Will The BJP's Bid To Project Modi As The Messiah Of The Downtrodden Help It Win?

Will the Bjp’s Bid to Project Modi as the Messiah of the Poor Find Traction in the High-stakes Battle for Uttar Pradesh?

- Ajit Kumar Jha

IN MAY 2014, WHEN NARENDRA MODI became prime minister in a landslide victory, several commentators compared him to free market icons such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. With Modi’s slogan of “minimum government, maximum governance”, he was taken to be a messianic moderniser, a neo-liberal who would unleash unparalleled privatisation, free market liberalisation and deregulation.

Today, halfway through his first term as prime minister, he confounds both his conservative admirers and liberal detractors when they discover a radically different Modi—a prime minister who describes the demonetisation drive as redistributive justice, as a class war unleashed against the corrupt elite flaunting their black money. The enigmatic Modi echoes Indira Gandhi who, in her Garibi Hatao (eradicate poverty) avatar, used her executive power to nationalise 14 banks in one broad sweep. Indira Gandhi did it to silence and purge ‘the Syndicate’, her conservative critics within the Congress. Modi proletarianised himself with a revolutionary rhetoric to undercut an Opposition that charges him with running a suit boot ki sarkar (government of the rich).

In Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, Modi is carrying out a “passive revolution”, using state power to reshape a hegemonic role for the prime minister, by disrupting old ruling class coalitions and attempting to build an “organic coalition” with the masses. Will such new strategies disrupt the traditional caste and class allegiances and fetch votes in UP and other states?