The ONLY ONE
The power and pervasiveness
of an idea called Modi.
By S PRASANNARAJAN
You may say that politics as
a science of change has run its
course. National mythologies are
no longer written by the old
peddlers of ideology but by smart
manipulators of dreams and
despair. They are thriving in
places where resentment is the
new religion, and fear of the
future is the most shared
sentiment, and that is exactly
what the insurgents of populism
covet. In the new order of salvation politics, the world is once
again a wretched place made worse by the last purveyors of
conventional politics. It needs new revolutionaries who can
shatter the centre, energise the fringe and adopt a people
abandoned by the Left and the Right. Their legion is multiplying.
Narendra Modi is not one of them.
The swelling impatience of India may have accelerated his ascent, but his story, the only story that excites India now, is different in its origin and nature. He is not your textbook populist who came from the periphery to harvest the anger, feeding on the pathologies of fallen totems. He is not a child of instant disruption. His evolution is methodical, one of Indian politics’ longest quests for power, a lone passage through adversities and all those pieties of the establishment.
The swelling impatience of India may have accelerated his ascent, but his story, the only story that excites India now, is different in its origin and nature. He is not your textbook populist who came from the periphery to harvest the anger, feeding on the pathologies of fallen totems. He is not a child of instant disruption. His evolution is methodical, one of Indian politics’ longest quests for power, a lone passage through adversities and all those pieties of the establishment.
In retrospect, 2014 was a victory made inevitable by the faith
of one man in the possibilities of himself in a nation abandoned
by its politicians. When he reached Delhi, as a debunker who
became the name of a movement, it was not the culmination
of his struggle for power. It was merely a pause in his struggle
with power. Along the way, he had to fight the demonology of
his caricature, and that too without any help from the party. He
never stopped arguing, and no politician was as passionate as
him about the redemptive possibilities of political power.
For India, though, Modi’s triumph in 2014 was a moment of rejection and renewal. Politics as a corrupt enterprise of the privileged, headed by one of the world’s most enduring dynasties, was rejected. A new sense of the nation was born. For so long, the ‘glorious nation’ was a backward journey, taking the enthralled to a distant yesterday. For once, there was no picnicking in mythology, and the dividends of demography in a country with a growing youth population did not allow the retro-romance of the old Ram Rajya. A Hindu nationalist could also be an inclusive moderniser, and Modi was more at home in a conversation with the future than eulogising the past.
Power intensifies his struggle. The campaign must go on. The victory in Uttar Pradesh brings out the velocity of the campaign, which not just psephologists but all of us in journalism have failed to gauge. Maybe it is not just the national mood that we are bad at reading; we are probably missing the nation itself. The last certainties of Indian politics are dying a quiet death in Modi’s republic, and we are too distracted by the headlines to notice the slow march of history. The idea of change itself has changed. The wreckage around Mandate 2017 shows the magnitude of his victory, but more tellingly, it highlights the volume of repudiation. He has made the India that doesn’t follow his script redundant.
The first overwhelming idea is that one man’s integrity is an entire nation’s destiny. This is not the march of the maximum leader as we know it, for Modi plays out his personalised politics in what is perhaps the most instinctive democracy. It is not ideology but biography that propels the leadership of Modi, the only storyteller of Indian politics. A higher sense of self-awareness has given his politics, even as it promotes a cult, an aura of detachment. At play is the ascetic, a man without a context, as if politics itself is a karmic endeavour rather than a professional calling.
It is the power of the singular that makes the Modi story compelling. In a country where the moral hollowness of politics is tolerated in the name of pragmatism, he is fiercely confident of his own moral exceptionalism. That is what makes him the best in realising the uses of adversity. He is ambitious, but his ambition is untouched by wealth or family or leisure; it is a spiritual quest. It is not the economics of demonetisation that has been endorsed by the poor in UP; it is the honesty of the man who stands for nothing but the restoration of an equal India. What makes the so-called conviction politician a trusted ally in unequal societies is not his version of utopia but his authenticity. And that is something Modi has in abundance. In an age when ‘fake’ is the most popular adjective in nativist politics, India offers variety. Modi has made his opposition irrelevant because he is an original in an arena dominated by fakes. They don’t have a counter-narrative to face up to him; all they have is an immense capacity to wallow in defeatism.
For India, though, Modi’s triumph in 2014 was a moment of rejection and renewal. Politics as a corrupt enterprise of the privileged, headed by one of the world’s most enduring dynasties, was rejected. A new sense of the nation was born. For so long, the ‘glorious nation’ was a backward journey, taking the enthralled to a distant yesterday. For once, there was no picnicking in mythology, and the dividends of demography in a country with a growing youth population did not allow the retro-romance of the old Ram Rajya. A Hindu nationalist could also be an inclusive moderniser, and Modi was more at home in a conversation with the future than eulogising the past.
Power intensifies his struggle. The campaign must go on. The victory in Uttar Pradesh brings out the velocity of the campaign, which not just psephologists but all of us in journalism have failed to gauge. Maybe it is not just the national mood that we are bad at reading; we are probably missing the nation itself. The last certainties of Indian politics are dying a quiet death in Modi’s republic, and we are too distracted by the headlines to notice the slow march of history. The idea of change itself has changed. The wreckage around Mandate 2017 shows the magnitude of his victory, but more tellingly, it highlights the volume of repudiation. He has made the India that doesn’t follow his script redundant.
The first overwhelming idea is that one man’s integrity is an entire nation’s destiny. This is not the march of the maximum leader as we know it, for Modi plays out his personalised politics in what is perhaps the most instinctive democracy. It is not ideology but biography that propels the leadership of Modi, the only storyteller of Indian politics. A higher sense of self-awareness has given his politics, even as it promotes a cult, an aura of detachment. At play is the ascetic, a man without a context, as if politics itself is a karmic endeavour rather than a professional calling.
It is the power of the singular that makes the Modi story compelling. In a country where the moral hollowness of politics is tolerated in the name of pragmatism, he is fiercely confident of his own moral exceptionalism. That is what makes him the best in realising the uses of adversity. He is ambitious, but his ambition is untouched by wealth or family or leisure; it is a spiritual quest. It is not the economics of demonetisation that has been endorsed by the poor in UP; it is the honesty of the man who stands for nothing but the restoration of an equal India. What makes the so-called conviction politician a trusted ally in unequal societies is not his version of utopia but his authenticity. And that is something Modi has in abundance. In an age when ‘fake’ is the most popular adjective in nativist politics, India offers variety. Modi has made his opposition irrelevant because he is an original in an arena dominated by fakes. They don’t have a counter-narrative to face up to him; all they have is an immense capacity to wallow in defeatism.
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