Shiv Visvanathan on Narendra Modi: The cultural revolutionary
NB: This is a very thoughtful article. (It is significant that it has appeared in a magazine that underwent some distinctly pro-Modi churning a year ago, and even used Hitlerite terminology to welcome Modi's advent. And that some of its senior journalists were forced out of its staff for being overly critical. Clearly the owners find critical commentary more tolerable now than they did a year ago). For all the disdain that the Sangh Parivar professes for the Englishman who penned the colonial policy on education in 1835, our ultra-nationalist RSS ideologues have proven to be Thomas Macaulay's wet dream. They are busy hammering Indian society into shape for 'modernisation' - by which is meant Americanisation. Religion is just a convenient badge of political identity, devoid of all philosophical content. All that remains is glory-seeking and lust for power. Their worship of the Nation is a manifestation of right-wing atheism, a useful tool in the science of power.
The regime's assault on higher education is calculated to dull the minds of young Indians for a generation; their undermining of criminal justice, accompanied by shameless intimidation of outspoken intellectuals and the judiciary, manifests their tyrannical approach to politics. The author is also correct in his perception that the 'jugalbandi between the RSS and the BJP' lends the regime its innovative power to which 'neither civil society nor the opposition has any real answer.' Nothing less than a re-invention of Indian democracy is called for: DS
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When he talks development, even the West cannot believe that the evangelicals of World Bank and IMF have created such a perfect mimic of the development logic...
The NRIs are crucial in a mythical sense here. They create the idea of the split-level Indian... Modi is an American in a bandhgala suit. They know that he is playing out the American dream in India... He is the new wog uttering all the right sentences... one can dismantle Ford and IMF in India because he represents the World Bank in all of us.
(the Modi regime).. has its own sense of civil society through the RSS, VHP and its numerous front organisations, and it is hostile to other forms of civil society. As a majoritarian government, it sees minorities as spoilt and dissent as sedition. It has created a monotheistic god in the nation-state..
Between nationalism, CSR and ‘Make in India’, we project ourselves as born-again evangelicals protesting antiquated ideas in science, governance and democracy. A little pat from the World Bank or some US Senator makes us wag like Pavlovian dogs.
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Anniversaries are moments of reflection and evaluation; they
demand rituals of memory and measures of assessment. They are crucial because
they are markers of history, and sometimes even the history of a year can be a
political revelation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime is a year old this
week. Yet, one feels he has been there for years. He has become part of the
taken-for-granted, an old habit—so rapidly has the Congress faded from memory.
The presence of the BJP seems obvious, and the Congress, which was part of the
furniture of our lives, seems distant and a comic interlude at best; if Modi
achieved something significant over the past year, it is this sleight hand of
time. The BJP seems all there and ready to be there for a long time. Lutyens’
Delhi, which could shrug Modi off for years, now sees him as the new monarch
and has adapted to him.
There is something about power that seduces citizens. Once
an alien figure, Modi appears as a fact of life of Delhi. In achieving this change
in mindset, Modi has created a new regime that already feels like an old habit.
Today, when one mentions a Sonia Gandhi or Sheila Dixit, a Rahul Gandhi or
Digvijay Singh, one senses they have already moved to page 3. Page one has been
handed over to the new regime.
Modi has achieved a symbolic change in mentality in a single
year, and yet oddly it is the symbolic war that the regime is losing. Deeply
and fundamentally, one feels the regime is creating its own contradictions. It
does not need a Congress, an AAP or a CPM to battle it because deep down, one
year is enough time to understand the symbolic contradictions of the new rule
of Modi.
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Indians love leaders. Outside our gods and the lesser gods
of cinema and sport, the only gods we want are political. The political is
almost an alternative sacred space, and our leaders, icons. When one thinks of
a Gandhi, a Nehru or an Indira, one thinks of mythic archetypes. Leaders were
icons we worshipped. They were larger than life, and that is how we wanted them
to be. We wanted them to be myth rather than history, part of parable and
folklore rather than news and everydayness. Without this second circle of gods,
belief and trust in politics was too difficult.
