Who is the Prime Minister of India? Everybody knows the answer to that question. Mr Narendra Modi. But today, thanks to the power of social media, everybody not just knows the name of our Prime Minister, everybody knows what he plans on doing for our country, for all the states in the country (especially the states where elections are due), for our farmers, for the economy, for the education sector, for the cleanliness of our villages and every other microscopic detail there is to be addressed in the country.
He has a plan for everything with target dates as late as 2024. Planning is very important when one wants to change the face of their country for good and having detailed plans for the same is not just effective, it’s impressive as well. If anything, we should be happy and proud of the efficient and energetic PM we have, to run our country (not to compare him with his predecessors).
But how do we know all of this?
Well, the answer I think is not as simple as social media or biased media networks. But before we get into finding an answer to this question, let’s have a look at a more basic question (also the question with which this article was started).
Who is the Prime Minister of India?
According to Wikipedia,
The Prime Minister of India is the leader of the executive branch of the Government of India. The Prime Minister is also the chief adviser to the President of India and head of the Council of Ministers.
Let’s just break that down for simplicity. What the definition above seems to mean is that the Prime Minister of India is the head of a branch of the government that runs it. Also, the Prime Minister works as an adviser (chief adviser to be precise) to the President of India and although the President is the head of the state of India, he is bound by the constitution to act on the advice of the Prime Minister. Meaning, all the power vested in President (with a few exceptions) are in practice exercised by the Prime Minister.
This is a big responsibility and only a few can probably take over this role.
Coming to the question asked before. How do we know about all the impressive plans our PM has for the country? The answer is simple.
The BJP has been sweeping elections in the country for almost 4 years now. The numbers are very impressive and although in some cases the results have been less than expected (Gujarat) or even negative (Bihar), but overall, the performance of BJP has been phenomenal. Something that has probably not been witnessed for a long time in our country. The election campaign strategy of BJP has almost always been better than their competition (not going into whether it was morally right or not), but the question is,
If the job of the Prime Minister of India is to run the Government and to advice the President on important matters, how come we have been seeing him during election campaigning so much?
Isn’t it a little strange that the person who is campaigning for all the state elections (currently in Karnataka) in India is not even being given the vote? I mean, you’ll be voting for a candidate of your constituency. Not the PM. Not Mr. Narendra Modi. It would have made so much more sense if the local candidate for election did a smaller (and less expensive) campaign for their constituency. Wouldn’t it give a more personal touch? And more importantly, wouldn’t it mean that the PM gets more time working for the country and running the government?
There have been elections in 23 states since the NDA swept the Lok Sabha elections and not in one place was the campaigning done without the Prime Minister of India. In my view, the PM could have instead taken a day off for the number of times he went campaigning for his party shouting out loud how the previous government looted and destroyed the democracy of that state and our country for 60 years (irrespective of the fact that the current CM would have been ruling for only 5 or 10 or 15 years). Taking rest is important and it would have given the PM a cooler mind to run the government better.
The intention of this article is not to belittle the efforts of our Prime Minister. On the contrary, I believe that Mr Narendra Modi is good PM and that he only has good intentions for the country. He definitely has changed the image of our country in front of the world. He is a very strong leader who has spent a great amount of time and effort in promoting India to the word. The problem is not even with the organisational structure of our government. The problem is with the organisation structure of BJP where the responsibility of campaigning is given to a person whose actual responsibility is (quite literally) to run the country.