The Redeemer’s Rite

On a wintry morning in Ayodhya, dressed in crisp off-white and carrying the crown, he walked confidently towards the destination he had vowed to reach one day, undeterred by any obstacles that stood in his way. His strides were as solemn as the air was thick with devotion. In the next few minutes of India’s most televised homecoming of a god who had been displaced by a disputed history but never abandoned by aggrieved Hindus, he presided over a ceremony that no other head of government in a secular state has done in the past.

On January 22, 2024, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, Narendra Modi fulfilled his promise as he led the consecration of Ram in a grand temple. The world’s most popular politician in a liberal democracy redefined national freedom in terms of cultural inheritance and civilisational memory, and in doing so, he achieved a rare feat in the history of political power in this country: in the restoration of a much-beloved god to his birthplace, he has ordained himself as the redeemer of Hindu nationalism, which, in his own words, is not a repudiation of modernity but a reminder of its cultural content.
It was a moment of religious and cultural rupture.

Nationalism has always been a contentious sentiment in the evolutionary story of independent India, maybe as much as it was a kinetic force in India’s struggle for independence. If nation with a capital ‘N’ was the idea under occupation before 1947, after independence, it was this same idea that needed guidance from the original nation-builders with a deeper understanding of it. India was not different in this lofty mission of dutiful liberators seen in most postcolonial societies. The only difference—and it was a big one—was that India defied the trajectory of most of the newly freed colonies where the liberators took the surest path to tyranny. In the book of the original nation-builders, what the modernisation project of free India needed was a restriction of primordial impulses and an enforced adherence to officially sanctified secularism. It is this progressive view of India that made the idea of the nation and the public attitudes of religion anti-modern. The New Indian, scientifically tempered and secularly programmed, like the New Man of socialism in another era, was meant to be modernity’s ideal advertiser. Was it a hollow golem?

In the summer of 2014, when Narendra Modi became prime minister, it was not the end of perhaps the longest campaign in Indian politics—a campaign that erupted from the embers of Gujarat 2002. He was unarguably India’s most popular chief minister, but he made himself inevitable to the state in three consecutive elections not as a politician with a provincial agenda but as a passionate interpreter of the nation, which, in his stump speeches, was slave to an establishment that distrusted India’s cultural ancestry, its civilisational memory. Power in 2014 intensified his campaign for rebuilding the nation. And it was going to be a long journey. Redeemers do not want the foreword to their saga to be written in haste.

The India story of the Modi decade, from 2014 to 2024, turned that worn-out word every politician with revolutionary aspiration overuses into a political intimacy in the world’s most impatient democracy. ‘Change’, for once, became a lived experience. One politician’s struggle—and his conversation with the future—would become a nation’s reassessment of its very being. The nation was no longer a restricted pride; and a public expression of religion was not a subversion of the secular ideal. India, as a nation-state, shed its inhibitions. It was a higher sense of the nation that allowed Modi to interpret power not as a privilege but as an emotional engagement with the cultural identity of the land. He brought to the arena the question that has mobilised, divided and united nations through centuries: Who are we? If a Hindu adjective to nationalism looks organic and inevitable today, it is because he, as the rebuilder of the nation, does not see the cultural impulses of a people as a threat to modernity. After all, the back stories of the world’s most developed societies have an overwhelming religious content, though ‘Christendom’ has already normalised its indebtedness to the Book. India’s nationalist text with a religious flavour has just begun. Modi simply wants to emphasise the obvious. Secularism, he implies, is not a repudiation but an integration of traditions. His message is this: nationalism with a religious accent is not a project in fear, as those who are still trapped in the jargon of majoritarianism would love to cry out; it is the kind of cultural synthesisation that makes secularism meaningful.

Modi’s battlefield, as a lone warrior with a larger waiting period for acceptability in India’s middle class than most of his contemporaries in their struggle for power, has never been confined to the electoral space. Once in power, the other constituency got equally important for him: the Great Indian Mindspace. He is not a proselytiser or an indoctrinator. He is a storyteller. Stories change nations. He told them as motivational pieces, and the frisson was generated by the seamless blending of aspiration, dreams and patriotism, and the style varied from avuncular intimacy to prophetic grandeur to conversational casualness. And the India in his telling is not a fairyland—a familiar place in the fantasy of nationalist-autocrats—but a place rooted in hard realism. Its full realisation, he tells you, is the ultimate realisation of nationhood itself. <Mann ki Baat>, his storytelling session with India in which the listener becomes a part of the story, is the best episodic expression of a country that has ever emerged from a politician. The great communicator may be a media construct that is too eager to turn every windbag on the stump into a Cicero, but certain politicians have had an easy access to the popular mind; for instance, storytellers such as Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher. They make political communication an art of alternative reality—beyond the wretchedness of the present lies a perfection worthy of us. As one of the most effective communicators in politics today, Modi makes the idea of the nation a shared enchantment among the millions who see in him their own unrealised possibility. That is a sure recipe for a bestseller.

