A 'Modi-Fied' Reality

The Prime Minister has managed to ace the image game by being all-pervasive, and, at the same time, being an elusive political persona

- Ajay Gudavarthy

HINDUISM and neoliberalism emerged as strange bedfellows in India at the turn of the century. Postcolonial India was prided for its somewhat sacred separation between spirituality and materiality. It was often argued that even under colonial rule, the ‘inside’ India, marked by its spiritual pursuit, remained sovereign, and it was only the ‘outside’ that got colonised by materiality, the market and technology. In today’s—or rather Modi’s—‘New India’, the market and spirituality are having a gala time together in a bonhomie that is here to last.

What is even more important to note is that both Hinduism and neoliberalism are decentred and decentralised. Hinduism is more of a ‘way of life’ encompassing countless local practices, whereas neoliberalism is a faceless post-Westphalia phenomenon without an anchor. In a sense, both Hinduism and neoliberalism have no nation or sanctum sanctorum to reach out to.

In an earlier articulation, Gandhi struck a chord by mobilising diversity in all its beauty, and the Congress party, in its post-independence avatar, became representative of a decentred polity with the state through its planning and welfare-oriented social democratic vision—a conduit to hold dispersed realities together. India was classically typified as a ‘nation in the making’. Neoliberalism replaced the centrality of state and welfare and replaced it with the processes of globalisation and privatisation.

The emergence of an omnipresent Modi is the personification of this transformed, ‘Modi-fied’ reality. Modi represents the uncertainty that Hinduism came to represent in neoliberal times. Both the processes lacking an anchor gave rise to a mass psyche of insecurity, confusion and a sense of directionlessness. In such a context, Modi rose to fame with a larger-than-life image that can provide the new anchor.