Why It Is Still Modi

IT’S NOT ALWAYS THAT, in the history of nations, a people come to see in a leader the alchemist of their anxieties and aspirations, the one who makes the future not a fairy tale but a comprehensible reality. Such leaders owe the consistency of their power to the decreasing distance between the ruler and the ruled in an unrestrained democracy—to an intimacy necessitated by trust and preserved by the shared stories about common good. They are, in the genealogy of politics, what the familiar figures from the book of dictatorship are not. They don’t reinvent the nations like crazy nationalists and paranoid revolutionaries; they restore the lost memories of a culture, and make the past not a dispute but a mandatory reminder of who we are. They sway the popular mind not to launch a fantasy, feeding on fear, but to redeem the nation. They are born in the impatience of a people let down by the pathologies of power and the excesses of ideolo­gies. And it’s such knowledge that keeps them on the path. Their journey parallels the popu­lar will in a free society. Like the journey of Narendra Modi.

There were leaders before him who gained a monumental space in the national imagination. In the formative years of independence, it was for the nation builder to turn the privi­lege of being the first manager of freedom into a mandate for the future. What Nehru, with his cultural cosmopolitanism and ideological fascination with the Soviet Model, sought was the creation of the perfect citizen in a morally supervised republic. The wayward impulses of the nation and the natural affinities of religion, in the larger scheme of the secular statesman, only marred modernity, and restrained the state with a social morality. This lofty project, in retrospect, only sent national impatience underground.

If Nehru de-sentimentalised the nation, the other Leader with a Capital L who concentrated the Indian mind was a national sentimentalist with the cultivated aura of a Mother India. Even as Mrs G kept herself steady on the left, she turned the nation into an emotional investment. It was a misplaced nationalist’s paranoia that unleashed her totalitarian temptations, but still, when the Indira saga came to a heartbreaking end, the mythology of a leader who lived and died for the nation was born. The nation, though, was a story less compelling than the nationalist herself.

The nationalist who came to power after a historic right turn in Indian politics was more effective in atmospherics than recasting the nation in tune with his political inheritance. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s success was in taking India out of Third Worldism and realising the redundancy of anti-Americanism. It may have taken a while for India to catch up with the post-Berlin Wall world, but when it did, India’s first rightwing prime minister was at the helm as a culturally different internationalist. The right still failed to comprehend the enormity of the mandate they had won—and to keep it.

Change ceased to be a worn-out slogan and became a national project in 2014, and Narendra Modi was a different kind of leader even as BJP struggled to remain a party with a difference. The cultural content of his leadership set him apart from those who came before him. Here was someone for whom India was a permanent argument he couldn’t afford to lose, particularly in a country where the idea of nationhood was a necessary contention for a certain class of modern­ists. By balancing his commitment to modernisation with his adherence to the cultural traditions that moulded his political life, Modi made governance an exercise in national rebuilding. It was this image of the man overwhelmed by the magnitude of his own mission that dominated the politics of India for the last 10 years. Nothing else mattered but what Modi said or did to influ­ence the Indian mind and infuriate those who never accepted the inevitability of him—or the sociology behind making him one of the most shared stories in a democracy. His resoluteness alone animated the politics of the last decade; India went along with him because he had the stamp of authenticity, and he made himself an idea for India to reject or rejoice at. The vote of 2024, like the two before it, was India’s interpretation of Modi. Everything else was derivative.

On June 4, Modi was the argu­ment that won India, which would make him the longest-serving elected prime minister of India. Despite the stupendous effort to refashion decisive defeat as tentative victory, there was a clear winner and an inflated loser. NDA’s majority over I.N.D.I.A. was made possible by one man’s relentless campaign for the future, which itself was sustained by his convictions and gratitude. For, he could not have been unaware of the fact that most Indians saw in his empowerment the unrealised possibilities of themselves. It was not for him to live up to the exit polls. It was only for him to win India—and defeat I.N.D.I.A., which, unarguably, is the largest coalition of incompati­bles in a democracy. The opposition’s fragile unity in diversity is a testament to the absence of a fortifying idea other than the convenient anti-Modi-ism.

It’s a measure of the narrative subversion on the part of a section of the commentariat, suddenly relieved by the retreat of Indian democracy from the brink of an abyss, that the ruling party’s reduced numbers are being celebrated as the delegitimisation of the Modi mystique, no matter the gap between BJP and Congress is 141 seats. The House of anti- Modi is built on the politics of negativism and provincial­ism, the fig leaf of a laboured nomenclature notwithstand­ing. What stood out in their disparate campaign was not a cohesive argument for a qualitatively different India but outright rejectionism. The result brought out its limits.

It’s the nature of power that too much sunlight takes some sheen off the crown. Modi, in his tenth year as prime minister, still standing tall with a renewed mandate, too, may suffer a bit from the politics of familiarity. Which can only quicken the pace and sharpen the argument of someone who knows how to turn adversity into a political advantage. For India’s choice, the days after June 4 are a prologue as well as a provocation. We may just wait for the next restorative phase in the argument for the national future.

2024 ElectionsBJPGeneral election 2024ideologyIndian democracyleadershipNarendra ModiOppositionVerdict 2024