How Modi is becoming Gandhi 2.0
On the eve of Mahatma Gandhi's death anniversary, two images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent creations come to my mind. I know it will shock the purists, but please bear with me.
Image One: Modi gingering up the Republic Day parade which has fallen into a rut by the sheer routine it had followed all these years by making "Nari Shakti" its theme this year. As an old army hand I was thrilled to see "lady officers" - let us not fool ourselves they were pretty girls in trousers (as the MCP in me says) - from the armed forces proudly marching in front of the presidents of India and the US. I was not the only one to be impressed. Everyone who saw the women in uniform said so, as though they were waiting for a visual endorsement of an idea feminists have been trying hard to sell for a century.
Of course, the same feminists may find fault with Modi for showcasing women soldiers marching together in the parade, although they were serving individually alongside men in their units. But Modi is selling an idea they could not to the national audience on a show with the highest TRP rating.
Image Two: The Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme launched by Modi heralding a multi-modal approach to improve the rapidly falling child sex ratio in the country. The idea of saving the girl child is nothing new. Various state and central governments had largely entrusted its implementation in bits and pieces to their overburdened bureaucracy, while the leaders made speeches about it. BBBP aims at hitting at the core issues - respecting, protecting and fulfilling the rights of girls and women and ending gender based violence. Knowing Modi's style of working, social welfare departments and their netaji ministers will be sweating it out for the next few months to achieve targeted results.
Mahatma Gandhi was perhaps the archpriest of marketing ideas of social change in applied politics. He transformed the humble khadi worn by the poor people into a product of brand equity for the freedom struggle. And it still lives, though unfortunately it has become the armour worn by political class to make them impervious to shame. He made the primitive spinning contraption "charkha" into a powerful weapon of warfare in his non-violent struggle against the British.
Perhaps his biggest marketing coup was converting Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a proud Pathan of the hardy warrior class living in Afghan frontier who spoke only with their guns, into a man of non violence.
The Mahatma can only be slotted in a 'hallowed' class of his own because he defied traditional branding of a politician. He mixed religion, politics and the fight against social inequality to dish out palatable doses of homespun wisdom that made sense to the poor as much as to the rich.
After sweeping garbage as part of his morning chore, he could easily palaver with the Viceroy of the British India later in the day. Mahatma Gandhi promoted all his ideas with a lot of showmanship. This enabled him to use mundane day-to-day actions in showy promotion of ideas on social change. Of course, now and then they were interspersed with shocking concepts like advising virtues of Brahmacharya forgetting he was a married man. But every piece of his action served to strengthen the "Brand Gandhi" that made it easier for him to sell other ideas. The durability of Gandhi as a brand is such that it still lives on around us.
After the Mahatma was assassinated 57 years ago by a former RSS cadre Nathuram Godse, we have the irony of another former RSS organiser Narendra Modi picking up the Gandhian ideas on marketing social change by mixing it in political discourses with great effect. The two recent examples I had given at the start of this article bear testimony to this. This is in sharp contrast to the Congress' forgotten Gandhian discourse, even though the Mahatma spent his political life nurturing the party.
It is holding on to its symbols while wallowing in self pity to prop up its modern day icons brought down by none other than Modi. It would be unfair to equate Modi with Mahatma Gandhi. But Modi seems to have read Gandhi thoroughly. He is doing what his fellow Gujarati from another century did: sell his ideas on social change with a lot of showmanship. Modi may or may not succeed as much as the Mahatma did, but at least he is trying. With every attempt, his brand is getting strengthened. While Mahatma Gandhi's latter day followers like Acharya Kripalani and Acharya Vinoba Bhave would not have appreciated such brand building, I am not so sure about Bapu himself. He may have just grinned.