From Kartavya Path, PM Modi frames his grand project of erasure and construction. To get a sense of its challenge, Opposition needs to listen in

The width of the project, the depths it seeks to touch and trawl, were framed in the PM’s speech from Kartavya Path on Thursday. For him and his party, 2014 inaugurated a rupture — not just a change from politics-as-usual in the erstwhile Congress-dominated system, but a deeper and more fundamental cultural shift. That shift is now being mapped and consecrated on the nation’s landscape, one renaming, one makeover, and one take-over at a time, all packaged as new India in the making. And yet, while the ambition is clear, the harping on the “colonial mindset”, a thinly veiled attack on the supposedly westernised elites that have profited from the old order, also points to a paradox. For all its clarion call to the more empowered India of the future, the PM’s project seems far too preoccupied with a past that has either lost its power to cramp the nation’s present and future, or has become so entangled with it that separation seems to be a hopeless endeavour. The “colonial hangover” in a nation that is mostly young, embracing new technologies and facing the world more confidently, and finding its stride in the digital age, is a fading spectre better left to die on its own. It doesn’t need a monument built to commemorate its passing.

The Opposition, rendered invisible from Thursday’s event, would nevertheless do well to listen carefully to the PM’s speech from Kartavya Path. To get a sense of the fact that its challenge is bigger and more daunting than it thinks it is — it is facing an opponent who is armed not just with politics and a policy, but also, more primally, with the will to erase and create.