NaMo and the NRI

NaMo and the NRI

Sagarika Ghose in a blog in the Times of India recalls the loudly cheering NRI crowds applauding the first Indian leader who seemed to understand why they walked away from the motherland and who seemed to empathise with them, applying a soothing salve on the perpetual guilt that sits on them for their migration. “... the NRI feels understood by Modi” she says.

Namo has dug into the readily aroused long distance nationalism of a community that has often felt insecure and increasingly with the incipient racism that has been recently raising its head in America, witness the recent riots in Baltimore.  Not to be left behind the liberal western democracies of France and Germany in Europe find such seeds germinating amongst them and scattered incidents in distant Australia point to the wide spread of the malaise. Ultra nationalist parties have been emerging in all these countries.

The NRI’s definition of identity in ethnicity and in religion finds a thunderous resonance to NaMo’s glib exhortations to Make in India and to the Bharat Mata ki Jai slogans.  They must lend their skills and lend from their not inconsiderable vaults to build the New India that they have dreamily imagined, an India that mirrors the societies they live in.  Free enterprise, an open society free of government fetters, no wasteful public spending a Swachha Bharat with successful gated communities and the unsightly poverty duly camouflaged or remanded into ghettoes.  A populace that might be lured into a permanent reversal of their earlier migration. 

NaMo has followed the growing ranks of Godmen who so cleverly play upon the NRI’s spiritual loneliness to reap enormous dividends.  The trail usually leads to the countries which have sizeable NRI populations ready to support a good cause in the interests of spreading the religiosity that has slowly slipped out of their ken.  The foot print of these Gurus in the Gulf and middle east countries with large Indian working class populations is considerably less and their harvest in them correspondingly low. Namo has yet to visit these countries and play his tune in them; he knows the response may not be as favourable.