Modi at Red Fort

THE IMAGE RECURS every Independence Day, the commemorative symbolism of which is matched by the political message it carries. There were times when we passed the moment with a yawn, for a litany of uplifting pieties can’t hold our enthusiasm beyond a point. It was more ritual than substance, that day in the year when history was reduced to an abridged fairy tale, and the future a laboured simulation. It was that day in the year when the leader didn’t see himself as the sole controller of the national conversation; the leader was only a character in the conversation.

Narendra Modi is one of the select few in the political class who have mastered the art of messaging. What matters is not the message alone but the style that makes the most ambitious projects look natural consequences of the politics he monopolises. On August 15, the message was not a vision conjured up for the consumption of the fan base because it all came from someone who knows that power is a permanent conversation. And the authenticity of such a conversation can be kept intact only when the leader is aware that the enormous power he wields is not an entitlement but an acquired privilege, a prerequisite for change.

The words spoken from Red Fort presented many variations of a pledge—a portrait of India as a nation in perpetual reinvention, the future as a story that has never been told before, and a promise that the choice India makes is what history wishes. In the end, words that formed the newest sentences of a passage that Modi has been perfecting since 2014, no matter from where. So, in his words we could read about:

—Anguish over Manipur, where “the dignity of mothers and daughters” was violated, and a refusal to abandon hope, in a tone that was more humane than political.

—An emphasis on the uniqueness of the moment, what he calls the beginning of Amrit Kaal: “The actions we take, the steps we take, the sacrifices we make, the penance we undertake in this era will define our legacy.” My race is to win history.

—Sharing the pride as the nation wakes up under his leadership: “Maa Bharti has been awakened and we have experienced in the last nine to ten years that this is the period in which a new trust, a new hope and a new attraction has emerged all over the world towards India…” The nation, with a civilisational accent, is back, and the world has noticed the new thunder from the East.

—Balancing cultural assertion with digital destiny. I, the moderniser, am committed to the ideal of AI taking orders from indigenous wisdom.

—The launching of a new power with an assured place at the global high table: “Today India is becoming the global south.” We may have taken an independent position on Ukraine, all the while rejecting war but not forsaking our historical relationship with the Kremlin, no matter who controls the Kremlin, and this autonomy of India’s geopolitical mind, and the confidence with which it is being exercised, only add to the world’s trust in India.

—Merging the leader’s biography with the nation’s, thereby projecting his life as a collective possibility of India’s 140 crore, and with a promise that could only come from someone who has won India’s confidence by first winning his own vote of conscience: “And next time, on the 15th of August, from this very Red Fort, I will present to you the achievement of the country…” I am here to stay, for I have a nation to rebuild, the raw material drawn from the aspirations you dare to show at last.

It is not eloquence alone that makes Modi one of the most effective communicators in power today. For eloquence is also a hallmark of demagogues presiding over faux democracies or outright dictatorships, constantly feeding fantasy to an entrapped people, playing with their fears. Modi is an old-school communicator for whom the possibilities of the world’s most volatile democracy are multiplying by the minute, and he is resorting to the newest words and phrases to translate the change—and make it accessible to the base, which shows no signs of shrinking. Modi is perhaps the most rewarded communicator because power for him is a necessary condition for national change, and the most powerful is the one who turns the pursuit into a relentless argument. Modi need not be on the stump to spread the good story—a day in power, like the day before, is a new episode in India reimagined by a nationalist-moderniser. India’s trust in him—certainly the India of the poor for whom change is always tangible, never a rhetorical abstraction—gives authenticity to the communicator—to his art of messaging. That is why, from Red Fort, the spectacular was equally substantial.

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