Dear Shri Narendra Modi Ji,

You are the elected leader of the country, and I, as a citizen, consider it my duty to bring before you any public grievance that warrants your attention. Hence, this open letter.

What struck a discordant note with me was your latest address to the nation. You are not the only Prime Minister to make use of Doordarshan and All India Radio, which, alas, are at your disposal, to address the nation. You can go through any such speech made by Prime Ministers like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Chandra Shekhar, HD Deve Gowda, IK Gujral, or VP Singh to see whether they used these platforms to seek votes.

I purposely did not mention any Congress Prime Minister because you are allergic to their names. None of them used the medium for petty political purposes. I wonder why Prasar Bharati, which is supposed to be an autonomous body, allowed you to do so. And why the Election Commission did not switch off the mic as the Lok Sabha Speaker often does.

It was with great difficulty that I heard your speech, in which you mentioned the name of the Congress 57 times. You named other parties, such as the All India Trinamool Congress, the Samajwadi Party, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. If, after 12 years of giving a clarion call to usher in a "Congress-mukt (Congress-free) Bharat," you had to take the Congress name so many times, is it not an admission that you failed to rid the nation of the Congress?

I cannot believe that you organised a special session of Parliament to pass the Women's Reservation Bill without much thought. If I, a layperson, knew that it would not pass muster in the Lok Sabha, where you lack a two-thirds majority, how could I believe that you did not know enough arithmetic to conclude that the National Democratic Alliance you lead is not numerically strong?

My inference is that you purposely introduced the Bill to embrace defeat and thereafter claim martyrdom for the legislative attempt. Ironically, you wanted to use women's power to defeat a woman, Mamata Banerjee, in West Bengal. Since women constitute 50 per cent of the population, even if you are able to influence 10 per cent of them, you can easily defeat your opponents.

I am not sure that your strategy would work. The English idiom "too clever by half," as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, means "so clever that it becomes foolish or causes problems." This expression came to mind as I listened to your address.

It is not proper for me to say that your speech was riddled with outright lies and half-truths, so I refrain from doing so. Yet, most of your statements came close to lies. You did not mention that, in September 2023, you yourself had introduced a Women's Reservation Bill. As many as 456 MPs were present and voting. Except for two MPs—Shri Asaduddin Owaisi and his party colleague Shri Imtiaz Jaleel—everyone voted in favour of the Bill. This worked out to 99.56 per cent.

You did not mention this rare parliamentary achievement in your address to the nation because it would have demolished your theory that the Congress and other parties you mentioned were against women's reservation. Knowing your party, I was not convinced that you were serious. If you wanted, a reservation for women could have been introduced during the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

If you had done so, there would have been 180 women MPs in the Lok Sabha, instead of 78, as is the case. Their representation in the Rajya Sabha is even worse—just 24 out of 224, or less than 11 per cent. Your intention, then, was to get some votes in the name of the Women's Reservation Bill.

That is why you cleverly inserted the clause that the reservation for women would be subject to the delimitation of constituencies, which would be based on the 2027 Census results. You wanted to catch two birds with one stone: interminably delay the reservation for women and yet get votes for enacting the law.

You waxed eloquent about women enjoying 33 per cent reservation in panchayats, municipalities, and other civic bodies. How did this happen? The Panchayati Raj system was introduced in India by Jawaharlal Nehru on Gandhi Jayanti Day at a function in Nagaur, Rajasthan, in 1959.

Rajiv Gandhi introduced a Bill to reserve 33 per cent of seats for women in civic bodies. It was passed in the Lok Sabha, but it failed to win support from the Opposition, and the Bill was defeated in the Upper House. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani, and Ram Jethmalani were its main opponents. Rajiv Gandhi did not use Doordarshan and Akashvani to attack the BJP. Finally, the law was passed by the PV Narasimha Rao government.

Yet you virtually cursed the Congress for obstructing your Women's Bill. You claim that women will never forget what the party did to them. If you are so confident that women are angry with Congress, then why waste your time and national resources condemning it? You just wanted an excuse to blame Congress and get some votes.

Everybody knows that your hidden agenda was to introduce the delimitation of constituencies. There was no need to link this with women's reservation. We have seen what your government did when women sportspersons made a complaint against one of your MPs. We also know how you treated the President, Droupadi Murmu, whom you chose, when the new Parliament building and the Ram temple at Ayodhya were inaugurated. I need not tell you that every government decision is taken in the name of the President. Yet she was not invited because, in the order of precedence, she is superior to you. The spotlight would have been on her, not you.