Still, even if the past propels his mission for the future, and even if tradition adds content to his modernisation agenda, the tomorrow he intends to build does not draw its raw material from a perfumed history. The Modi of the marketplace makes the best use of technology to make India as egalitarian as possible. That is why the digital destiny is not just a trendy mantra but an acceptance of the inevitable. He is not a revolutionary in the marketplace, and he has never intended to be a panegyrist of capital, and that is one reason for the disappointment of those who anticipated an Indian version of Reagan or Thatcher in him. As a gradualist reformer, he knew that India was in too unequal a place to withstand ruthless reforms. The state still has a role to play, and the role need not be of socialist vintage, not a nanny state but a state that provides the best context to the individual’s most daring text. Modi gave his own nationalist spin to Deng Xiaoping’s famous aphorism: it’s glorious to be rich. The so-called start-up nation is a fine indicator of how the state does not restrain the individual but frees him. The pinstriped Davos man can be spotted with a dash of the tricolour on his lapel. A true nationalist in the marketplace can afford only one ideology: freedom.

And it is this ideology of freedom that underpins his internationalism. India has come a long way from its leadership of ‘Third Worldism’—though as a mindset it may not have been fully eradicated from the establishment—and its relic, the Non-Aligned Movement, continues to get New Delhi’s patronage. Still, that is not the India that has got a seat at the global high table. In the India of the new Wise Man from the East, anti-Americanism is redundant, and national interest is not subordinated to a foreign policy built on borrowed ideology. Modi’s India does not belong to a bloc; it belongs to alliances and attitudes sustained by freedom, politically as well as economically. As a pragmatic globalist, Modi has achieved that rare feat of remaining a trusted friend to big-power antagonists, without devaluing his country’s international morality; Ukraine is a good example of this. With regard to China, India may have suffered from an inferiority complex for long, despite the advantages of democracy. It was as if an intimidated New Delhi made a diplomatic virtue out of its stoicism even as Beijing continued with its provocations along the border. Not anymore. Once again, this belated display of confidence in the dividends of freedom allows Modi’s India to strike a fine balance between national interest and international responsibility. Today, India’s global ambition matches its influence. No other prime minister after Nehru has excelled in the art of internationalism with such panache.

In the end, no politician in a democracy as unforgiving as India can play out a script of individual audacity and nationalist ambition without one quality: authenticity. Look around and you will realise that what those leaders desperate for postponing political mortality lack is the same quality. Authenticity comes from old-fashioned virtues a people disillusioned with the political class seek from a new leader on a mission: credibility, integrity and honesty. Modi is not a ‘professional’ politician. He is a politician for whom politics is a permanent struggle of the most dutiful, and that too in one of the most deified nations. It is this devotion to the nation that adds a spiritual content to his idea of power. He has never been tentative about his relationship with power, which, in his book, is the most effective instrument for change, culturally as well as economically. He has turned power into the highest form of spiritual contentment, in which the personal blends with the national. It is this terrifying clarity of purpose that makes Modi authentic. He continues to remind India that, through every word uttered with such rhetorical flamboyance, his pursuit of power is a necessary condition for national renewal.

Authenticity is rewarded by trust. In a country where power and corruption coexisted in harmony for so long, principled governance has become an enforced norm. In the pre-Modi India, privilege and patronage, or entitlement and entrenchment, alone ensured the persistence of political power. Modi gave power a spartan intensity, never letting himself be distracted. There was nothing at stake but the nation, which could be redeemed only by the one who held power with detachment and clarity in equal measure—and for a vast majority of Indians, he was the one. The most popular politician in a democracy is powered by a massive wealth of trust. The more he grows in power the more those who trust him feel empowered. In a country where elections are won and lost by the poor, and where every social engineering, every salvation ideology has failed to create a revolutionary, an ordinary man, an outsider in power, announces that what his nation needs is not a phoney revolution but a cultural transformation. They trust him for that.

In Ayodhya, in the afterglow of Ram’s consecration, he said, with his customary rhythmic flourish, “Ram is flow; Ram is effect.” He was invoking the god to emphasise the great cultural continuum, and as prime minister, he implied that he was within his ‘constitutional’ rights to do so because even secular India’s Constitution invoked Ram. So, in Ayodhya, it was consecration as national reassertion: “We have to lay the foundation of the India of the next thousand years.” In the flow of the nation, such a mission stretching into the distant future can only be stated by a man who sees power as a sacred text. When Narendra Modi plays the national redeemer, he makes sure that god stands witness to the occasion.

(This is an edited excerpt from Indian Renaissance: The Modi Decade edited by Aishwarya Pandit)

Aishwarya PanditAyodhya 2024booksfrom Indian Renaissance: The Modi DecadegovernanceNarendra Modi