Indians were ashamed of being born in the country till a year ago

Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s remarks in China and South Korea about Indians being ashamed of being born in the country before his government came to power triggered one of Twitter’s top trends, the hashtag #ModiInsultsIndia, on Tuesday.

“Earlier, you felt ashamed of being born Indian,” Modi was quoted by The Hindu as saying during an interaction with the Indian community in Shanghai on Saturday. “Now you feel proud to represent the country. Indians abroad had all hoped for a change in government last year.”

Modi echoed the same idea when he addressed a gathering of Indians in Seoul on Monday. “There was a time when people used to say we don’t know what sins we committed in our past life that we were born in Hindustan. Is this any country, is this any government…we will leave,” he said, speaking in Hindi.

“The Prime Minister, true to his style of dividing the history of India into ‘before-me’ and ‘after-me’ in the manner of messiahs, was trying to draw a distinction between the country he inherited and the one he ‘rebuilt’ in the past 12 months.”

To further underscore the messianic complex, he sounds like a sort of Moses to the diaspora about to lead them back to the Promised Land or rather the Land Living up to its Promise. The people who wanted to leave, Modi says, are now ready to return to India.

India’s history is too vast and too complex to be turned into BM and AM – Before Modi and After Modi.

RBI governor Raghuram Rajan pretty much conceded that when he said that the expectations from the new government were “probably unrealistic” and it was “probably not appropriate” to think of Modi as “Ronald Reagan on a white horse” coming to slay anti-market forces.

But the Prime Minister’s comments in Seoul revealed more hubris than humility as if he saw himself not just as that knight on a white horse but as a knight who had already brought achhey din to India. The PM sounded as if he had swallowed his followers’ hype of Modi-did-it-first and Modi-did-it-best.

The first Indian prime minister to go to Mongolia. The first Indian prime minister to visit Nagaland in 10 years. The first Indian prime minister to make a bilateral trip to Nepal in 17 years. In a country that loves its first-class firsts, Modi is Numero Uno in spades.

Modi claimed he was the first Indian prime minister to make a bilateral visit to Canada in 42 years. The Congress pointed out Manmohan Singh went there in 2010 at Stephen Harper’s invitation. Then the MEA clarified it was the “first stand along bilateral visit since 1973” which sounds a lot less historic.

India is bigger than Modi and India is bigger than UPA. He is a product of India just as Rahul Gandhi is a product of India. Both are made possible by India and that is the wonder of the country. It is routine for Modi bhakts to dismiss the Nehru-Gandhi years as lost years but India did not become great just because it elected Narendra Modi. That is the most misguided version of self-centred nationalism where the sevak is consumed by his saviour complex.