Tavleen Singh writes: Birthday blessings or a bad idea?

The saddest thing that can be said about the birthday celebrations of last week is that Modi appears to have forgotten that he has been elected and re-elected twice because voters saw him as one of their own. (Photo Credit: BJP/X)

6 min readSep 20, 2026 06:30 AM IST First published on: Sep 20, 2026 at 06:30 AM IST

Did you light a diya of ‘blessing’ on the Prime Minister’s birthday last week? I considered doing so for a moment. It seemed like a simple enough request. But when I saw whole streets covered in diyas by Narendra Modi’s shamelessly sycophantic chief ministers, I changed my mind. So, if truth be told, the Prime Minister should have asked for something else as a birthday present, and I shall tell you why. He has carefully cultivated the image of being a man of the people, a true son of the soil, as opposed to the entitled, spoilt princes who are his main political opponents. What went through his mind when, late on the night of his birthday, social media filled up with pictures of small children collecting the oil from these clay lamps to take home to their mothers for cooking their meagre meals?

Did those pictures make him feel bad? Or is he now in such a lofty cocoon that he does not notice such things? Did it hurt him to see those reels on social media of flooded villages in Bihar and Assam in which there was, in some cases, no dry land left on which to place the clay lamps he urged people to light? Did it hurt him when the leader of the Cockroach Janta Party lit a diya in the broken window of a crumbling school only to declare that his birthday gift to the Prime Minister was this school? Did he approve of the hundreds of crore his chief ministers spent on carrying out his wishes? Did he approve of the huge sums spent on advertisements by his minions and supposed well-wishers?