Redeeming the Redeemer Cult

AS IF ANOTHER reminder is needed. As if, when everything else, everyone else, in the picture is steeped in weariness and tenta­tiveness, there is only one certainty Indian politics can afford now. The persistence of Narendra Modi, as an idea reinforced by the imaginations of a people and as a ruler who turns his every working day into a renewal of the pledge, is democracy’s most compelling story today. What the results of the Assembly Elections 2023 reveal, yet again, is the extent of the passion with which India lives it. It’s a story seldom told in places where popular will is not filtered through the paranoia and pathologies of power, and where the volatility of electoral choices is matched by the plurality of the electorate itself. Its recur­rence in India is also a testament to the emotional covenant forged between political conviction and popular trust.

It remoulds popularity itself—and its indebtedness to social and demographic attitudes. Modi, unarguably, is the most popular leader in a legitimate democracy today, and what sets him apart is not its magnitude but its meaning, which doesn’t derive from the behavioural patterns of group identities. It is formed in the recesses of popular emotion—a politician’s safest constituency.

The Assembly elections have brought this out with their empha­sis on the personal, which, when everything else fails, is the most intimate expression in politics. If India is nothing but an intricate pattern of caste and communal traditions, a jigsaw of a million social incompatibilities, popularity can’t be a measure of the personal. It must be subject to social moods rather than emotional volatility. A Modi comes along, and the pattern unravels. The jigsaw collapses. His political personality is built on the wreckage of sociology that swayed the elections for so long.

It is not that some Modi voodoo has made the social realism of Indian politics disappear. It is that when the personal overwhelms a political space, the realism of win­ning elections and fortifying power needs an adjective other than ‘social’. In Modi’s India, a season of elections makes it ‘magical’, and, like its literary version, it is not a rejection of reality but an instance of political imagination recast­ing reality. When Modi is in power, or when Modi is on the stump, social identities cease to be a force of fragmentation and become a catalyst of consolidation. The personal, or being Modi, alone makes it possible.

It only shows that character is a bigger political asset than ideologies and identities. As far as leadership goes, India is a crowded place where every type has its role to play. From the residues of dead salvation theologies to variations of pro­vincialism and communal affinities, nothing is left out of the armoury of the Indian political class, and still, India remains something they can’t fully comprehend. Modi alone continues to be a story more compelling than the political text of his party because, in his campaign for India, he has already rei­magined himself as national redeemer.

We need to clarify. The redeemer cult in politics is not necessarily a triumph of democracy. It is mostly a manipulation of democracy. The redeemer crafts the perfect future with ideas mined from a history of hurt and humiliation; the road to glory is paved with reminders from a simulated past. The cult, sustained by controlled minds, becomes a repudiation of democracy rather than its vindication. It evokes more awe than affection, more fear than admiration. The cult of Modi has a different foundation, culturally as well as politically. It redeems the redeemer cult.

For the most indulged redeemer in a democracy, the nation is not a fairyland; it is a shared experience that cuts through the walls erected by identities. For so long, the nation was an idea that corrupted the secular soul; it was as corrosive as religion. The inherited intimacies of tradition were anti-modern, or that was what the original builders of the nation thought about popular impulses. They went on to control them by creating taboos, as if containing a people’s cultural attitudes was mandatory for a smooth passage of modernity. In retrospect, it was a misreading of modernity itself.

The point of rupture came when the impulses broke the idyll, and the nation returned to dominate the arguments about the future—even modernity itself. BJP’s victory in 2014 was a subversion of the Indian story as told and retold by successive ruling establishments with a weakness for borrowed isms. It was Modi who made the subversion a recipe for national redemption, and it is the personal story of being Modi that added authenticity to the mission. It was a time when the nationalist storytelling elsewhere in politics lacked credibility. Suddenly, courtesy Modi, the biographical be­came the most authentic ideological story told in politics. India is still listening.

India has been listening since the summer of 2014; maybe more than a decade before, when Chief Minister Modi turned every state election into a campaign for India. Since 2014, as the sole spokesman of a nation in search of cultural justice, his own story has provided the narrative propulsion. Not every politician succeeds, even in the long history of the redeemer complex, in making the biographical an essential element of a nation reimagined. He has prevailed because India was repeatedly convinced by the conviction with which he wins power, which alone makes the relentlessness of the argument for the future authentic. In every election, from the frontline, he told them that he had nothing at stake except his faith in the possibilities of India, and all the while, he could effortlessly play the moderniser and the cultural restorer, the internationalist without the crutches of Third Worldism and the nationalist who kept mobilising emotions, the time traveller who shuttled between the past and the future and the best storyteller on the stump… It looked so organic; and for most Indians, voting for him, whether the election was local or national, was a very natural exercise. The Indian redeemer cult has the added aura of authenticity.

As leadership behaviour across the world prompts many of us to put democracy itself on trial, Narendra Modi, believer in his own and his nation’s singularity, alone seems to renew the mantle of change. We are yet to measure its sweep.

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