The fringe of fringes

Fringes by their very characteristics do dominante the public discourse and try to dominate the public narrative towards their very ideological inclinations. 

Whether it's a Sadhvi Prachi on one extreme or a Brinda Karat on the other, the core elements of their thought & action follow the same pattern. 

The former might have a fetish for a stark chastity, while the latter might be a votary of indulgent promiscuity. 

Both have their own language, symbols and motifs to communicate their very own worldviews to their very followings sharing each of their respective ideological moorings. 

Both despise each other with utmost disdain and look forward for trampling the other's viewpoint at the first opportunity. 

The following of both these fringes keep on dwindling and thereby keep on determining the directionality of national discourse. 

Which one of them is progressive or which one of them is regressive, would certainly remain an object of constant debate and is somewhere needed for a vibrant civil society. 

It's just very normal that a piece of art for one can be interpreted as an object of sheer vulgarity by the other. 

For one devouring beef is just a culinary preference, for the other it's an emotive extravaganza at par with murder. 

A democratic and liberal society like India has always lived somewhere in a continuum between these two fringes. 

These two poles have given rise to a vibrant society with innumerable ways of life all cohabiting and adjusting with each other making course corrections on way with law of the land safeguarding the fundamental human liberties. 

One fringe taking over the right to free speech of that of other by any form of intellectual skullduggery or shenanigans just cannot be exercised in perpetuity.

The recent tirade to abuse a tolerant Indian society tethered to its Civilizational virtues of peace & prosperity was somewhere an aberration inspired from fissiparous alien forces. 

This fringe of the fringes need to be thwarted by all means. 

Frivolous Flirting to Fierce Fending :: The Tale of Two Indian Prime Ministers

The fireworks at Wembley somewhere created a historical cusp in the destiny of India. 

While on one hand it marked the 125 years of mortal emergence of Jawahar Lal Nehru, the political aristocrat of suave mannerisms who was chosen to be India's Premier by the Father of the nation at the time of India's Independence from the British; it commemorated the 25 months of anointment of Narendra Damodardas Modi as the Prime Ministerial candidate for the 15th Lok Sabha Elections who led India to a decisive political landscape after a 3 decade of turpitude and confusion.

The contrasting nature in the origins, struggle and eventual deliverance of these two gentlemen couldn't have been more diverse and differentiated, something which the wielding cauldron of Wembley witnessed and would certainly remain a glaring testimony for the ages to come. 

Creating a majestic myth out of a mole was greatly possible in the age old days of Chacha Nehru who got catapulted as a legend despite the momentous blunders he made while ruling India for 18 long years. 

In today's era of multimedia enriched real time mass communications with a perpetual coverage even your momentous gyrations to let go the fart or yawn gets noticed and becomes a point for greater scrutiny. What to talk of closely guarded secrets which could pass on for decades without any reproach. 

Amidst such tribulations, attracting and continuing a whopping fan following has been no less daunting a task for Modi.

While Chacha Nehru got it all on a platter from the comforts of Anand Bhawan to the entry to Inner Temple to the entitlement to hoist the national flag at Red Fort; Modi had to make a long haul from the railway platform of Vadnagar and still has to carry along with the brickbats of his very own seniors. 

While Chacha used to visit London, on every possible pretext to further his frivolous flirting with Edwina Mountbatten; it took the fierce fending of the cause of a Shyamji Krishna Verma to instigate Modi to the shores of Thames twice in 12 years where he got him reinstated to the Bar posthumously though.

While Chacha's eloquence in the imperial language both in letters and diction used to resonate and reverberate every now and then as the stellar standard of intellectual finesse; Modi's Indianized English replete with sincere action, committed delivery and inclusive global vision transformed it all in the British Parliament. 

Despite his absolute subservience to the English Civilizational values & virtues; Chacha couldn't move & woo a Churchill who procrastinated India's independence over technical trifles. 

On the other hand an overtly Indian in Modi, impressed upon a Cameron to become a cheerleader of the Indian cause across frontiers including India's rightful position for a permanent seat in UN Security Council.

India's emergence on the global scene in the last 18 months of Modi rule has been unprecedented by all yardsticks, something which an 18 year stint of Nehru couldn't accomplish even remotely.  

Nehru created a unique tolerance for indulgence ridden incompetence and intellectual discourse which continued the alienated view of India. 

Restraint & penance do define the underlying persona of Modi whose relentless striving creates a

definitive intolerance for sluggishness, mediocrity and compromise.