Now, let me come to the delimitation of constituencies. We started our careers at almost the same time—you as an RSS worker and I as a journalist in Delhi. When I joined the profession, my beat included the Ministry of Health and Family Planning, headed by Dr Karan Singh, son of Maharaja Martand Singh of Kashmir. It was a time when the government did everything possible to introduce the concept of "We two, ours two."

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala did everything possible to promote family planning. One of my friends, the late Prof Omchery NN Pillai, who coined the famous slogan "Garibi Hatao" (Banish Poverty) to counter the Opposition's "Indira Hatao," had chosen Islamic history for his graduation. He was employed by the government to spend time in the Muslim-dominated Malappuram area to promote family planning. He, in his autobiography "It So Happened," narrates how he took on the religious establishment by quoting their own religious texts.

The Tamil Nadu government at that time was led by MG Ramachandran, who never tanned his fair skin to appeal to the voters. Nor did J Jayalalithaa do so. The Press Information Bureau (PIB) took a press party from Delhi to report the progress Tamil Nadu had achieved in family planning. I joined the group from Bhopal. It was a great opportunity to see Tamil Nadu. We met the Health Minister, Dr HV Hande, who explained the strategy employed to reduce the population.

Kerala was at one time the densest state. Today, population growth in the state is negative for some communities. The average growth rate is comparable to that in Europe. Alas, when the Janata Party (of which your party was a constituent) came to power in 1977, family planning became "family welfare," and the small-family campaign lost its momentum.

In the cow belt, family planning never took root. It is said that the best contraceptive is education. Those states lagged behind, while southern states succeeded in limiting their population growth. As a result, an MP in Kerala or Lakshadweep represents a smaller number of people than an MP in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar.

In order to assuage the fears of the southern states, the total number of seats in Parliament was frozen. But you want to increase the number of MPs through delimitation. You never explained what you meant by 'delimitation.' If you go strictly by census figures and fix the number of seats based on the population of states, southern states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and northeastern states like Mizoram and Meghalaya, will lose their strength in Parliament.

In your address, you mentioned that every state will see an increase when delimitation happens. This is contradictory. If, for instance, Kerala's seats are increased to 30 from 20, the number of people a Kerala MP represents will fall drastically. To make it proportional, states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh should double or triple the number of their MPs. True, that is not contemplated.

Statistics have a peculiar flaw—one that often hides inequality behind neat arithmetic. Consider this: a boss earns ?5 lakh while his cook earns ?5,000. If both salaries are doubled, the boss now takes home ?10 lakh, while the cook's pay rises to ?10,000. Technically, you would be correct in saying that both incomes have doubled. Yet the gulf between them has widened dramatically, revealing how percentages can obscure the reality of disparity.

Governance in India is not affected by the number of MPs. Do you really believe that India will become greater if there are 2,000 MPs? In the United States Senate, there are 100 senators in total. Each of the 50 states is represented by two senators, regardless of population size. They are elected to six-year terms, with elections staggered so that roughly one-third of the Senate is up for election every two years, like our Rajya Sabha.

In terms of size, Alaska is 400 times larger than Rhode Island. California has 39 million residents, while Wyoming has only 600,000 residents. Yet, they each send two members to the American Senate.

If population size is made the determinant, it amounts to penalising states that performed well in family planning. You can call Dr Karan Singh to find out which strategies were employed to popularise family planning and what promises were made. Then you will have a better idea of why Tamil Nadu feels offended. Unfortunately, your leaders do not seem to believe in family planning. On the contrary, they exhort party workers to produce more children. Yes, when Palestinians were pushed out of Israel, you facilitated the arrival of 10,000 Indians to do their dirty jobs there.

China was the most populous nation. We have overtaken China. Does this redound to the credit of Indians? China has made strides in all walks of life. They have begun using drones to deliver food and medicines ordered online. They have beaten the United States hollow in many sectors.

And where have we reached? You waste national time spreading claims that the Women's Bill was not passed when it was, in fact, passed with 99.56 per cent of the votes in 2023. I do not presume to predict electoral outcomes in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Assam, or Puducherry. But public trust depends less on rhetoric and more on consistency between word and deed.

I conclude with a reminder from the Bible: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). A similar idea is echoed in the Bhagavad Gita, which teaches that true achievement lies not merely in outward success but in adherence to righteousness.

Yours, etc.