These are times when the distinctions between the government and the party, politics and religion, propriety and impropriety, and even law and lawlessness are disappearing. When roles are mixed up and interchanged, the accepted norms for the functioning of a democracy come under pressure. That undermines the system that is built or at least sought to be built on the basis of propriety, fairness, equal rights and opportunities for all and adherence to the rules of the game. In such a scheme, the government is different from the party that forms it and the Prime Minister is different from the politician who assumes that office. Politics is to be practised on its own terms and should not stray into other areas of life, and the boundaries for the conduct set by the law and best practices and conventions should not be breached. But transgressions have become the norm in all these areas and those who hold the highest offices in the country appear as transgressors.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been on an inauguration spree, unveiling projects for the last few weeks in Uttar Pradesh, where Assembly elections are due but are still a good two-three months away. He used an IAF aircraft to land on a newly built highway and went on to make an election campaign speech; he laid the foundation stone for an airport that will take all of 40 years to complete and went on to make a political speech; he inaugurated the Kashi Vishwanath corridor and used the event to showcase his Hindutva politics. These are all national projects on which the taxpayers’ money is spent. It is wrong to appropriate them and present them as gifts from the ruling party, the Prime Minister or the Chief Minister, to the people. The Prime Minister should not reduce himself to a salesman of public goodies, trying to maximise profit from them. It is true that others, including Chief Ministers and ministers of other parties, too, do that, but shouldn’t the conduct of the person occupying the highest person be held against the highest standards?
Other causalities of the Prime Minister’s desperate determination to win the UP election at any cost have been the distinction between politics and religion and the separation of public conduct from personal faith. It is highly inappropriate for the Prime Minister to wear his faith on his sleeve and use it for political commerce. He is the Prime Minister of a country where there are practitioners of all religions and it is wrong to make an ostentatious public display of his religion. The images of the Prime Minister performing rituals in Ayodhya or at the Kashi Vishwanath temple appear as disquieting questions to the nation. Some vital lines are blurred when the Prime Minister becomes a priest, even in a state where a priest is the Chief Minister.