While Nehru took pride in being called the last British Prime Minister of India;

Modi became the First Indian Prime Minister to have electrified the erstwhile imperial capital of the world with the majestic resplendence of India.  

This Children's Day, it's for us to decide as to who should be the ideal of our kids - the frivolous flirt or the fierce fender of the Indian civilization. 

Prodyut to Prashant :: Paratroopers in Technology Driven Professional Electioneering

Strange and sinister are the ways and means of credit giving and snatching in the political arena. The entire media limelight on Sushasan Babu got stolen overnight towards the campaigner-in-command Prashant Kishor whose peans are now being sung inside and outside, creating national headlines though for brief epochs, projecting him as the emancipator of the brouhaha of Bihar. In an ever-interfacing inter-connected world, globally integrated lobbies wreck havoc on public minds snatching away their very power of original critical thought. 

The boy from Buxar, the erstwhile seat of Sage Vishwamitra and theater of the second most crucial imperial contest for the British, might have championed a branded model of technology driven professional electioneering first under the auspices of CAG and later under the banner of IPAC, doesn't happen to be the first paratrooper into the fray. 

The resplendent reminiscences of the much avowed #IndiaShining campaign at the close of NDA-1, orchestrated by the Late Pramod Mahajan with professional inputs from Sushil Pandit's The Hive, still recapitulates the soaring sores, in the advent of the momentous political debacle. The precept, the design, and the eventual delivery was nonetheless unprecedented and a pioneering attempt from within. 

The fall-out of the so very well tuned in #MajbootNetaNirnayakSarkar campaign, by the Stephenanian and IIMA grad turned political activist in Prodyut Bora, was a greater attempt in professional electioneering with all kinds of technological tom-tomming available at that point in time. 

Prodyut's YPRI (Young Professionals for a Resurgent India) was somewhere a precursor to Prashant's CAG (Citizen's for Accountable Governance). Like the several of 'mind-boggling' Indian Start-Up Innovation driven enterprises & bollywood masala scripts this too was a blemish borrowing from the wielding west which started its romances with campaign based manipulation of public opinion much earlier. 

The turn of the tides of professional electioneering in its third attempt turned the fortunes of Prashant Kishor, largely due to the stellar track record of Narendra Modi and realpolitik grassroots understanding of Amit Shah. 

The debacle in Bihar & Delhi is being seen as the classic outcome of a political gridlock accentuated by the Unified Opposition which is finding it difficult to gain grounds in the advent of the Modi-Shah-Bhagwat-Madhav-Doval-Sahasrabuddhe-Murlidhar-Rajnath-Gadkari-Venkaiah-Jaitley juggernaut. 

The performing core of visionary Good Governance setting in some of the structural & foundational transformations having geo-political ramifications; supported by the disciplined Party Organization consolidating the core vote base and fending for newer equations & allies; galvanized by the Spiritualized Societal Superstructure streamlined & cemented by the Sangh Pariwar has created a greater existential crisis for fissiparous political enterprises whose motto has been invariably "power for power sake". 

It would take the master strategists & organizers to accomplish a breakthrough to squander this political chakravyuha. Sooner, than later, it should be done, putting to service the tactics & tools of the opposing forces themselves.  

Technology driven political messaging, no doubt turned the eyeballs of one and all for its newness, but its role cannot be accorded more importance than that of an item number by a supporting-actress. The central grand narrative was undoubtedly woven & spearheaded by the long haul committed delivery in public service where even a couple of khadi kurtas used to be a luxury to the key proponents.

The high-handedness in creating a larger than life image for such Campaign Managers is again an exercise in sophistry as there is nothing which is ordained from some heavenly revelations. Any such technology driven professional electioneering campaign can be easily curated from first principles of 

• identifying the target stakeholders, clustering and linking them across creating the tactical social graphs with all the concerned parameters in place. 
• converging on a set of narratives around which this stakeholder base has to be engaged with, compiling enough content from multifarious sources with ready research & analytics capabilities to back up an ever increasing knowledge driven space. 
• fine-tuning & integrating a mix of engagement mediums & tactics from digital to physical to what all and what not both covert and overt across levels. 

The real glory and power has to vest with the leaders of the masses who have the capacity to invoke their collective will for a converged action. Originality of thought rooted in the glocalized context integrated duly with the action programmes can only come out of decades of selfless public service, where power is just a means of amplifying the drive. 

