Modi’s Family Values

FAMILY MATTERS. In politics, family, as a fun­damental social unit, has given ideology a sense of stability whereas a set of dogmas could only provide certainties. And not just for the conser­vative who finds in the family the perfect agent of cohesion in a system built on the familiar. In an age when visual and other sensory communication influence public perception in a political campaign, it is for every­one on the trail to cash in on the ideal family picture. It’s more so in societies where the political content is made of both the public and the private.

In politics, family makes power an inheritance, too. The bloodline becomes stronger than the rewards of talent and popularity. It’s genealogy that matters, not ideology. Political dynasties revere the family as the highest and loftiest institution, and not for the wrong reasons in their world of morality passed down through generations. It’s in the families where the truest form of trust is edified and guarded against the natural instincts of a democracy.

Indian politics’ relationship with family is as old as India’s freedom, and if there’s one extra-constitu­tional institution that defined the nation’s journey as a democracy, it’s the dynasty. The Nehru-Gandhis may have survived as one of the world’s most enduring dynasties; its last gasping days continue to provide Indian politics with a theatre in which an exhausted legacy struggles for relevance. The political soil of India is so fertile that dynasties of various sizes and influence still hold power as a privilege shared within the family. The longer the lineage prevails the easier it becomes for the denationalisation of power.

It’s the patriarch of a provincial dynasty that faulted the prime minister for not having a family: “What can we do if Narendra Modi does not have a family of his own?” He then went on to question even Modi’s credentials as a true Hindu son. That this reprimand for Modi failing the family test comes from someone like Lalu Prasad Yadav says something about how family values work in Indian politics.

Lalu Prasad, the old socialist from the Lohia school, has come a long way from the original romance of anti- Congressism. As Bihar’s chief minister, he made ‘badlands’ the most familiar synonym for the state, and ‘jungle raj’ its idealised version of governance, and, in the end, he himself would become a fallen character in the tragedy of heartland socialism. He played many parts, from the em­powered cowherd of Aney Marg to the first jester of Indian politics who understood the electoral power of kitsch, even as the jokes would finally be on him. Those roles were probably affectations that suited the cameras. The role that he played to perfection was as the builder of India’s first kitchen cabinet, literally. What made him content with life, as he watched its legacy from jail and elsewhere, was the power of his bloodline. The patriarch today sees himself as a qualified preacher of family values. More than irony, it’s pathology that characterises his new role.

That Modi does not have a biolog­ical family is not true to begin with. In Lalu Prasad’s idea of a family man in politics, maybe Modi is a misfit because his family members do not figure in the political space he dominates, and they are not share­holders in power. Modi responded with confidence: “My life is an open book. One hundred and forty crore Indians are my family. Today crores of daughters, mothers and sisters of the country are Modi’s family. Every poor person in this country is my family. Those who have no one belong to Modi and Modi belongs to them.”

With just one statement that subverts the family values that Lalu Prasad and most of his other comrades in the opposition promote in their political enterprise, Modi has given his family credentials a meaning which no other politician in India is qualified to replicate

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With just one statement that subverts the family val­ues that Lalu Prasad and most of his other comrades in the opposition promote in their political enterprise, Modi has given his family credentials a meaning which no other politician in India is qualified to replicate. More than rebuke his detractors’ parivarvad, the prime minister’s self-portrait as a family man elevates him from politics-as-usual to a realm where the expediencies of the personal cease to exist for the ultimate nationalist. If the nation is a collective imagination of a people, only a higher dose of emotion can make it an immediate as well as intimate experience. For Modi, most rewarding too.

This idealised version of the Indian family man in power sets him apart from a political culture that has institutionalised Family First. Its most visible representative, playing a role for which everyone except himself knows that he is a miscast, has already shown that one of the world’s oldest political dynasties has made itself redundant in Modi’s India. No invocation of the holy ghosts can make ancestry an asset for Rahul Gandhi in the arena, where he continues to emphasise his inability to form either a coherent conversation with India or an argument against Modi. That he remains a princeling in the opposition alliance only reveals how the allies pitted against Modi are shown the path (to nowhere) by the Family.

Modi’s family values challenge the political culture where family means the privatisation of empowerment. By bring­ing every Indian into his family fold, Modi makes dynasties that overwhelm I.N.D.I.A. aware of their diminished national credentials as spokespersons for India. What he has left unsaid is: Power is not the profit accumulated from one of democracy’s most volatile markets but a shared asset of every Indian.

It may sound cultivated loftiness if uttered by a lesser politician. What makes Modi the most popular elected leader in a democracy today is his relationship with power. Those who habitually reject him as a ruler blinded by his own aura prefer to be in denial, refusing to accept the change in India’s appreciation of power as well as the change in the art of exercising power. Five years ago, power, in his then self-portrait, made India’s chowkidar more dutiful. In grassroots patois, it was the guardian angel speaking, and most Indians approved. Today the same Indians, and likely more, identify themselves as Modi ka Parivar. Trust is one thing that they take for granted in a family.

Still, what cannot be taken for granted is Narendra Modi, whose identity, yesterday’s watchman and today’s patriarch, is periodically explained by Modi himself. In one of politics’ most captivating journeys, every waystation adds a layer to the power of being him­self, being the multiplying possibilities of every Indian in democracy’s largest family. The family values of India’s patriarch hasten the unravelling of an I.N.D.I.A. weighed down by what else but family baggage.

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S Prasannarajan

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