There is a simple way to measure the distance India has travelled in the last decade: listen to the prime minister’s Independence Day speeches. Things have changed; it is undeniable. But what has also changed is the very nature of what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has to talk about.
In the early years of the Modi government, the speeches were often about problems that we may today consider as ordinary: toilets, electricity, poverty, roads, bank accounts, fertiliser shortages. But the prime minister’s tone was urgent when he addressed them. The challenge was to fix what was broken, reach those who had been left out. Perhaps that is also why the length and sweep of his Independence Day addresses have become a phenomenon in themselves. For a prime minister whose working life is famously relentless, the sheer time devoted to presenting the nation’s journey from the Red Fort is telling. These are not simply annual speeches; read together, they become something closer to a running record of the country’s transformation. PM Modi asked, “If the people of India could remove such a big empire without the power of the government, without weapons and even without resources, then friends, it is the need of the hour to eradicate poverty, can we not overcome poverty? Can we not defeat poverty? Startup India, the prime minister’s flagship initiative that redefined how young India viewed the future, is a perfect example.
In 2014, poverty was presented as a national challenge requiring a national resolve. Seven years later, in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, he said, “The way India has kept the stoves burning in the poor households by providing free food grains to 80 crore countrymen continuously for months during the pandemic is not only astonishing to the world but also a matter of discussion. In 2015, it was a resolve.
“I have to provide strength to startups and, therefore, I resolve that in the coming days ‘Startup India’ and ‘Stand-up India’ will be there.”
Through reform, perform, transform, I have turned this promise into belief. The next five years will be the years of unprecedented development. It will be impossible to analyse every change, but using the Independence Day speeches as a lens, let’s look backwards before looking forward.
And there is no better starting point than the promise PM Modi made in 2023. He said, in part, “When I came in 2014, I came with a promise of change. Based on my performance, you blessed me once again in 2019.
If “unprecedented development” was the promise, the Independence Day speeches provide an unusually revealing way of asking: what happened to the problems that once occupied the prime minister’s attention?
