Modi’s I-Day speech wasn’t his oratorical best, but high on electoral rhetoric

Unlike his previous I-Day speeches which saw him marshalling the best of his oratorical skills to harp about his government’s achievements and vision for the future, the prime minister stuttered and stammered through the first hour of his over 90-minute address as he patted himself on the back for setting India on the path of becoming a developed nation by 2047 – the 100^th year of her Independence.

Taking the Manipur cue to reach out to women

With the BJP’s government at the Centre and in Manipur coming under massive criticism for the ongoing ethnic violence and unspeakable atrocities on women in the north-eastern state, Modi ensured that his I-Day address had a major push for women empowerment.

Scorched by a united Opposition during the recently-concluded Monsoon Session of Parliament for his apathetic silence on the attacks on women in Manipur, Modi made it a point to speak on Manipur within the first 15 minutes of his speech, asserting not just that the country stands in solidarity with the Manipuri people but also that the state is gradually returning to normalcy. That latter half of his speech too was peppered with an ambiguous outreach to the country’s women electorate that the BJP has assiduously tried to woo. The prime minister announced that his government would soon rollout a scheme, with the cooperation of women Self Help Groups, to create “two crore Lakhpati Didis” across Indian villages and that women SHGs would also be integrated with the country’s agriculture sector and provided “loans and training for operating and repairing drones”.

The push for women empowerment aside, there was, however, no other big ticket announcement by Modi; a major departure from his previous nine I-Day speeches, which he used for making grand policy and programme announcements the nuances of which would only later be finalised and unveiled by the ministers concerned. This, though, is not to say that the prime minister’s I-Day speech was totally devoid of pointers to the policy (and political) paradigms that he was working on.

Vishwakarma narrative

With the next general elections just 10 months away and the Opposition raising its pitch for a caste-based census to win favour with the scheduled and backward castes, Modi revived the push for empowering Vishwakarmas – an amorphous umbrella grouping that is meant to include the numerous backward and Dalit castes who are identified by the occupations they have historically been engaged in – by promising a nearly ₹15,000-crore scheme meant for their benefit.

It was in Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s 2023 Union Budget that the PM Vishwakarma Kaushal Samman Yojana (PM-VIKAS) was first announced indicating that after adding laabharthis (beneficiaries of central government schemes) to its electoral lexicon, the BJP would now focus on building yet another nebulous but formidable vote bank – that of the Vishwakarmas. However, following Sitharaman’s budget address, there had been no concerted rhetorical push by the BJP to hype up the Vishwakarma narrative – until now.

The final 30-minutes of his speech was when Modi, the perpetually election-driven BJP mascot, was more at ease with the incoherent and weary tenor of the preceding 60 minutes of his address giving way to an ear-splitting blitzkrieg of invectives at his political rivals who have coalesced as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) to stop the BJP juggernaut in next year’s crucial Lok Sabha polls.

Blitzkrieg against Opposition

Having laid out his achievements of the past nine years and his vision for the future – replete with repetitions of making India the world’s third largest economy, expanding the growing middle class further, reducing poverty, etc. – earlier in his speech, Modi pretty much sought a fresh mandate from the ramparts of the Red Fort by asserting that if the country wished to continue on the path set by his government it had to join his resolve for fighting the “three evils of bhrashtachaar, parivarvaad aur tushtikaran ki rajneeti” (corruption, dynasty and appeasement politics).

The tropes of corruption, dynasty politics and appeasement have been routinely invoked by Modi and the BJP to decry their political rivals and so the prime minister did not need to name any party in particular.

Stating that “dynastic politics had gripped the country and snatched away the rights of the people” for seven decades since India’s independence, Modi demanded that the people reject parivarvaad while attacking his political rivals for indulging in appeasement politics “which destroyed everything” in the country.

With the Opposition’s push for caste-based census threatening to put a spanner in the wheels of the BJP’s efforts to consolidate its base among the socially and historically oppressed and backward communities, Modi also pitted appeasement as an antithesis to social justice. “This thinking and politics of appeasement, using government schemes for appeasement, has killed social justice... appeasement and corruption are the biggest enemies of development,” Modi said, while adding, “dynastic political parties are of the family, by the family and for the family and this kills talent.” He declared that “it is imperative that democracy gets rid of these evils”.

Electorate gets an upgrade: from ‘mitron’ to ‘parivaarjan’

What also stood out about the prime minister’s I-Day speech, alongside his bombastic prophecy of returning to power for a third consecutive term “to address you all from the Red Fort next year”, was Modi’s conscious, though repeatedly sputtering reference to the people as his “parivaarjan” (family members). The appellation marked the third change in the past decade in Modi’s attempt to emphasise his proximity to the Indian people. If in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls and its immediate aftermath, he had sought to befriend Indians by addressing them as “mitron” (friends), the subsequent years had seen Modi adopt the more familiar “bhaiyon aur behenon” (brothers and sisters).

Modi qualified this shift in his association with the electorate with his characteristic flair of invoking his humble roots that set him apart from his principal rivals – the Gandhis, the dethroned royalty of Indian politics – or even those who now helm a majority of Opposition outfits. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, Lalu Yadav’s unambiguous heir-apparent in the RJD, Tejashwi Yadav or DMK chief MK Stalin, may all be sons of leaders who, like the prime minister, did not owe their political rise to pedigree but these heirs owed their station to dynasty and privilege. As such, Modi used the I-Day speech to set himself apart, though not for the first time, as an ordinary Indian, asserting that “I came from among you (the common Indian electorate), I live only for you, I dream of you, I sweat for you and I can’t see your dreams shattered”.

Modi’s 10^th I-Day speech may not have been high on specific deliverables or grand announcements nor can it be ranked as an oratorical triumph. Yet, with a 10-month calendar ahead that’s packed with high stakes poll battles in nearly half a dozen states, leading up to the big battle for Raisina Hill, it did not disappoint on the score of electoral rhetoric.