On a sunny afternoon in 1980, a father and son rode through West Bengal’s Purulia district on a motorbike. It was election season, and along the road they came upon a crowd of mostly villagers listening intently to a candidate. The father, a politician from neighbouring Bihar, stopped, bought two cups of tea, and together they slipped into the audience.
“It was a fascinating speech, in Bengali, laced with humour, wit and sarcasm,” the son—historian and media scholar Rakesh Batabyal—would recall decades later in his magisterial The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches: 1877 to the Present. “I have never forgotten the effect of that speech on me. I realised that there is something in the language of each region that gets articulated in its politics and this is generally not translatable, and is best understood in the moment.”
Batabyal says he would remember that afternoon in Purulia every time he came across a roadside meeting or a public speech. “Now, whenever I hear that same gentleman speak in English in Parliament, I feel like whispering in his ear, “Why don’t you speak the way you did that afternoon.’” The leader was Congress stalwart and future Union minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi, whom Batabyal credits for showing him “how much magic local culture brings to a political speech”.
Very little of that magic finds its way into The Voice of the People: Great Speeches from India’s Parliament, a new anthology of parliamentary oratory edited by veteran journalist Smita Gupta, who covered Parliament for over three decades. The fault, Gupta insists, is not hers but that of the official parliamentary transcripts: the English translations of non-English speeches are often clumsy, and editors are not permitted to improve them. “There are speeches that had to be dropped entirely,” she writes. “For instance, in the case of a brilliant speech in Hindi made by Atal Bihari Vajpayee after the creation of Bangladesh, the translation was a summary of the original. It, therefore, became pointless to include it.”
Even with this handicap inflicted by Parliament’s archives, Gupta’s book is a remarkable document of speeches that have shaped the soul of India’s democracy. The anthology is divided into 12 sections—spanning social spheres (from gender to politics), topical issues (economic liberalisation, the India-US nuclear deal), and the perennial preoccupations of the republic (civic space, religious fault lines). Each speech is prefaced with a short, illuminating foreword that situates it in its historical moment, sometimes with a touch of drama. Speeches have been edited to “manageable lengths”—Indian MPs, Gupta writes, “don’t warm up to their subjects till the 15th minute or so!”—and she strives to present both sides of major debates with fairness.
The selection captures the breadth and depth of India’s parliamentary tradition. Some entries are inevitable—Jawaharlal Nehru’s lyrical ‘Tryst with Destiny’ (“Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow.”), and B.R. Ambedkar’s incisive ‘Grammar of Anarchy’ speech (“We must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha…. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”)
But the book also sparkles with less remembered moments: Piloo Mody’s scathing criticism of the Maintenance of Internal Security Bill (“We are not living in the reign of bloody Elizabeth I. We are living in the reign of Indira Gandhi, the last, I hope.”), and the English translation of Manoj Jha’s pandemic-era call for action that went viral online (“It doesn’t matter if you print huge advertisements and colour newspapers or say thank you to this or that, Sir, all this is a waste, if history doesn’t thank us.”)
Oratory, as British newspaper editor Brian MacArthur once observed in his Penguin Book of Modern Speeches, is always thought to be a declining art. “Every generation,” he said, “judges contemporary speakers unfavourably against the giants of the past.” Gupta seems to arrive at a similar conclusion. “As I trawled through the Parliament Digital Library,” she writes, “what struck me was not just the gradual waning of research that had gone into the crafting of the speeches…. If earlier sharp differences on the floor of the house were expressed in a civilised fashion, gradually, the tone and tenor of some of the speeches became distinctly unparliamentary.”
The decline is most visible towards the latter part of the anthology. Rahul Gandhi’s speech during the 2018 no-confidence motion against the Narendra Modi government reads like a staccato score punctuated by heckling: “And Prime Minister… (interruptions) the soldiers… (interruptions). It is the truth; no one can hide it… (interruptions).”
Gupta herself had what she calls “the two best seats in the press gallery” of the old Parliament House, directly above the prime minister and, later, the leader of the opposition. “Theatre seats don’t get any better than that!” she writes. But one wishes she had let us in on more of the theatre she witnessed—the cadence of the great orators, their tics, their ability to hold a house in thrall. MacArthur’s anthology includes a vivid account of Stalin’s speaking style: “When Stalin speaks with his knowing, comfortable smile, pointing with his forefinger, he does not, like other orators, make a breach between himself and his audience; …very soon an alliance, an intimacy is established between him and his listeners. They, being made of the same stuff, are susceptible to the arguments, and both laugh merrily at the same simple stories.”
A similar pen-portrait of Somnath Chatterjee, Mahua Moitra, or even Vajpayee or Modi might have elevated this collection and made it more textured. Still, Gupta’s anthology does what it sets out to do. “I am deeply conscious that the speeches in this book still represent a mere fraction of the total,” she writes. “I can only hope that this book will whet the reader’s appetite for more—and will inspire them to check out the Parliament Digital Library.”
