NEW DELHI: Taking the view that Swaraj was earlier “interpreted narrowly” besides being “diluted”, Union Home Minister Amit Shah sought to conflate a new imagination of the concept of self-government with a “New India” in which “Bharat is a geo-cultural country”.
In his inaugural address at the start of a three-day international seminar on ‘Revisiting the Ideas of India from Swaraj to New India’ at Delhi University on Thursday, Shah that while the government “wished to have good relations with nations across the world and wanted peace, we shall respond in the same language to those who have ill intentions on our defence forces and with our borders”. He added that India’s response “will be with determination”.
Shah said that Swaraj’s interpretation must now reflect the ideas of “supremacy of Swadeshi, Swabhasha, Swadharma and Sanskriti”.Claiming that culture that unites and holds India together and that “unless we adopt this idea and understanding, we cannot imagine a new India”, Shah said that “those who talk about the idea of India do not know the meaning of India”.
But he quickly shifted gear to extol the “achievements” of the Narendra Modi government on the social, economic, political and cultural fronts in the last eight years. Rattling off some statistics in the context of the Ujjwala scheme, setting up toilets, healthcare for the poor, improvements in the supply side of healthcare and protecting the environment, Shah said that India has achieved much between 2014 and 2022 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“When governance is conducted with a resolve to place the interests of the nation first, then problems automatically disappear,” he said, adding that the Modi government is the best example of this aspect.Waxing eloquent on internal security, Shah said that while in the last eight years, 9,000 “cadres of armed groups in the Northeast have joined the mainstream by putting down their arms”, a number of agreements with these erstwhile insurgent groups have been signed.
Now that peace has been restored in the Northeast, we have removed AFSPA from 75 percent of the region, Shah said, the human rights of victims must also be acknowledged and recognised. He said that “under the leadership of Narendra Modi, India is moving towards becoming the India that people have wanted to see since the last 1,200 years”.