From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 2, Dated Jan 19, 2008
Man, Mask And Modi
The Gujarat CM is a man who wants to paste his persona over his politics
TRIDIP SUHRUD
Social scientist
IN THE unnamed town in Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s In Evil Hour, the best way to preserve a secret about oneself was to write a lampoon of it. Narendra Modi did something similar with his mask. Simultaneously real, surreal and hyper-real, the mask was no mere carnival device. It said there was something of Modi in each of us, of which the mask was a manifestation. It was a kind of wish fulfilment hitherto possible only in dreams or in cyberspace. It was a brilliant semiotic creation.
Narendra Modi has mystique. He is one public figure who is wholly and entirely public. Nothing of his private world, the world of his emotions, intrudes upon this public persona. He does not display his familial ties in public. The family remains entirely in the private realm. He is a householder who leads the sparse, chaste life of an RSS pracharak. The only emotions he displays in public are about his commitment to Gujarat and its people and his commitment to the RSS. He uses metaphors of kinship to describe this commitment. The RSS and the party are maternal figures; so are Gujarat and its land. He is the pater familias who could also be brother and son. And, like the stereotype of the Indian male, he is undemonstrative of private emotion. He chooses to remain aloof, distant; part of his authority is derived from this unapproachability. He is a mass leader who keeps the masses at bay. He holds no durbars, does not mingle with the people, he prefers to function out of the sanitised environs of his home and the state secretariat. Instead of conversations, he prefers announcements made from tall hoardings.
He speaks of manliness as a virtue in politics, as befits a defender of the land and its glory. His references to his “56-inch chest” are offered as a measure of his nationalism, his patriotic commitment. His virility is directed only to the defence of Gujarat and her people. He is also the lone man who never lets show any sign of being lonely or forlorn. As a fighter, he leads from the front, taking all the blows. He needs neither the party nor the sadhus of the VHP nor even the recalcitrant cadre of the RSS to come to his aid. He has shown he can fight all forces ranged against him and emerge triumphant. He is the perfect male: virile in his chaste conduct, devoted yet distant, bereft of any effete emotion, zealously guarding the honour of his people. He resembles the mythical figure of Parashuram, ready to punish every transgression to the point of annihilation. In this masculine nationalism, all those who challenge the land are rendered effeminate. In a traditionally non-martial culture, his hyper-masculine presence serves to allay deep-seated fears of cultural effeteness. In this the feminine is pushed to the margins and equated with weakness. Therefore, neither Modi’s demeanour nor his language suggest caring, warmth, nurturance, healing or even chatty friendliness.
Two other characteristics form his persona. In a country that considers politics a matter of inheritance, he stands alone in denying benefits to immediate family. Even his most virulent critics would not charge him with nepotism in any form. The second trait is a very non- Gujarati one. The Gujarati mind is occupied by schemes of the “two for the price of one” variety — it speculates, it seeks to accumulate, it accommodates and is ever-willing to negotiate almost anything for a profit. Modi scorns such accommodativeness. He does not bend, he does not give any ground. In a culture that sees bribes as office expenses, he remains personally incorruptible. The only riches he brandishes are the state’s investment figures through his Vibrant Gujarat. In a society where almost all middle-class families have some connection with the diasporas, or aspire to one, he is the only Gujarati who can scoff at the US and still command a massive diaspora following.
In a caste-ridden society, which has hitherto thrived on caste-based political alliances, Modi stands out for his “casteless-ness”. Himself an OBC, he has never appealed directly to this constituency. He appeals, instead, to the Gujarati in us. He projects all the markers of the middleclass Gujarati — his sartorial style, his professionalism, his language all cohere to allow him to emerge as the first middle-class politician with a mass following across group affiliations. This will be his calling card in national politics, whenever he decides to make the shift.
Modi is also seen as a master of political rhetoric. And yet for a man who is partial to poetry, he operates within a very limited range of political vocabulary. He has the capacity to infuse simple words with varieties of meaning, made indelible through repeated use. A simple, everyday term like behn (sister), used almost always as a sign of respect, became something ridiculous with his constant references to Sonia behn. Something similar happened with James Michael Lyngdoh. Vibrant Gujarat, Nirmal Gujarat, Samras Gujarat, Gujarati asmita, five-star NGOs, Sohrabuddin, English media, Italy — all these are terms the people of Gujarat have come to understand without Modi ever explaining to us their semantic structure. He uses them often, deftly moving from one phrase to another, and the audience provides the semantic underpinnings. Those who hear him feel involved in the performance because the audience, many of whose members might wear his mask, imbues the speech with meaning. He need say nothing more.
Modi is one moderniser who stands outside of modernity. He is impatient with modern notions of plurality, polyphony, dissent and autonomy of action. For him, modernisation reads like an auditor’s report: figures of investment, highways, electrification, SEZs and such like. It was no accident that he chose one of the finest auditing firms in the world, Ernst and Young, to showcase Gujarat. In a society that specialises in making sense of figures, he makes perfect sense. He is pragmatic and forward-looking, just what the Gujarati middle-class likes to see itself as being. This pragmatism is a strange thing. It is forwardlooking, but it also prohibits the backward glance, making memory a burden we would rather shed, be it Gandhi, be it violence, be it our own culpability. The absence of such memory impedes self-reflection. With our pragmatism comes the blunting of self-awareness; remorse and repentance are not possible in a primarily forward-looking culture.
Modi’s conduct is fiercely moralistic, but we do not know the contours of his moral universe because he prefers statistics to discourse. We do not know his moral vision for Gujarat, the vision that allows his minions to interpret virtue by attacking nudity in modern art or by “rescuing” girls from undesirable love affairs.
India, be ready. The enigmatic charisma that is Narendra Modi is coming to conquer your heart.
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