Topping the spoils are such umpteen grumbles as — the municipality doesn’t work, or we pay taxes so we can dump the waste water or the sludges on the locality roads, and it’s the sweepers’ job to clean these, etc.

Common sense is most uncommon among the residents of such mindset. The locality roads are public premises, nobody has the right to pollute them. Prime Minister’s clarion call for a Swachh Bharat aims to draw this common sense of responsibility. In fact, in the fundamental teachings of Quality Science, this sense of cleanliness comprises the first lesson in healthcare. What the Prime Minister espoused in his Independence Day call, is indeed what ancient India preached through Arthashastra.

An online Community Outreach Local Circle started by the BJP under the stewardship of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with its about 2,00,000 membership has short listed residents’ advises for various ministries, including that for the Urban Development. It asked for online people’s suggestions. Only a few advised penalties for polluting community roads, if not a punishment. Maybe most of them considered the issue too trivial to think upon.

This makes the job of understanding national issues in healthcare all the more difficult for people, including the Political Scientists.

Most senior political scientists, who have been theorising on big issues of the country for over sixty years, today are spell-bound about how to position Narendra Modi in the history of Modern Indian Political Thought.

It has created a difficult riddle. That a national mass leader, risen from utmost humble background, has emerged as a development force in the world’s largest democracy—is both a pleasant fact and a formidable riddle.

The riddle is: how to posit him into an agreeable theory of political science of post-modern Indian thoughts? After all, Indians deserve development and it is long overdue now. Talking about it is no big deal, the political scientists argue?

Yet, the spontaneous response to Narendra Modi achieved in the length and the breadth of the country during this short spell of time since his taking office is bewildering. It is beyond numerical equations of media pundits too.

A noteworthy point is: the notion of mass leadership seems to have suddenly changed. Historically mass leadership is associated with the ones of revolution or uprisings by the distraught and disadvantaged India against the ruling classes or some foreign powers. Now it is one by the rulers and workers ganged up together.

India has seen pre-independent violent uprisings since 1857’s Sepoy Mutiny. The strategic-diplomatic mass awareness and movements against British rule were led by leaders like Subhash Chandra Bose, Bal Gandhar Tilak, and Gandhiji (Salt, Satyagraha, and Quit India). After about four decades, in the second mid-decade of 21st century, India has again in the throes of a clarion call, to which the nation responds for “Development” and a “Swachh Bharat” for spontaneity.

The national uprising today is novel, and in support of a governance – the power of the day. The idea of reforms, which emerged in post Cold-War India through the ‘Look East Policy’ of the Narasimha Rao’s government, but which was halted off and on due to inept socio-economic and political decisions during the span of 2000 to 2014, has once again touched the heart of the teeming millions.

It may be too early for us to reach a conclusion, in just over the seven-month period since the new NDA government took over. Not much corrections can be made of the colossal national infirmities in such a short spell of governance. Yet the tenor and tone of the Modi government speak volumes about the mood of the nation. (IPA Service)