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20 Jul, 2016

The PM and the politics of questioning – The Hindu

Recently, there were two interesting developments. First, as the second anniversary celebrations of the BJP-led NDA government began, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the “most hardworking PM ever in Indian history”. The reason was that Mr. Modi delivered a speech every 45.6 hours in two years. And second, this summer, the Mr. Modi gave his first full-fledged television interview in two years.

There is a bewildering irony here: the Prime Minister who has given the most number of speeches in the first two years has taken the least number of questions from the people. There is a chasm between Mr. Modi’s frequency of speeches as well as communicating through 140 characters, and the refusal to converse with, and be interrogated by, the people. This irony of monologue is a defining feature of the current regime. How do we get our elected leaders, especially the head of the government, to take and answer questions from the people is a question that must animate us.

Read the rest: The PM and the politics of questioning – The Hindu