Modi’s ‘yagna’ on graft is the old Hindutva riff on repeat
Following his massive victory in Lok Sabha elections in 2014, then Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi embarked on some interesting optical jouney that, though expected, was nevertheless, difficult to accept for many Indians.
Modi, along with his retinue of elected leaders, performed a live-televised havan in Varanasi – his parliamentary seat – on the bank of Ganga, in an unprecedented show of strength and assertion of a Hindu right-wing identity.
In other words, Narendra Modi performed a yagna to mark his electoral triumph, a sight so bewitching and jarring at once that commentators and reporters could only sugarcoat it as Modi paying tribute to the holy city of Varanasi, where he defeated the then upstart Arvind Kejriwal.
That the yagna in Varanasi was the final act of a play that started on December 6, 1992, when Babri Masjid was brought down brick by medieval brick, could only be uttered in hushed tones in the stunned newsrooms and drawing rooms of India, which had expected democracy to “cure” Modi of his Hindutva inclinations.
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| Indians saw Modi re-framing himself in an unabashed Hindu religious identity, living up to the moniker Hindu Hriday Samrat. |
With great power comes great responsibility, a fractured India had hoped, while voting Narendra Modi to the topmost legislative seat in the country. And then Indians – a staggering conglomerate of people more diverse than half the world itself – saw Modi re-framing himself in an unabashed Hindu religious identity, living up to the moniker "Hindu Hriday Samrat".
Last Thursday, as the country marked one month of the finacial train wreck that is “notebandi”, PM Modi added another layer to his multi-tiered cake of demonetisation description. He tweeted: “I salute the people of India for wholeheartedly participating in this ongoing yagna against corruption, terrorism and black money.”
PM has been changing the demonetisation narrative since he announced it over a month back, on November 8 – shifting from a surgical strike on black money, to an eradication exercise targeting counterfeit currency, and then, hailing a cashless economy of Digital India – has now been demonstrated enough.
From calling it a “minor inconvenience” even as about 90 people have lost their lives to stress induced at endless ATM queues, to dubbing those upset at demonetisation as black money hoarders, Modi has played messiah and victim alternately, exhorting us to join him in what he thinks is his big bang reform.
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| Despite the economic catastrophe, demonetisation has become a moral project for India’s neo-middle class. (Photo: Reuters) |
In a way, this mirrors the way governance in the Modi era has changed the peg to justify its daily encroachment into citizens’ private lives, dictating terms and creating communal apartheid based on food choices (beef ban), romantic and marital bonds (love jihad, ghar wapsi), freedom of expression, hounding of intellectuals, degrading secularism as a pseudo-secular exercise in minority appeasement, and many more.
The shifting of goalposts, however, has cumulatively torn apart the gossamer’s thread of secular democracy in India, bludgeoned the behemoth that now lies bleeding profusely, fighting for its life.
Framing demonetisation as a “yagna” against corruption achieves the same end. That our talented Prime Minister Narendra Modi can not only script history, but also a colourful political potboiler, with many a metaphor and simile from the PM that will put the best dramatists to shame, has been proven beyond doubt.
Despite the economic catastrophe, demonetisation has become a moral project for India’s neo-middle class, which is mostly Hindu and urbane. For them, the promise of the cashless utopia has the same lure as “development” had in the run-up to 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
As long as mythical glory, a conduit connecting a dreamt-up ancient with the projected future, was offered in a platter, this Hindu, neo-middle class, technology-savvy WhatsApp warriors, would let Modi shepherd them to the garden of wireless and cashless delights, without checking once with realistic assessment of the said promise.
Hence, the utterly hideous, false and misleading equation of all cash with black money that Modi effectively puts forward, is bypassed at the altar of greater glory. This is another apoplectic moment, after the September 29 surgical strike against terrorists across the Line of Control separating Pakistan-occupied Kashmir from Indian Kashmir, when the sense of nationalism has been fused so fully with Modi’s ability to take “bold decisions”, that criticism, indeed any questioning of the pros and cons, looks unnecessary, and downright antinational.
As sociologist Sanjay Srivastava writes on the laudatory Amul ad on surgical strikes, “The insidious nature of the Amul advertisement, and others like it, lies in its attempt to instil a life of carnage as the normal state of being and, much worse, to make the innocence of childhood the grounds for the grotesque fantasies of adult violence.”
But he also observes that only the privileged eulogise violence as someone else dies, that the Centre treats the border as a sphincter that can endlessly teased, as a colony that can be neatly harnessed for the endless electoral game of chess.
The couching of the privilege of being unaffected by demonetisation comes in the lexical wrapping paper of a religious crusade, preferably Hindu nationalist.
The orgasmic delight of seeing Bharat Mata turn into a jazzed up version of herself, all plastic and electronic, singing peans to its online nationalism on Twitter and Facebook, tweeting the nationalism-enhancing hair salon experience with #CashDetox, as the head of Modi's Digital India project, Arvind Gupta did sometime back, is therefore nothing but the continuation of the old script, the script called Hindutva, presently in its most ruthlessly late capitalist avatar.
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