The growing aspiration of an ever connected electorate is making this as a standing exercise which is good from a participative governance standpoint as well. 

The risk of dejection and sense of rejection which paratroopers from Prodyut to Prashant face post electoral victories forcing them to jump the ship creating a momentary vacuum, can always be obliterated by creating a party wide in-house corporate function of technology driven professional electioneering. 

The differentiating aspect of technology is easy to get internalized by the ideologically initiated cadre which by its very orientation is not keen to steal the overnight limelight without the tribulations in the fray. 

For record, the Man @ Wembley, spent some 3 odd decades to become an overnight sensation and a global heartthrob.

The professional paratroopers in politics need to understand this amply well.

  

The Entrapment of Indian Civilization :: Deepening of Societal Fault Lines by Well Oiled Global Research Networks

The recently published research work of Akshaya Mukul, a veteran Times of India Journalist, titled "Gitapress and the Making of Hindu India" would pass the test of intellectual rigor with its 1251 references scattered across 293 sources. 

This 430 pager work, undertaken over an year sponsored by New India Foundation funded by Nandan Nilekani, managed by Ram Chandra Guha and inspired by Wendy Doniger - the doyenne of Hindu Studies expert in demonizing the same, by author's own admission is "not to sing paeans of Gitapress".

Pursuing the very spirit of her mentor's footsteps who grew to infamy by authoring a crude, lewd and very rude commentary on Hindus, which had to be pulped down by its publisher; this work fares no better.

Well researched on facts, but intellectually dishonest & haywire on conclusions, the author however does a good job of sufficing his central quest of placing Gitapress within the larger canvas of the much 'haunted' Hindu Nationalism in the colonial as well as post-colonial India. 

The epithets of "A rare treasure trove" by the likes of Arundhati Roys and "A powerful and original work" by Ramchandra Guha, somewhere alerts about the mischievous intent of this colossal work. 

The author couldn't resist his innate affection and reverence to his parents Manorama & Madhusudan, by dedicating this work to them. By his own admittance, he differed on the ideological plane with his father who originally seeded the idea for a book on Gitapress, unraveling its success mantra. He however seem to have pursued the ideological framework of Mr. Nilekani, whose IT dollars funded this research work and who too had had his curiosity on the economics of Gitapress in due furtherance of his personal quest of Re-Imagining India & Rebooting India.

What's noteworthy about this work is the sheer exposition of a global inter-connected network of scholars & academics treading a particular line of thought which is averse to the ideal & reality of India. 

It's interesting to note that Malavika Kasturi and Kajri Jain of University of Toronto have much say and influence in the affairs concerning Gitapress. 

The deeper academic interest of Shahid Amin & Ulrike Stark in Gitapress is quite illumining.

A Siddharth Varadarajan provides access to The Hindu Archives and a Mushirul Hasan gives a cue on the politics around cow to the author. The novelist & writer Ajaz Ashraf patronizes & prods the author and Jyotirmaya Sharma of University of Hyderabad fine-tuning the key arguments. A Nandini Sundar adds on to the narrative around Hindu Nationalist Fascination around adivasis.

A Monika Freier comes mid-way in the research, who leads the author to Paul Arney who happens to be the first scholar to work on Gita Press. A Medha M. Kudaisya of NUS Singapore, opened up the sources on the world of Kolkata Marwaris.

Such a multi-layered academic interest around the central protagonist of Gitapress, would have existed, is a cause of celebration as well as concern equally as the author investigates Gitapress from a perspective of Commissioner's Record Room; CID Records and UP State Archives as well. 

This gets all the more intriguing as by author's very own factual admission Gitapress parallels its success with the Bible Society.

It would take a while to undergo a detailed semantic analysis of this 1.3 lakh word long treatise to unravel its ideological universe. Guha's erudite cutting of 60,000 odd words would make this task a bit simpler. 

However, the titles of the chapters suggest it all. From starting with the title of "A Twentieth-Century Hindu Missionary and His Mentor", the author unravels "The World of Gita Press", enumerating its Local, National, Transnational Contributors.

After laying the content foundation with elaborate facts and figures, he starts converging his work by invoking the well established labeling strategy, terming Gita Press as "Foot Soldier of the Sangh Parivar". The theme then hovers through the narrative of "Religion as Politics, Politics of Religion" and conclude by challenging "The Moral Universe of Gitapress".

