A 'Modi-fied' Reality

Transcript

00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Omni-Present, Omniscent".

00:06 The issue looks at Modi's personality, his cult and his brand in the light of the recent consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya,

00:14 which also kick-starts the election campaign.

00:17 Modi is an avatar, a statesman, a saint.

00:21 Beyond Hindutva, there is now the Moditva project.

00:25 A Modified Reality by Ajay Gudavarthi

00:28 Gudavarthi is Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

00:33 The Prime Minister has managed to ace the image game by being all-pervasive and at the same time being an elusive political persona.

00:43 Hinduism and Neoliberalism emerged as strange bedfellows in India at the turn of the century.

00:49 Post-colonial India was prided for its somewhat sacred separation between spirituality and materiality.

00:57 It was often argued that even under colonial rule, the inside India, marked by its spiritual pursuit, remained sovereign,

01:06 and it was only the outside that got colonized by materiality, the market and technology.

01:13 In today's, or rather, Modi's new India, the market and spirituality are having a gala time together in a bonhomie that is here to last.

01:24 What is even more important to note is that both Hinduism and Neoliberalism are decentred and decentralized.

01:32 Hinduism is more of a way of life, encompassing countless local practices,

01:38 whereas Neoliberalism is a faceless, post-Westphalia phenomena without an anchor.

01:44 In a sense, both Hinduism and Neoliberalism have no nation or sanctum sanctorum to reach out to.

01:52 In an earlier articulation, Gandhi struck a chord by mobilizing diversity in all its beauty,

01:59 and the Congress Party, in its post-independence avatar, became representative of a decentred polity with the state

02:06 through its planning and welfare-oriented social-democratic vision, a conduit to hold dispersed realities together.

02:15 India was classically typified as a nation in the making.

02:19 Neoliberalism replaced the centrality of the state and welfare,

02:24 and replaced it with the processes of globalization and privatization.

02:29 The emergence of an omnipresent Modi is the personification of this transformed, modified reality.

02:37 Modi represents the uncertainty that Hinduism came to represent in Neoliberal times.

02:43 Both the processes lacking an anchor gave rise to a mass psyche of insecurity, confusion, and a sense of directionlessness.

02:53 In such a context, Modi rose to fame with a larger-than-life image that can provide the new anchor.

03:00 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.