Modi at 75

What democracy today is the absence of leadership with a motive larger than templated ideas and electoral urgencies. The stage, shaken by wars extending from the battlefields of disputed histories to the marketplace of vindictive tariffs, is crowded by self-styled redeemers with an exaggerated sense of indispensability, autocrats claiming ownership of a restricted civil society, and those holding on to the last straw of legitimacy in the face of alternatives rising from the recess of disenchantment. The expectancy of a life in power is marred by the collapsing guardrails of a system most of us think is still best suited for governance. The question of whether the cause is exhaustion or atrophy is a bestselling enquiry in political science. Now take a pause. It only takes the imagination of a politician who is in a permanent conversation with a nation that balances its impatience with its aspiration to defy the pessimism. 

The name of one such politician has become the most shared invocation in a democracy. Being Narendra Modi is a study in the endurance of conviction and clarity in the exercise of power. On the eve of his 75th birthday, and in the 24th year of his life in power, he is one of those rare politicians who make tomorrow an anticipation, not an anxiety, which is no small consolation in a world where the fear of curated liberties darkens the future of democracy. The ascent of such a life shatters the much-feted motifs of politics-as-usual, provokes a class steeped in entitlement and enrichment, and gains unrestricted access to the popular mind. It is a privilege accorded to a few, and it is squandered by those who mistake the size of the mandate for acquired divinity. If Modi is still out there as the most authentic model in the politics of national renewal, it only brings out how organic is the covenant of trust between him and the people. 

When his experiment with power was launched, in 2001, there was nothing extraordinary about the man or the event, except perhaps that his sense of the nation, shaped by the Sangh, surpassed the assignment of a chief minister. When Gujarat was set on fire by hate, his journey could have been halted by the embers of a riot. Adversity only strengthened his purpose, and in the beginning itself, power provided him with a compelling argument for change. It was a word trivialised by slogans, but he was determined to prove that power could render a rhetorical cliché meaningful. It was not the longevity of his chief ministership alone that set his Gujarat story apart. It was the epithet of India’s chief minister that made him special, for Gujarat was a stage on which he played out, with unmatched panache, a role that was truly national. Even as he made Gujarat a model state of development, which itself was not the theme of his stump performances. India was the story he told with such narrative flamboyance. From the morning inferno of New York 2001 to the machinations of Mian Musharraf to the terror within, the arc of his argument, delivered from the home turf, always highlighted the mounting threat to the nationalist ideal. India’s storyteller certainly needed a bigger stage.

When he stormed  into Delhi in the summer of 2014, it was a conquest as well as a validation. It was the power of his message that made him a national inevitability, and that it came ten years after the Indian right’s failure to retain power despite a much-indulged moderate as its mascot was a confirmation: the space for a nationalist reclamation was lying vacant—and waiting. And that it happened before Brexit and Trump Part One would make India the original site of the outsider’s ascent—and the nation’s revenge. True, Modi’s storming of “the Sultanate” was made possible by the nationalist daring against the pathologies of what LK Advani called “pseudo-secularism”. It took a while for the rearmed right to turn the grievance of the Hindu into a political weapon, though its first beneficiaries could not even realise what the mandate meant in a country conditioned by the virtues of borrowed isms, and where nationalist and religious affinities were a taboo, a cultural threat to the Nehruvian New Man. The Hindu nationalist in power began as a moderniser with a cultural accent.

To summarise the eleven years of Modi’s prime ministership is to abridge the Indian story in a new language of confidence. It was the compassionate moderniser at work when he balanced freedom in the marketplace with empowerment in the countryside. It was the conviction of a cultural restorer that made the idea of being a Hindu not an apology but a civilisational talisman. It was the internationalist not beholden to the last vestiges of Third Worldism who got India a place at the global high table—at long last the wise man from the East did not come from China. The new strongman was not a controller of democracy but an original who plumbed its depths with political ingenuity; he was not a populist who feared the instincts of a civil society but perhaps the most popular politician in the free world whose spartan elegance was as much on display as his allegiance to the decencies of public life.

The rite of change featuring Narendra Modi is a political thriller set in a nation fast shedding its inherited inhibitions. Turn the pages and what you hear is the rustle of history.

Happy Birthday, Mr Prime Minister. 

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