Yet, Modi was a strange leader. He did not sound like a
natural growth, he felt like a manufacture. He was the first product of the new
‘Make in India’ movement. He felt like a clone. A leader is a bit unlike us,
but Modi felt like all of us, middle-class in his aspirations, middle-class in
his envy. Like the middle-class, he wanted the nation state to be a magical
entity, to ooze charisma, to generate pride. He was tired of an India which was
third world and third class. He talked of power of the Prime Minister’s post as
if it was an IAS exam or a plum post in the bureaucracy. He was, like all of
us, a candidate. And it was as a candidate, an aspirant oozing ambition, that
we voted him to power. We wanted someone like us to be in power and so we voted
him in. He became the singular version of a collective middle-class us.
Power, we realised, is a fancy dress ball, a literacy
contest where we savour new words and recite them as if it is a drama. Modi
dressed the part and we sensed the costume ball of power. He was easy to
identify with, not as an icon, not as a distant hoarding, but as one of us. He
used words like ‘security’ and ‘development’ the way we did, feeling that they
had a magic we needed to extract. And that is why the West and the NRI loved
him: he seemed to have internalised all their values and seemed a third-rate
version of them. When he talks development, even the West cannot believe that
the evangelicals of World Bank and IMF have created such a perfect mimic of the
development logic. When he returns from Canada and Europe and says Nuclear
Energy is the second modernity, the West realises that India is for the taking.
The NRIs are crucial in a mythical sense here. They create
the idea of the split-level Indian. Like Modi, they are all Modis
abroad—aspiring, hardworking, successful, easy to please, and willing to learn.
Modi is an American in a bandhgala suit. They know that he is
playing out the American dream in India. When Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind
Panagariya adopt him, one knows that America has completed its colonisation of
India. He is the new wog uttering all the right sentences. Frankly, one can
dismantle Ford and IMF in India today because he represents the World Bank in
all of us. All he needs is a Harvard honorary degree or a mention in the
Queen’s list, and one knows India is captive forever.
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If anyone should be introspecting, it is not the Congress,
but the RSS. Modi gave the RSS the one thing they wanted: power and the guarantee
of power for a decade at least. Modi gave them the time and space to unfurl
their cultural world. Their desperation for power was obvious. Vajpayee brought
them close to it, but he was no Advani. He had a Nehruvian ease about him. He
preferred his sensuality and refused to be a puritan in power. For him, power
was a drawing- room game, not the takeover of a culture. Modi was the puritan
that the RSS wanted. He loved power, was completely obsessed by it. He combined
the best of the BJP as a vote gatherer and RSS as a culture builder.
It is these two parts of Modi, RSS and BJP, that creates the
new internal tensions and complementarities of the regime. There seems to be a
symbolic division of labour, an ideological split between the BJP and RSS. It is
as if Modi has come apart and is being run dualistically. One can see it in
Union ministries. Defence, Finance and Home seem to have a managerial kind of
corporate hardness, and the trio of Modi, Jaitley and Shah seems to run them.
However, Health, Education and Environment seem to be more open to a cultural
reorganisation. Here one sees the RSS moving in. It can be read as a split, a
dualism or a jugalbandi where two styles combine to create the
content and form of a new India. At one level, this goes deeper and is farther
reaching than any Nehruvian dream of Planning, Public Enterprise and
Panchsheel. This jugalbandi between the RSS and the BJP lends
the regime its innovative power. Neither civil society nor the opposition has
any real answer to it.
At this level, the Modi regime is successful, and one year
seems a long time in politics. But the long-run is yet to begin. What we need to analyse is this: while India has been good
to Modi, is Modi good for India as a civilisation, a nation-state, a community?
What is the Indian Prime Minister’s idea of India and how does it affect the
everydayness of being Indian?
In one year, Modi has altered the idea of being Indian. This
new Indian middle-class is brash and global, it wants a seat at the UN Security
Council, and is open about its love affair with Israel. It wants to identify
with the strong and the successful. It talks mobility rather than justice, and
is tired of slowness. It wants a democracy built on speed. It has no patience
for complex memories. It does not want to side with the defeated, and it sees
the marginalised and minorities as defeated.
