Backstory: A Modi Cult in the Making?

A couple of weeks ago, I was part of an audience of Delhiites – mostly young professionals but also a significant number who would fall under the rubric of “family audience” – that was watching Omung Kumar’s eponymous film PM Narendra Modi. The prominent disclaimer which began the film, insisting that it didn’t claim to be historically authentic, did in no way disrupt the seamless connect the movie established between the viewers and the protagonist towering in 70 mm colour before them.  

All the creative liberties taken by the filmmaker to impart super heroic, clearly improbable attributes, to the protagonist – such as walking in deep snow without footwear in the upper reaches of the Himalaya in search of spiritual truth – seem to be accepted as real-life experiences. One could gauge this from the moments of pin drop silence, interrupted by occasional whistles and claps, and even the innocent questions young children looking at the screen put to their guardians.

Quite possibly, the majority of those in the auditorium had voted for Narendra Modi in this general election, and every scene that played before their eyes only reinforced the validity of their unqualified endorsement of the man. Nothing underlined this more effectively than the spontaneous laughter that rang out every time a “clueless” Sikh gentleman made an appearance. ‘Man Maun Singh’, depicted as a slave to a woman in a sari speaking accented Hindi, has clearly transited into being a stock comic figure for such an audience.

The question that arose as one watched this film was whether Prime Minister Modi is well on the way to becoming a cult or has the cult already taken shape? The writer of The Wire piece, ‘The Rise of the NaMo Cult and What Lies Ahead for 'New India'' (May 29), dates its provenance to the chief ministership days of Moditva, with its heady combination of Hindutva and ‘Gujarati Asmita’, but which came out of its ‘regional shell’ in the 2014 general election (“launched with fanfare in Varanasi, with the chanting of ‘Har Har Modi’”) and gained even greater weight with the 2019 election. A process helped without doubt by cash reserves that touched stratospheric heights (‘The 2019 Elections Came Down to Money, EVM Machines and the Media’, June 7).

Also read: What the Age of Narendra Modi Means for Indian Foreign Policy

Cults thrive once ordinary people begin to implicitly believe in the powers of benefaction of the leader and they are loathe to question that perception, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. This requires the twin actions of publicly projecting the cult figure as the personification of greatness, even as the forces construed as inimical to him or her are subjected to vilification on a continuing basis, so that the possibility of a potential challenger is diminished, if not extinguished.

So has the Modi cult stabilised? Difficult to say, but clearly the self-projection that marked Modi’s early years in power has done its work well enough to ensure that ordinary people now invest him with extravagant virtue and pristine rectitude, without even having to be prompted by his own considerable skills of self-communication.

What one could venture to state is that the Modi-as-cult-figure is a work in progress, which will be furthered in the days ahead through Yoga Day demonstrations and Independence Day speeches, “society building programmes” and celebrations of national anniversaries. A cult figure does not need to address a press conference – let that small job be left to Amit Shah. It can even undertake something as seemingly quixotic as an overnight break in a Himalayan cave, wrapped up in a saffron shawl, and gain country-wide murmurs of admiration.

Modi-as-cult-figure can take the occasional unilateral rhetorical detour – calling upon his party to gain the trust of Muslims, for instance. But there can be no diluting of the prime ideological agenda – that of furthering Hindutva. So a new motto is pronounced –  “Sabka Vishwas” (gaining everybody’s trust) – at a time when there is a sharp spike in random vigilante violence against Muslims in an orgy of post-May 23 triumphalism, but on which nothing is said (‘Why Hindutva's Dark Fantasy About India's Muslims Could Become Real’, June 2).

The Indian mainstream media, with a few exceptions, have over the last five years emerged as one of the main forces that have lent this cult-in-the-making a crucial authenticity and ‘publicness’. This is also why this media cannot be a force to counter it (‘The Mainstream Media Is No Ally for Those Fighting the Cult of Narendra Modi’, June 3).

How then can a challenge to it be mounted? To expect a few media entities and individuals who have thus far courageously stood outside the all-encompassing ring of allegiance, to actually dismantle it, is unrealistic. To expect that this can be achieved by them in an atmosphere that is growing increasingly partisan, vituperative and hostile; where funding is shrinking and sustaining media operations has become an enormous challenge, is unreasonable.

A few good people in the media cannot undertake this task alone. It requires an enabling environment that has to be built by society as a whole. It is about raising the question posed by a school educator (‘Letter from a Teacher to the Parents of His Students in ‘New India’, May 30):

“In the five days since the elections finished, there have been five separate incidents of communal hatred…Is this the India you want for your children? It’s certainly not the India I want for my students.”

It is to call out, at the broadest social level, the Sangh parivar for its politics of fear (‘Modi 2.0 Must Check the Sangh's Role in Generating Politics of Fear’, May 26). It is about bringing together the people and voices behind movements and agitations, whether over the deliberate undermining of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (‘What Does a Second NDA Term Entail for India's Environmental Policies?’, May 27),  the struggle for justice in the case involving Payal Tadvi, a young doctor, whose identity as a tribal and Muslim left her vulnerable to the slurs of her upper-caste colleagues, until she could bear them no longer (‘Payal Tadvi's Case Follows Predictable Pattern of Victim Blaming’, June 3), or any other.

