As politics, as style, as message, Narendra Modi presents an ersatz version
of the BJP. There is little that is civilisational about him. Worse still,
he creates an artificial Swadeshi, without any sense of Swaraj

A civilisation is greater than the sum of its individual values and an
election is bigger, more poignant than the sum of its candidates. As one
watches the drama of the current election, one realises that each candidate
represents a Weltanschauung, a world view. Mr. Rahul Gandhi represents the
Congress in decline, Mr. Kejriwal, a new politics of possibility dignified
as the AAP, and Mr. Narendra Modi plays the BJP. Watching reflectively, one
realises that while he is an effective candidate, he is a poor
representation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). I do not see this
either as a naive or a Machiavellian statement. Anyone interested in
politics should confront this possibility.
*Tectonic shifts within the BJP*

Let us begin by going down memory lane, watching a Vajpayee as Prime
Minister. He is at ease with himself. There is a style, an affability, a
grace about him. He recites poetry with a flair. He does not need a Prasoon
Joshi or a Piyush Pandey to do it. He can think civilisationally with ease.
Then, consider his organisational double, Mr. Lal Krishna Advani. He is a
Vajpayee in corsets, stiffer, more ascetic, and intensely serious about
life. For him, the BJP is a vocation. He is a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) exemplar. Vajpayee who is more accessible, represents a less
procrustean view of the BJP. Mr. Vajpayee makes the BJP a more inviting and
inclusive proposition.

Whether it is Mr. Vajpayee or Mr. Advani, one senses an authenticity to
them. They smell, evoke the BJP. The very differences in styles seem to add
the realism of difference. Oddly, when I watch Mr. Modi, I miss this
authenticity of text and context. Is Mr. Modi, an authentic BJP text as
message and performance, and does the BJP as a party, as a community, see
him as that? The answer is worryingly ambiguous. If one wants to be
generous one can say that he represents not the exemplary values or the
leadership qualities of the BJP, but a lowest common denominator of the BJP.

The BJP is a framework of values, an organisational system, a style of
politics, and a way of constructing social reality. As a parliamentary
party, the BJP is seen as being more open-ended than the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) or the RSS, and less coercive than the Bajrang Dal. When
push comes to shove, the BJP, as a parliamentary, political fragment, seeks
wider adjustment, compromise, unlike cadres or pressure groups which might
be more ideological. The BJP has to be more discursive as a party, be more
conversational politically and sound less like a catechism. Mr. Vajpayee
and Mr. Advani captured such a politics with grace and style. Mr. Narendra
Modi sees the party as a necessary evil. No leader seems more hostile to
his party than Mr. Modi. The party seems uneasy and even wary with him.
Recent events indicate that the unease is a deep fault line.

Consider the fate of some of the classic leaders of the BJP, Mr. Jaswant
Singh, Mr. Advani or Mr. Joshi. These leaders were almost exemplars of the
style of the party. Yet, they also evoked a style of cosmopolitanism. They
were literally the voice and the message of the party. Yet, the party
dismisses them today, treating them as being irrelevant, like cultural
strains to be rejected. When Mr. Jaswant Singh cried, or when Mr. Advani or
Mr. Sudheendra Kulkarni talk of wider worlds, they are read as noise. Yet,
suddenly, this wider cosmopolitanism seems unnecessary. The BJP as a
mentality shrinks to a parochialism to guarantee electoral victory. The BJP
seems to be back in some strange uniform. But it is not just strains in the
party I am talking about.
*A party in crisis*

As politics, as style, as message, Mr. Modi presents an ersatz version of
the BJP. There is little that is civilisational about him. Worse still, he
creates an artificial Swadeshi, without any sense of Swaraj. Mr. Modi's
Swadeshi does not empower locality, it creates a politics of anxiety around
security. He evokes paranoia insulting Mrs Sonia Gandhi as foreign and
Italian which neither Mr. Advani nor Mr. Vajpayee would do. He is leader of
a *nukkad* not of a nation. He behaves like a Bajrang Dal bully rather than
a BJP leader ready for adjustments, coalitions or even a compromise
necessary for an Indian idea of unity. The paradox of Mr. Modi is that he
might criticise the Congress model of Federalism but adds little to the
alchemy of unity and inclusiveness. Mr. Modi represents a reductionist,
single strand of leadership which is un-Indian. A Vajpayee can reach out to
the Opposition and talk easily to it. Mr. Modi suffers from an arid sibling
rivalry which destroys a syncretic style of leadership. Mr. Modi can be
diktat but never a conversation.