The contextual universe of these Well Oiled Research Networks is somewhere limited to the twin tactics of baiting & denigrating a tolerant and all absorbing & assimilating Indian Civilization. What better than entrapping & attacking some of its foundational & prominent institutions masquerading geo-political agenda as academic research.

These academic Sleeper cells create the baseline breeding ground for the unleashing of intellectual terrorism, of whose power & potential we have witnessed on the domestic political turf.

While, the Dalmatian Bella of Mr. Mukul would have been continuing his loyalty to his master, he couldn't resist his temptation to elude the New India Foundation fellowship, to unleash an intellectual treachery with his own parents and motherland. Such is the nature and character of modern day progressive liberality which just perpetrates self-indulgent hollow intellectualism to further deepen the societal fault-lines.     

The Reckoning of Bihar

Much before the electoral outcomes of Bihar all those forces which are oblique & oblivious to the Indian view had regrouped & regalvanized converging their energies to create a well coordinated multi-layered attack on the emergent developmental narrative of India. 

They used every arsenal in their ammunition deck to unleash and widen up the very fault lines of Indian society so very resplendent and deeply entrenched into the societal canvass of Bihar. 

Small stray incidents were carefully chosen and blown out of proportion and converted into a rallying war cry to capsize the attention of one and all. The contesting emotive narrative of 'intolerance' became the dominant one and overturned the 'developmental' doctrine, which gets more intellectual to internalise.

The wide range of tactics deployed to amplify and sustain this 'intolerance' ripple can be an emphatic case study for academics & journalists of various hues but would somewhere have a deeper reckoning to the strategists defining the direction and furtherance of the BJP empire.

The strategic triad of Development, Governance and consequent Electoral Politics somewhere took the predominant seat within the rank and file of party thinkers and organizers making them grossly oblivious to the sordid state of affairs prevalent. 

The narrative of development can give a chuckle to the electorate for a while, but to be a persistent part of this long painstaking process the comfort zones of many are to be abrogated, which have its  own side-effects.

The bonds created out of electoral politics are quite shallow and are based on a kind of a short term revocable contract. I would give you my franchise, you shall provide me back with my sheer comforts whatsoever I have got used to. I am not bothered as to how you should accomplish it. I don't care what all legacy challenges you face and I won't appreciate your efforts and the grandiose  of your vision. I am driven by my impulses and not the intricacies of your intellectual inadequacies. You can't appeal to my sense of fulfilment beyond a point. I am a mere self-centred indulgent consumer of political services, you have to satiate me by all means or else I would  sabotage and scuttle even the most profound of work in progress. 

Transformational Developmental Governance has thereby to be consoldiated and integrated into the deeper civilizational values and virtues heralded, defended and showcased by  intellectual leaders in the social, spiritual and academic confines.

Somewhere, this parallel element of societal organisation based on conventional civilizational ethos duly defended and championed by a vigilant, well networked and action oriented intelligentsia deeply anchored & nurtured by social & academic institutions has been missed out to a great extent. 

The decoupling of the political narrative from that of the civilizational one has somewhere dented the political prospects which is being over exemplified all over again continuing the vicious trap.

The ideal of 'Organization for Organization' sake can go on in the societal space for perpetuity. But in order to capsize the damsel of power persistently for a longer haul, a much wider construct would be warranted for suiting to the most modern, sophisticated and subtle tactics of psychological warfare. 

A cogent community of dispassionate thinkers and activists armed and endowed sufficiently to carry forward the civilizational narrative of India would have to be created.

They would defend the civilizational values & virtues on the intellectual plane from a positive & progressive standpoint. They would have the audacity to accept the dents & aberrations into the fabric and the capacity to extoll the reasoning behind. 

This community would also undertake the decimation of intellectual sophistry aimed at disarming the indigenous precept by laying various false traps such as the one woven through the triad of 'municipal meat ban'; 'stray beef violence'; and 'awardwapasi'.

The objective discourse on the innate intrinsic ethos of Indian civilizational virtues would be the third and most important element of this rejiging effort which would inspire and instigate a wide variety of advancements and integrations across. 

It would be difficult to continue the politics of development without the outer layers of subtle but significant civilizational discourse unfurling in action. 

The wolves have been terming the cows as intolerant, disarming even their little leftover natural resistance. If they are not contained by erecting the outer security wall of herbivore elephants whose trumpeting can scare them out, the lone tigers would find it difficult to prevent the slaughter.