This India is not a culture or an ecology, but a brand that
has commoditised itself. This generation is clear that India has to sell and
sell itself successfully for a regime to work. It is not ethics and ideology
that drives it, but the market. This India will never fight for Palestine or
against Apartheid. It will seek to subjugate Pakistan. What were ideals or ways
of life are all conceived as instrumentalities. It is not open to pain and
suffering, lest it be seen as weak. It is indifferent to farmer suicides, which
it sees as an externality, but will respond to the Nepal Earthquake because it
wants to feels its humanitarian competence. This mentality is the real success
of Modi, because it has altered the grammar of our culture. This new India is
tired of being third rate and third world. Whether it’s the IPL or UN, it wants
to be top of the heap. As fans and as citizens, we want to win. This is the
time of Moditva, which accompanies the majoritarian Hindutva. One without the
other will not be successful. India has re-socialised itself and it is powerful
as any cultural revolution. But more fragile.
What one has to examine is not the policy, the acts of
governance of the regime, but the nature of its axiomatics. In creating what is
a ‘Nehru mukt Bharat’, the BJP has gone beyond socialism but has
acquired the trappings of a new convert nation-state. The RSS behaves as if it
has just won a battle of independence.
We want to be a hard state and emphasise security. When
‘security’ is touted as national salvation, geography takes over from culture,
and chauvinism trumps pluralism.Democracy, instead of being an experiment in
political pluralism, becomes electoral majoritarianism. The search is now for
speed, uniformity and order, all guaranteed through a technocratic idea of
governance. We impoverish our ecology and civilisation because we do not want
to be left behind.
Secondly, we have become an anxious society. Like the US,
with its axes of evil, we too need our moral fault-lines, our little
cartographies of democracy. As security becomes more internal, we unleash an
array of moral policemen seeking to control minorities, gender, sexuality, and,
in fact, any apparent act of dissidence from sensuality to ecology. Our sense
of intolerance has increased, and worse, we see any act of difference as a
law-and-order problem.
Finally, despite all the passion, the sense of middle-class
liberation that Modi has unleashed, India actually appears more second rate
than before. In the domain of ideas, it appears out- thought and out-fought. We
appear like an atavistic anachronism in imitation of the West, while the West
we construct has moved on to more creative ideas. Between nationalism, CSR and
‘Make in India’, we project ourselves as born- again evangelicals protesting
antiquated ideas in science, governance and democracy. A little pat from the
World Bank or some US Senator makes us wag like Pavlovian dogs.
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It is the classificatory skills of the Modi regime as a mode
of thought that one has to scrutinise. It is a government that has over-
defined security at the cost of sustainability. It has confused ecology and
environment. It cleans up the environment as an act of civics, but it has no
grasp of ecology, of the relation between nature and livelihoods. It subsumes
ecology under growth and fast-tracks industrial projects. It has its own sense
of civil society through the RSS, VHP and its numerous front organisations, and
it is hostile to other forms of civil society. As a majoritarian government, it
sees minorities as spoilt and dissent as sedition. It has created a
monotheistic god in the nation-state and insists on patriotism as the only
religion of the state. Yet, as an imagination, it is populist, playing to all
the resentments of history.
As we watch today, it is not clear that the phenomenon we
call ‘Modi’ is an act of leadership or the fact that the leader merely
represents the lowest common denominator of ideas. Modi now feels less like a
signal for action than a symptom of deep societal trends that seem confused and
pathological. The media whips up a frenzy around what he says, yet his acts
look more and more empty. What was once seen as promise, a message of change,
now seems surly and vacuous, a regime full of sound and fury, signifying little
or nothing. Something about the ground celebration called ‘Modi’ tells us that
as a society, we are running on empty, an emptiness of ideas, aesthetics, even
ethics. Modi stands like a leader enacting the emperor’s new clothes. Sadly, in
the sycophantic celebration of the first year, there is no dissenter, not even
a child to tell him the truth about his regime.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/narendra-modi-the-cultural-revolutionary#sthash.gwB6acj1
See also:
The Broken Middle (on the 30th anniversary of 1984)
