by SIDDHARTHA DEB
Indian Prime Minister during a grand reception at Madison Square Garden in September 2014 PHOTO/AP/First Post
The violence, insecurity, and rage behind the man who has replaced Gandhi as the face of India.
In September 2014, at Madison Square Garden in New York, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, addressed a crowd of nearly 20,000 people. It was a sold-out spectacle worthy of a lush Bollywood production, with dancers warming up the audience and giant screens flashing portraits of Modi in the style of Shepard Fairey’s 2008 Barack Obama “Hope” posters. There was a revolving stage, a speed portrait painter, and a bipartisan coterie of American politicians, including senators Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez, and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who is of Indian descent.
When Modi appeared, dressed in saffron, a color associated with the ascetic, martial traditions of Hinduism, his first words were “Bharat Mata Ki,” an invocation of India as a Hindu goddess that translates as “For Mother India.” The crowd, almost entirely Indian-American, some with Hindu tikas dotting their foreheads, finished the line for him. “Jai!” they shouted. (“Victory!”) “Bharat Mata Ki Jai!” Then they broke out into the chant, “Modi, Modi, Modi!”
Modi’s hourlong speech touched on every element of the received wisdom about India as a vibrant democracy and rising economic power. He spoke of its special prowess in information technology and the particular role played by Indian-Americans in this. He spoke of India’s youthful population, with 65 percent of its billion-plus people under 35; of Make in India, a program that encapsulated his plans to transform the country into a manufacturing powerhouse along the lines of China; and the ways in which his humble origins and meteoric political ascent served as an example of what might be possible in India today.
This address was followed by many similar ones around the world, but it was the first to establish on a global stage an idea that had been doing the rounds, in India, in the Indian diaspora, and among Western nations keen to carry out business in India: Modi and India were versions of each other, doppelgangers marching through the world and conveying a new era. Even Barack Obama made the comparison, writing in Time’s annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world: “As a boy, Narendra Modi helped his father sell tea to support their family. Today, he’s the leader of the world’s largest democracy, and his life story—from poverty to prime minister—reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.”
Dynamism, potential, rise: These are the states of being captured by the entwinement of India and Modi. In the minds of India’s elite, and in that of an admiring, supportive West, India has been rising for a while, ever since it fully embraced Western capitalism in the early 1990s. Modi’s Madison Square Garden appearance was but an expression of that ascendance, from slumdogs into millionaires. But Modi was also in New York because of something that accompanies the rising India narrative: the perplexing reality that having been rising for so long, India is still not risen.
In the past 15 years, the top 1 percent of earners in India have increased their share of the country’s wealth from 36.8 percent to 53 percent, with the top 10 percent owning 76.3 percent, and yet India remains a stunningly poor country, riven with violence and brutal hierarchies, held together with shoddy infrastructure, and marked by the ravages of lopsided growth, pollution, and climate change. Modi at Madison Square Garden, then, stood for the promise that India’s rise would finally be completed, the summit reached. It had not yet been achieved, but he would change that. He would change it because he was an outsider, a man of humble origins, leading a political party—the Hindu right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—that had a few months earlier been given a clear electoral majority, the first time for any Indian party in 30 years. He was at Madison Square Garden to mark this triumph, and to declare himself the new Indian icon for a new Indian century.
Modi referred, naturally, to the icon he had supplanted, the one from a previous century. Stumbling over Gandhi’s first name, calling him “Mohanlal” instead of “Mohandas,” Modi compared Gandhi to the members of his audience, as a person who had lived abroad as a diaspora Indian before returning to India. Modi’s Gandhi, however, had nothing to do with anticolonial politics, mysticism, or nonviolence. Those had been left behind with the old India, as demonstrated by some of Modi’s supporters outside the venue. Gathered in large numbers, they heckled and jeered at the Indian television anchor Rajdeep Sardesai for being part of what they saw as the liberal wing of the Indian media, which is ill-disposed toward Modi. To Sardesai’s attempts to ask them questions, they responded with shouts of “Modi, Modi, Modi.” When he retorted, “Did Mr. Modi tell you to behave badly? Did America tell you to behave badly?” a brawl ensued, some of the men chanting, “Vande Mataram,” or “Praise Mother India,” while others shouted, “Motherfucker.”
This episode could be seen as an aberration, but the combination of adulation and violence, sanctimoniousness and abuse, is never far from Modi and those who support him. It is, in fact, the essence of his appeal. He is a representative Indian not merely because he signifies potential, outsider status, and an Indian form of DIY upward mobility, but also because he embodies violent sectarian and authoritarian tendencies: so much a modern man belonging to the new century that he has dispensed with the pacifism associated with Gandhi.
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)