North versus the rest

Is Jayanthi Natarajan a victim of Rahul Gandhi's 'shift' from being pro-poor to pro-industry?

Like everyone else, I am as in thrall of breaking news as I am of the subtext, or what exists between the lines. This Friday afternoon as I watch the airwaves go into a tizzy over Jayanthi Natarajan with Twitter trending with #JayanthiNatarajan and #RevoltAgainstRahul, the other thorny issues that emerge are i) blimey! our worst fears about Gandhi imperiousness and Congress worker sublimation have been confirmed; ii) there's a much more strategic game being orchestrated through Ms Natarajan in the run-up to the elections than is apparent now; and this is the most worrying prick: when did the pejorative meanings of words like 'NGO' and 'development project' get exchanged?

Because let's face it, when TV anchors cued by the Bharatiya Janata Party say that "development projects were stalled on the prompting of NGOs", it is an indication of the distance we have travelled from the Left to the Right in the national discourse that this could very well be another stick to beat the Congress with.

And that is because from a time when the word 'businessman' was used pejoratively and depicted in Bollywood films and in popular imagination to mean a blood-sucking, hard-hearted mercenary and those behind NGOs were altruistic noble souls, we are now at a juncture when almost the opposite is being successfully suggested.

Seen in ideological terms, this gradual creeping to right-wing, pro-industry, conservative leanings could be the effect of various causes - the natural swing of the ideological pendulum, global trends, the graying of a nation or any other phenomena that one cares to enlist.

I choose to see it as an expected detour in that constant and silently conducted argument between the North and the rest of India that determines so much of what transpires in our country.

For me, the North, with its outward and westward gaze and the romance of its foreign invasions and the resulting intermingling, was always given to a bias for the humanities, to matters of literature, science, philosophy and other fuzzy things like altruism and the common good. Jawaharlal Nehru was a prime example of a North Indian leader.

The Rest of India, on the other hand, or that which lay below the North, with its inward gaze and its ideology of practicality and materialism, champions the more empirical ,realistic and thus business-like approach.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a prime example of such a being. That he is being cheered like a rockstar at public events means he is being seen as a world leader on the international stage. That he is a hero to so many in India is perhaps only the result of the tables being turned, in the North-Rest of India dialogue, so to speak.

This might not only explain why the pejorative meaning of words like businessman and NGO (or activist or trade unionist) could change, but also more significant things like India's territorial and global shifts in bias.

From a so-called non-aligned nation with nanny status given to Russia to becoming one with a big cool friend in Washington, from a perceived dove to a vigilante hawk on Pakistan, from a government of crony capitalists to one that is so unapologetically pro-business and industry, and from a nation that wore its secularism as a fig leaf, we have come a long way indeed

To think that the unacknowledged arm-wrestling between the two halves of India can result in such a paradigm shift - one that impacts thought, outlook, policy, economics and culture, not to forget words like NGO and development project - is pretty awesome.

Now to get back to Ms Natarajan and the "Congress revolt".

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasmumbai@gmail.com