Also read: A New India Has Emerged and Narendra Modi Is Its Voice

It is also about generating an alternative discourse. The piece, ‘Modi Cannot Be Combatted Through Politics as Usual’ (May 30), argues that it is in the “near-total absence of a grand vision and supportive ideas from Modi, whose megalomania has distanced him from the cares and concerns of the deprived, the marginalised, the oppressed”, that there is an “opportunity to shape and alternative discourse”. But a sustainable, alternative discourse is impossible without alternative politics and achieving an alternative politics will be the challenge of the next half-decade.

Repression is also information withheld

As the rest of us have gone about our lives over this past year, human rights activists locked up in the Bhima Koregaon case have remained behind bars. It is simply shocking to learn about the innumerable stratagems employed by the Maharashtra Police to ensure that they do not get what is their fundamental right, the right to bail.

As defence advocate Nihalsing Rathod pointed out in The Wire piece, ‘A Year Later, Rights Activists Accused in Bhima Koregaon Case Struggle for Bail’ (June 6), since the first round of arrests that took place exactly a year ago, applications for bail hearings have come up at least 60 times, “but they have not been decided upon”. This is also a story of suppression of information. The sizeable “literature” that the Pune Police has gathered to damn the activists – which at 5,000 page would give Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace competition in terms of wordage (and possibly creative licence) – has not been made available to the accused themselves, despite a court order.

Now that the general election is over, what exactly is this dragging of police boots all about? Is it the impending Maharashtra elections that they are now waiting for? If the media were half as pro-active in probing into this, as they were in putting out the police’s version in the case, Indian democracy may have been spared this blatant display of state repression.  

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Wire reader, Geetanjali Jha, believes that the AAP minister was misquoted in the June 4 piece, ‘Its Time to Defang 'Meritocracy', an Argument That Claims Lives’ (which incidentally has an embarrassing typo in the heading – the word ‘Its’ should have been ‘It’s’ or ‘It is’). She was present at the event in which the minister spoke and vouches for the fact that he did not say that the focus given to the death of Payal Tadvi “diverts” society’s attention from issues of “development”. She goes on to state that while she herself is a student and does not represent any party – and definitely not AAP – she believes this misinterpretation of what the minister said might amount to misleading readers and voters.

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Another reader, Mayur, who like Geentanjali believes in The Wire’s “bold and courageous journalism”, is disappointed that nobody, including The Wire, is “talking much about the draft national education police 2019 that will adversely impact the future of India and that of young Indians". He is particularly worried about Section 8.4 that talks about amending Section 12.1 of the Right to Education Act, which reserves 25% of seats for children belonging to the disadvantaged and weaker sections in private schools.

Mayur writes: “The idea behind this clause was to create inclusive classrooms where the Disabled, SCs, STs, HIV-positive and EWS children come together. This poses a strong resistance to caste and class discrimination in our society. I suppose that’s exactly the reason why it is being diluted.”

He wants The Wire to dwell on this theme and says he would be happy to provide it with “evidence from research papers and data from states that counter the recommendations in the draft.” Now that is what I call a thinking, pro-active reader.

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The general election verdict may have faded from public memory, but readers still seem exercised over certain aspects of it. Biplov Ghosh sent in infographics to suggest that all was not well with the way the votes were counted. He writes: “According to data given in Election Commission of India’s official website, the total voter turnout in all phases of Jharkhand is 14,199,120 (it is the sum of the total voter turnout in all four phases in which election held in the state). But when we add up all the votes counted in each constituency on counting day, we arrive at a figure of 14,962,473, which is 763,353 more than the original count of voter turnout in all phases. How is it possible? This phenomenon has been noticed not just in Jharkhand but in many other states.”

Meanwhile, Akbar Basha has proposed an intriguing idea. “I was wondering how do political parties, who spend so much in canvassing for votes, pay their employees (karyakartas)? The whole system seems wrong. We all know that no-one will fund any party unless they are assured profitable returns of some kind. I don't know if the Indian Constitution allows this, but why can't our country be run by a private or public company which is solely Indian? Every panchayat, municipality, state assembly or Lok Sabha election can then be fought by various companies and the most deserving one among them can be given the chance to run the nation on a transparent basis and in a way that there is zero tolerance for irregularities of any kind. The company, in turn, should be paid for its efforts and ensure that all its employees get paid. Perhaps with such transparency, we will really get to see actual work done, instead of being given mere lip service. There has to be a performance review for each panchayat, municipality, constituency, employee and leader. The additional benefit of this approach would be to create more jobs!”

Sachin Kadam, as a regular reader, gets the last word for his suggestions on improving the outreach of The Wire. He suggests that it should allow readers to download news in order to read it offline. There should also be an automatic “daily edition download”. Such features can be made chargeable – just as is the case with The New York Times and The Economist.

Write to publiceditor@cms.thewire.in.

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