Rama Krishna Sangem
Three factors – US President Trump’s tariffs, Pakistan triggered Operation Sindoor and Chinese Galwan threats – have influenced or shaped this year’s Independence Day speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He spent about 103 minutes, longest ever by a PM from the ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi, but it was not boring or meaningless either. It has to be that long to cover a range of topics that he covered in his speech, that is 12th as a PM to him.
It is not that Modi’s entire speech is provoked by these three factors. There are other issues too, but broadly three things played a role in shaping his speech. Normally, Independence Day speeches, right from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi any may other PMs, reflected their loud thinking and a sort of reminders of how we got our Independence on August 15, 1947 from Britishers and the challenges ahead us to move forward.
Even Modi’s previous 11 speeches too, to a large extent, ran in the direction. But this year’s speech is qualitatively and quantitatively different. His tone and tenor underlined some urgency, some anxiety. Anxiety that his own government machinery is not catching up with his ideas. To put it in one sentence, he is not all that happy with his bureaucracy’s speed – to translate his policies into reality. That’s the reason he chose Red Fort to announce milestones for his ambitious agenda to make India a developed nation by 2047, just 22 years from now.
The three factors of influence
Now I will discuss the three factors that prompted or influenced his speech. First factor is our armed forces clash with those of China at Galwan in June 2020, in which lost close to 20 lives and some territorial ground too. That incident not just hurt entire country’s pride, but also strained our relations with China. India has realized how deep is its dependence on China for each and every of our essentials, leave alone critical components like rare earths etch.
This prompted PM Modi to announce a Made in India semiconductor chips project in his I-Day speech. Second is Pakistan linked terror attack at Pahalgam in April and subsequent Operation Sindoor, a brief four day war with that country. This armed conflict opened our eyes to the need to have our defence self-reliance. PM Modi’s Sudarshan Chakra, missile defence network is the direct response to the threat of Pakistan’s nuclear threat.
Finally, Trump’s tariffs which kept India on tenterhooks for almost eight months. We have seen how shattered trade and commerce sections of India in the wake of Trump’s tariff impositions – first 10 per cent, next 25 and later 50 per cent on our exports. Trump still threatens to impose more secondary tariffs on India for buying Russian oil. This has prompted Modi to launch a deep sea exploration project, titled as Samudra Manthan, for extracting oil and gas within our country’s territorial waters.
Other elements like mission to check demographic changes in border areas and developing India into a 10 trillion US dollar economy by 2047 too are part of the challenges we have faced in the five years or more. As a saying goes, our enemies are best educators more than our friends. In a way, China, Pakistan and Trump have opened India’s eyes to realise the need to ensure our self-reliance, from defence to semiconductors to energy needs. Exactly this is what PM Modi has outlined in his Independence Day speech on Friday.
