‘God’s gift to India’

THE most striking outcome of the recent national executive meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party is the promotion of Mr Narendra Modi’s personality cult. After newspaper readers had been regaled to a submissive Prime Minister being meticulously measured for the honour of making it to Madame Tussaud’s collection of life-size wax lookalikes of world leaders came Mr Venkaiyiah Naidu’s accolade. He is “God’s gift for India”.

True, the theme of divine intervention was first broached earlier in March by the BJP Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Mr Shivraj Singh Chouhan, addressing the party’s Yuva Morcha, but it was dismissed as a routine genuflection. He had said, “He [Mr Modi] is a man of ideas and has the strong will to execute these ideas. Wherever in the world he goes, people chant ‘Modi, Modi’. He is God’s divine gift to India”. 

If there are echoes of then Congress president DK Barooah’s sycophantic excess in his doggerel “Indira is India, India is Indira”, the build-up of Mr Modi is more reminiscent of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the levels of praise he collected for himself, most recently by visiting the home of his captive media empire singing his fantastic qualities.

The pattern of the BJP executive meeting was carefully choreographed. The Prime Minister waxed eloquent on development, leaving it to the political resolution to blow the trumpet of nationalism in its new avatar and getting Home Minister Rajnath Singh, apart from Mr Arun Jaitley, to brief the media on the main document to give it a muscular tone.

Even otherwise, Mr Modi is doing his own bit. He was expansive in expressing his catholicism at the World Sufi Forum even as he routinely refrains from commenting on increasing cases of hate crimes against Muslims in an environment in which anyone stepping outside the lines drawn by the Hindutva brigade does so at his own peril. Such ‘details’, he seems to suggest, are for his minions to take care of.

Thus, except for intervening at an Ambedkar function to say that Dalit reservations would stay (to counter the RSS line), it was for others in the BJP setup to pronounce the new rules of the political game. It was patriotism with a capital ‘P’ and the test was to pronounce “Bharat Mata ki jai”, what the president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Musalmeen (AMIM) leader Asasuddin Owaisi and his Maharashtra Assembly member Waris Pathan refused to do, for which the latter was suspended from the House.

How long Mr Modi will be able to float above the controversies he has initiated in the cause of Hindutva remains to be seen. But he has found the new strain of nationalism let loose by his party, reiterated by the national executive, conflicting with his endeavour to appear as the unquestioned leader of the nation. In the RSS concept, Bharat Mata is waving a saffron flag, instead of the Tricolour.

Mr Modi’s dilemma is genuine because in seeking to overturn a long-nurtured idea built during the Independence struggle, and for more than six decades of Independent India, the Hindutva credo and its newly-advertised form of nationalism rings a jarring note. How can the Prime Minister of a country as diverse as India, with Muslims alone representing some 14 per cent of the population, win the hearts and minds of his countrymen and women with a narrow Hindu agenda?

BJP supporters can draw some wry comfort from the fact that the Bharat Mata chant has wrong-footed the Congress party. It enthusiastically supported the suspension of Mr Pathan from the Maharashtra Assembly while having to fall back to proclaiming that one chant cannot be the test of patriotism. In any event, the BJP executive has made amply clear that it treats the Congress with contempt. 

But another problem for the BJP is that, encouraged by the RSS and the Sangh Parivar, it seems set on its illiberal course. A recent example of its direction is a directive to Urdu (mostly Muslim) writers to give an undertaking that they would not write anything against the government on the specious ground that a government-aided organisation would be buying their books.

On a broader level, compared to President Xi’s plain sailing in building up his personality cult, Mr Modi’s task is more arduous because of the democratic nature of India’s polity, however attenuated it is becoming. A telling example, of course, was his having to climb down from his development platform to say that the reservation regime would stay because of the RSS having openly (and wisely) expressed scepticism of where it has led the country. The Prime Minister knew that the BJP would be committing harakiri in forthcoming elections if it voted against the reservation card.

Meanwhile, the debate on nationalism gathers pace even as the young, especially in universities, become increasingly involved. Having decreed the height of the mast that should fly the national flag above all Centrally-financed universities, Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani has received encouragement from the RSS to mould students in the cult of narrow nationalism. Jawaharlal Nehru and Hyderabad universities have already been scarred by the BJP’s enthusiasm for promoting its form of nationalism. There will doubtless be more tempests in universities as the authorities attempt to lay down new rules of patriotism.

The world has recognised Mr Modi as a decisive leader who, after years of Congress drift, is seeking to take India forward. But it is not clear about the baggage of Hindutva he carries and how far he will cut corners to achieve his aim. His record as Chief Minister of Gujarat, impressive as it was in development, was spotty on the social side and downright negative on integration, the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom haunting him to this day.

It is clear from Mr Modi’s incessant travels around the world that he sets great store by how he is perceived by the world. He has gained respect for his effort to pull India by the bootstraps — almost overwhelmingly from the Indian diaspora. But his party’s efforts to divide the country on religious lines are very much in the world’s consciousness.