What is different about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest visit to the United States of America? It is immaculate grace, friendliness, and rootedness personified.
As someone born in a democratic, free, and plural Bharat 45 years ago, it is the first time I see a leader of an erstwhile third-world nation like ours, with a change in economic and geopolitical reality, take his place on the world stage with a vision for the future through hard-earned respect and goodwill.
Why do every word and gesture of Modi resonate with most Indians in India and across the world? It is because every word and act of his dignifies us. We, as people, zealously propagate our attire, our food, our heritage, our quirks, our jokes, and our way of delivering words in English or our individual mother tongues, and he does too.
Indians today want to be respected, with honor for the way they are. We want to be accepted, respected, loved, and cherished for who we are, not just by our families but by the entire world. But we won’t beg or cry for it. We expect, and rightly so, not to be seen through a messiah colonizer’s lens. We want to easily become part of world culture, the way French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese are, without Anglican hegemonic othering.
A common Indian wants to lead an abundant, progressive, healthy, and joyous life without harming the environment, humans, or wasting time thinking about and hating those determined to finish off our nature-friendly Indic way of life.
It is not a coincidence that Indians have mastered the art of being alive for 10,000 years, despite tremendous odds of time against them. From the bloody Partition till today, we have been continuously wounded by foreign powers, leading to the breaking of our original Akhand Bharat.
But today, I want to celebrate my country, my people, and my Prime Minister. Today we are telling the world firmly that we are not going to seek vengeance for all you did to us in the garb of civilizing us.
Like the Arabs, we will not fight crusades against you, but we will definitely, in all our power, resolutely push each day to make Bharat strong, defend our geography, shelter our people, guard our natural resources, and keep our minds and hearts unbrainwashed.
Of course, the world is still full of unconscious beings, but the trajectory we have decided to take is not to emulate imperialism and expansionism.
PM Modi, as our spokesperson, has chosen a higher ground, GENEROSITY. He reiterated his G-20 slogan of “One Earth, One Family, One Future” in the US Congress. We are ready for global partnerships in every sector with mutual benefit.
As the Prime Minister mentioned on International Yoga Day at UN headquarters in New York, we have not patented YOG because we believe in compassion and world health. Indians agree that it is a gift from us to all humans on the planet. It is a heritage we inherited from our Brahminical (pun intended) Rishis due to our birth in our sacred land, and we want the whole world to benefit from it.
India’s democracy is the oldest and most peculiar because we do not believe in one way to reach the highest form of self-realization or optimum growth. We have practiced letting every individual seeker and sect flourish on their own path.
It is obvious that we, as a self-ruling civilization, even at the most nuclear level of a small village, do not believe in the idea of dictatorship or forcing our ways of life on other nations. Diverse arguments and debates are in our genes and are a forceful part of our societal upbringing.
Not long ago, the generation of our parents and grandparents saw extreme destitution and poverty. For every small basic amenity, we had to stand in a queue and fight with each other for survival.
Our colonizers had left us deprived and in chronic penury. So, it became part of our social learning to save every coin, recycle, bargain, and do the best possible for our family and country.
It is this resilience and grit to not give up in the face of death that has made us flourish today, becoming the fifth-biggest economy in the world in just 75 years of our rebirth. I want to celebrate that.
India, that is Bharat, is one of the best countries to live in. I do not worship any leader because, after all, a leader is human. We know today that even Mahatma Gandhi was a deeply flawed human being.
But, I do want to celebrate the leader of Bharat, Narendra Modi, today, when he presents us Indians with love, respect, and inherent dignity on the world stage, when he speaks his second mother tongue, Hindi, with fluent charm, when he goes all out to shake hands with all US congressmen, even though he knows that in the last 75 years, many of them have sided with Pakistan, which wants us to bleed to death.
We, as people, do not naturally cry victim; it is not in our cultural memory. Encyclopedias can be written about our intergenerational scars and trauma.
After going through cataclysmic dehumanization, looting, killing, and creating famines by invaders and Europeans in the past, we have never asked them officially to pay for their beastly behavior.
We have grown up on stories of Shiva, who drank poison for life to survive, but we are also now determined to take on the aggression of self-proclaimed superiority. What we seek now is self-sufficiency, from farms to Artificial Intelligence.
While our PM, who represented all of us at the White House, was talking about gracious hosts, Joe and Jill Biden, and thanking them for their warm hospitality, Barack Obama, the former President of the US, discreetly threatened PM Modi in an interview about India being partitioned again because we are not treating our minorities well and equated us with autocratic China.
Obama at that moment not only lowered his stature, but it has become amply clear he has neither understood India nor Indians, despite the warm welcome we gave him when he visited us last time. He casually spoke plain lies to spark unrest. It seems it will take him a few births to understand the magnanimity and depth of Bharat.
As his wife, Michelle Obama, famously said, “When they go low, we go high.” That is exactly, and more, what statesman PM Modi did in his incredibly successful trip to the USA when he said at the White House Press Conference: “Democracy is in our DNA, our spirit, and our constitution… So, no question of discrimination on the grounds of caste, creed, or religion arises.”
Indians today are overwhelmingly aware of Shatrubodh (awareness about the enemy). They are hyper-aware of the challenges they face inside and outside the country. They are not willing to lose the narrative or any other kind of war if thrust into it, as PM Modi asserted in the US Congress, for a better future for our children, “We must revive multilateralism and reform multilateral institutions with better resources and representation that applies to all our global institutions of governance, especially the UN.”
Well, in all sincerity, I do not know whether our Pradhan Sewak will be successful in turning the wheel of geopolitics in favor of peace on the planet or whether India will win this dualistic illusionary game in the years to come, but I am glad I lived to see the day when he earnestly tried.
Chetna Kaul is a filmmaker and a political and social commentator.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.