Indian Express
“ One of your pet hatreds? ! 😃”, asked a good friend of mine this morning as she forwarded me the above long-winded political harangue of Bhanu Pratap Mehta (BPM) published in this morning’s New Indian Express .
My reply to her was this below :
I do not hate BP Mehta … I pity him … since he knows not that he is himself afflicted by an elitist malaise best described in his very own words: “An aestheticisation of politics that is trapping India’s elites in a land of unreality…”
BP Mehta writes his dense, inelegant columns as though he were the appointed chief drummer-boy of India’s Mahagutbandhan of motley opposition parties …. which BTW appears increasingly to me at least as days go by like some headless chicken prancing about in the belief that prancing about by itself will somehow produce Mehta’s dreams of a viable political alternative .
BPM doesn’t seem to understand that the refrain “there is no alternative” to Modi doesn’t relate to Modi the personality per se… It is a merely a statement of stark fact that there is really no alternative national vision, no credible alternative program or agenda that the rest of the opposition combine has been able so far to bring to the table for ordinary citizens like you and me to assess and to weigh whether it can and could replace the BJP’s own.
“There is no alternative” does not mean there is no alternative to present leadership. It really means there is no convincing articulation of an alternative plan for the nation that people can feel is bankable.
Spewing anti-Modi rhetoric from journalistic rooftops every other day is not an alternate vision.
Raving and ranting daily about perceived “communal poison and authoritarian repression” is not alternative vision.
Whining like an old hysterical woman, on and on and on about “The prime minister is sowing the seeds of division, protecting poisonous speech, the coarsening of civil society and unleashing the furies of hate…” is not an alternative vision.
Mr BP Mehta , please find a way to climb down from your ivory tower perch in the “land of unreality” created by thine own aesthetic hands. If you don’t, I am afraid, the New Indian Express might well look around for another Op-Ed writer in due course of time as an alternative for you.
Regards,
Sudarshan Madabushi