Sacralising—and smirching—the tricolour

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Editor's note: When the United States sneezes, it used to be said, the world catches a cold. In the past eight years, Indians have been exposed to a homegrown variant of that international truism: When Narendra Modi has a brainwave, countless native lives and livelihoods are washed away. In 2021, just over five years after abolishing the Five-Year Plans, Modi announced a 25-year programme to make India great. If demonetization was, in M. Venkaiah Naidu’s disturbingly unselfconscious phrase, India’s own “Cultural Revolution”, Amrit Kaal must qualify as our own Great Leap Forward. In the next quarter century, Modi wants India to scale “new heights of prosperity”—to undo the damage inflicted during centuries of “slavery”. There is nothing objectionable about this aspiration to become affluent, even if its basis is a sense of shame emanating from a self-wounding fixation with the past. What ought to worry us profoundly, however, is the man behind the idea. For Modi’s conception of success is not concerned so much with the substance of success as the feeling of being successful. Consider some concrete examples: government ministers routinely …