is perfectly possible today, for the majority people to hold that the socialist organisation of society is better than the capitalist organisation of society. But it would be perfectly possible for thinking people to devise some other form of social organisation which might be better than the socialist organisation of today or of tomorrow. I do not see therefore why the Constitution should tie down the people to live in a particular form and not leave it to the people themselves to decide it for themselves.