There is a deeper inadequacy to his politics. As a country, we need leaders
who can win more than the next election. Our Prime Minister is not a
winnable horse, which corporate or media punters can be happy about. A
leadership has to think fifty, hundred, at least five hundred years into
the future. Mr. Modi offers little sense of the future, whether it is of
craft, knowledge, agriculture or biotechnology. He has not a single
significant line on an India of the future. Sadly, Mr. Modi might play a
second rate mimic of Vivekananda and talk of the Parliament of religions at
Chicago. But, Mr. Modi keeps thinking that his Parliament of Religions is
Davos and a subsidiary at that. He might look China in the eye but has no
alternative vision to China. The least a Veer Savarkar, a Har Dayal, a
Lajpat Rai or a Vivekananda would have done is to provide an alternative to
the Chinese idea of autocratic growth. Yet, Mr. Modi becomes through
behaviour and style, as a second rate mimicry of China. Worse still, Mr.
Modi seems to caricature the BJP. As the BJP declines as a party, as the
older generation of visionaries disappears, a party in crisis produces a
caricature of itself called Narendra Modi.

Any writer who has a commitment to Parliament and party politics must
recognise the importance of parties like the CPI(M), the BJP or even the
Congress. We would have to invent them if they did not exist. Each
represents a critical part of the history and imagination of Indian
Politics. I want to emphasise this because my opposition to Mr. Modi was
initially triggered by his authoritarianism and his responsibility for the
riots and their cruel aftermath. Electoral politics and sanitised law
cannot exonerate him. But by watching him grow in popularity, and listening
to his message, I want to argue that Mr. Modi is dangerous to the BJP and
its value frames. His narrowness hypothecates the BJP, politics and Indian
society to a jingoism of nation-state and development.

There is a cultural backstage to Indian politics where small groups with a
mix of ethical and religious perspectives seek to argue and discuss the
future of Indian politics. One strain or strand of these groups includes
people who would embody a sense of cultural politics. Some, in fact, many
of them would be BJP influentials. I wonder how many of them would pick Mr.
Modi as an exemplar. I was imagining whether a historian like Dharampal, a
shrewd student of politics, would pick a Modi or see him as a straw man, an
ersatz model of the BJP at a time where its political poverty cannot
produce more than a mediocre leadership. Mr. Modi seems a solution of an
RSS desperate for power rather than a BJP rethinking the possibilities of
politics. Nagpur has fettered India for decades to come. Let us not confuse
contempt for the Congress as approval for the BJP. Mr. Modi's Neanderthal
model of development in the age of sustainable and human development shows
that Mr. Modi is an anachronism, dusted up and presented as technocratic
model of development. It will not take long to prove that the Gujarat model
of development and the Gujarat model of violence are part of one picture.

I wish I was a politically curious fly on the wall listening to BJP leaders
and workers thinking out private doubts about the public face of Mr. Modi.
A psychoanalysis of the party reveals that there are deep fault lines in
the party about Mr. Modi. A desperate RSS cannot paper over it for long by
arguing that parliamentary success will erase organic doubts. I wish
someone from the BJP would articulate this politics of doubt openly so that
India and the BJP can be saved from an excruciating future.

*(Shiv Visvanathan is a professor at Jindal School of Government and Public
Policy.)*

*http://tinyurl.com/n4srhpx <http://tinyurl.com/n4srhpx>*

-- 
DEV BOREM KORUM

Gabe Menezes.





-- 
DEV BOREM KORUM

Gabe Menezes.

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