Cuckoo nationalism: Gandhi in Modi’s India

Ghosting the Mahatma

As Gandhi, a larger-than-life figure of the nation’s history, shrinks to a loo-sized logo, the figure of the Maha-Atma (Great Soul) that emerged out of and shored up Gandhi’s performative moral critique of colonialism and modernity appears to have found a new avatar - Modi. This mimetic Mahatma came into view most markedly during and since the nation-wide COVID-19 lockdown ordered by Modi in May 2020. This was not the strongman version of Modi who is given to remark on the size of his chest to signal his potency. This was Modi-the-yogi who successfully campaigned for a world yoga day, who meditated in a cave like the great sages of Hindu lore, and whose grey beard and hair kept growing through the pandemic to mimic the sartorial style of the quintessential Hindu holy man.

India’s lockdown was novel in that it was staged as a spectacle – a sudden announcement of a nation-wide lockdown followed by a series of highly choreographed acts – from the banging of plates to the lighting of candles – that demanded whole-hearted participation from the nation. Like the BJP’s 2016 demonetisation policy, where the population was given less than four hours’ notice that much of their currency would be worthless at the stroke of midnight, the lockdown too was announced with theatrical flourish by Modi on television giving the nation less than four hours before everything would grind to a halt and everyone was required to stay at home. As has been well documented, the lockdown precipitated the worst humanitarian crisis in independent India. With the nation riveted by images of desperate caravans of migrant labour fleeing the city by foot and making their way to faraway villages, this spectacle threatened to overwhelm the strongman spectacle of total control that Modi was hoping to stage with his sudden lockdown announcement. The silence from Modi as the crisis unfolded began to seem like a rare misstep from the media-savvy and image conscious leader.

However, what we saw emerging is a version of Modi-as-Mahatma as he began to assume the physical form and mien of a sage, or at least the popular imagery of one. As he sat sage-like in his garden feeding peacocks (rather more adroitly than Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro’s feeding of the rhea), unmoved by the mounting toll of the lockdown and COVID-19, he laid the ground for legitimising the withdrawal of social welfare and abandonment of migrant labour and others whose lives were wrecked by the lockdown. In this sage-like avatar, the trials of the migrant labourers, the insecurely waged, and the infected were not issues he stooped to concern himself with. His lack of empathy for, or even recognition of, the inhumane cost of his policies was not seen as a failure of leadership, but as an expected response of one who has fashioned himself as a renouncer in the Hindutva sense of the term – detached[2] -- and therefore not perceived to be criminally negligent.

"The sage-like Modi can both command the moral authority that is needed to legitimise this policy of abandonment and, as sage, can detach himself from the world of the profane where leaders are required to be accountable to citizens."

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It is in this sage-like avatar that Modi, in April 2020 against the backdrop of the migrant labour caravans, exhorted citizens to practice atmanirbharta (self-reliance). Atmanirbharta enjoys a surface similarity to Gandhi’s insistence on self-reliance but is in fact firmly rooted in the neoliberal refusal to recognise a collective right to welfare. Whereas Gandhi’s call to self-reliance was based on principles of autonomy and freedom from colonial exploitation, Modi’s call is about the dissolution of any claim to welfare as an entitlement (the most recent political gambit of the BJP to launch a broadside against public welfare entitlements by denigrating them as ‘freebies’ is a continuation of this discourse). The sage-like Modi can both command the moral authority that is needed to legitimise this policy of abandonment and, as sage, can detach himself from the world of the profane where leaders are required to be accountable to citizens. Even before this moment, it is useful to recall that Modi has not held a single non-choreographed press conference, preferring to address the nation through his periodic mann-ki-baat discourses that, as a rhetorical form, bear a similarity to the pravachans (religious discourses) with which most of his Hindu supporters are already familiar.[3]  The broader affective politics set in motion through the cooptation of Gandhi – his spectacles and his Maha-atma - and through ritualized national performances and exhortations of sacrifice, purification and self-reliance briefly described here, partners with the culture of impunity that has been a hallmark of the BJP majoritarian project, to give shape and legitimacy to authoritarian governance in India today.

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