While I would promptly concur with any sane person who thinks that this is the least of our worries, I have to return to a suspicion I expressed in an earlier post – at least one of the writers of blog posts attributed to ‘Narendra Modi’ is someone based in the USA who basically lifts American political idiom wholesale, regardless of its relevance to the Indian situation. The posts sound absurd, or should, to any reasonably aware person, but the Indian media seems to lack even one such person in its ranks. Hence the brain-dead way in which these blogs are reported, with much enthusiasm and empathy for the PM.

The first one I noticed was a blog post reported at the end of polling, in which ‘Narendra Modi’ said :

Lets place people over politics, hope over despair, healing over hurting, inclusion over exclusion and development over divisiveness. It is natural for the spirit of bipartisanship to get temporarily lost in the midst of an election campaign but now is the time to resurrect it.

We’ll come to those phrases I have emphasized in a minute, but first, the term ‘bipartisanship’ rang oddly in my ears. This is what bipartisan means:

representing, characterized by, or including members from two parties or factions

That’s the US party system, not India. For example, Reagan is said to have had a “bipartisan spirit”, reaching across the aisle to Democrats. Or take this essay ‘What is “bipartisanship” ‘? in The Economist in a section titled Democracy in America, which discusses this term in its specific context.

In India it would have to be multipartisan, for there are not just two parties. And there never has been a “spirit of multipartisanship” in Indian politics, where there are still real differences between parties, unlike the US, where the Republicans and the Democrats pretty much mirror each other. Continue reading Seriously, who writes Modi’s blogs? →