HOPES FOR A NEW REPUBLIC OF OLD STORIES

Ta special cabinet meeting this January, the defence minister proclaimed that India had merely obtained the body of freedom in 1947, and the body politic received its soul only in 2024.

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The man who gave it the soul was Narendra Modi. It required a Shankaracharya's wit to wonder whether it was Ram or Modi who was being consecrated, given the fanfare.

A Yet, one has to recognise that Modi has reshaped our sense of India by altering the very idea of India. The plural, informal, syncretic, playful sense of civilisation has given way to the puritanical nation-state as a monolithic entity.

Governance today speaks a language alienated from democracy. The nation-state has grown many layers to not only be a developmental state but a national security state. Democracy has become majoritarian to serve the surveillance state.

One has to recognise that this governance model did not encourage much debate.

Governance was elaborated like a catechism and a set of diktats summarised the administrative wisdom of the state. This was claimed to be a Sardar Patel inheritance in doing so, it co-opts and usurps the Iron man of India.

The nation-state was no longer what nationalism dreamt of. The idea of culture, which was almost anarchic, was being rationalised to serve the state. The annals of administration appeared tutorial-collegestyle as a set of listless techniques. The transition from India as a nation to the nation-state to a national security state was stark in creating shifts in foreign policy. The institutional changes that accompanied it were tacitly articulated. For example, science was now an accompaniment to a securitarian state, and applied science became the need of the hour. The project as a working style became the mode of productivity.