Excerpts from the book:
Jawaharlal Nehru in the Lok Sabha
November 8, 1962
On Resolution Regarding the Proclamation of Emergency and Aggression by China
Here is a single fact… they have invaded an area which has not been in their possession ever, ever in the history of the last 10,000 years. After all, the present Chinese Government came into existence 12 years ago or thereabouts. Any claim that they may directly make to this territory can only be made either in these 12 years or possibly previously through Tibet. So, it becomes a question of what they can claim through Tibet or through their domination over Tibet.
It is true that… there were some frontier questions between Tibet and India, even in British times. But all these questions were about little pockets or little frontier areas, small areas….
If they had any claim they could have discussed it and talked about it and adopted various means of peaceful settlement, appointed arbitrators or gone to The Hague Court… Here, I may say, it is fortunate, in this as in so many other cases, that the present Government of China is not represented in the United Nations.
Hon. Members are surprised when we have supported the Chinese representation—the representation of the People’s Government of China—in the United Nations. We have supported it in spite of this present invasion because… it is not a question of likes or dislikes. It is a question which will facilitate Chinese aggression; it will facilitate its misbehaviour in the future. It will make disarmament impossible in the world. You might disarm the whole world and leave China, a great, powerful country, fully armed to the teeth. It is inconceivable….
The difficulty is, one cannot call them up before any tribunal or world court or anywhere. They are just wholly an irresponsible country believing, I believe, in war as the only way of settling anything, having no love of peace and… and with great power at their disposal. That is the dangerous state of affairs not only for India but for the rest of the world.
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Syama Prasad Mookerjee in the Constituent Assembly
September 17, 1951
Hindu Code Bill
We are told very often that our system is backward. I have got with me many extracts from the writings of great Indians and great Western scholars who have admired the way in which Hindu society has carried on its existence in spite of tremendous odds and difficulties.
I am not for a moment saying that all is well with Hindu society. I know where the defects lie. But it is something amazing, something unprecedented that our religion or the great truths on which Hindus for generations past, for thousands of years, have lived, somehow have shown a degree of adaptability and vitality which is hardly to be witnessed anywhere else….
The other day we were discussing about Buddhism…. I have something to do with the Maha Bodhi Society. I happen to be its president, without being a Buddhist. I am a Hindu and yet I am its president, because I have liberality enough to admit the greatness of Buddhism and yet remain a Hindu.
The point I was about to develop was this. There were friends who came from outside India and they asked with a tone of complaint, ‘Well, India was the land of birth of Buddha, but India killed Buddhism.’ I do not wish to go into those controversial matters now. But one point comes out very prominently and that is that when Buddha started preaching his great doctrines, India needed Buddha, not only to save the world but to save India. And Buddha succeeded in checking the growth of certain tendencies which were about to destroy the very life-blood of Hindu civilisation. Buddha has been absorbed by the same Hindus as an avatar….
The reason why I am saying all this is to show that we should never tolerate any criticism from any quarter, especially from a foreign quarter when they say that Hindu civilisation or Hindu culture has been of a static nature or of a stagnant nature or of a decadent nature. There is something in our culture and civilisation which is of a dynamic character and which has lived from generation to generation.
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Omar Abdullah in the Lok Sabha
July 22, 2008
Motion of Confidence in the Council of Ministers Moved by Dr Manmohan Singh
I am a Muslim, and I am an Indian. I see no distinction between the two…. (Interruptions.) I see no reason why I, as a Muslim, have to fear a deal between India and the United States of America. (Interruptions.) This is a deal between two countries. It is a deal between, we hope, two countries that in the future will be two equals…. (Interruptions.) Sir, the enemies of Indian Muslims are not the Americans, and the enemies of the Indian Muslims are not ‘deals’ like this. The enemies of Indian Muslims are the same enemies that all the poor people of India face, namely, poverty and hunger, unemployment, lack of development and the absence of a voice. It is that we are against, namely, the effort being made to crush our voice.
… (Interruptions.) I am not a Member of the UPA, and I do not aspire to the membership of the UPA. But I am extremely unhappy with the way in which my friends in the Left have taken on this self-imposed position of being the certifiers of who is secular and who is not…. (Interruptions.)
Until a few years ago, I was a part of the NDA and I was a minister with them.
The same Left people considered me as a political untouchable, and they considered me an outcast because I was a part of the NDA. Today, the same Left people are telling me that all secular parties must unite with the BJP to bring down this Government…. (Interruptions.) I made a mistake of standing with them once, I did not resign on the question of Gujarat when my conscience told me to do so, and my conscience has still not forgiven me. I need not make the same mistake again…. (Interruptions.)
VOICE OF THE PEOPLE: GREAT SPEECHES FROM INDIA’S PARLIAMENT
Edited by Smita Gupta
Published by Juggernaut
Page 544; price Rs999