EVERY regime needs a narrative, a ritual of storytelling. Yet stories are not always easy to tell as theory and anecdote, fable and discourse mix to create an era. Worse, storytelling becomes like a Lego set with mixed up pieces. The same event can be read through different lenses of time. The immediacy of an event triggers the categories of media. For media, an event has to be new; it has to be dramatic; it has to involve the immediacy of churning. It is eventually a narrative built around common sense, and common sense is a middle class category. No marginal or minority or subsistence society can survive on common sense.

Modi as news beckons one kind of time. Yesterday’s newspaper is no longer news, it is social science. As Modi’s world acquires a sense of narration, he unfolds in a different way. Psephology links news and a more qualitative social science. One summons textbook categories, concepts that have a comparative nuance, a durability, words like nation state, security, and development. Such concepts demand a different intricacy, a thickening of narrative. One has to explain the phenomena, create a different narrative of acceptability and critique. The time dimensions range from decades to centuries and one unravels a middle range logic.

As time passes, news and social science look artificial. Culture demands a different sense of digestibility. Categories become primordial or civilizational and one enters the taken for granted of folklore. Folklore is not a mere narrative system, it is a digestive system where worlds are domesticated and internalized. What was new acquires the power, the obviousness of the taken for granted. Folklore indicates that a narrative has been localized and domesticated. It is read through the categories of storytelling. It is embodied in the oral.

The rise and durability of Narendra Modi has to be read thrice. The transition from Modi I to Modi II has to be read archaeologically. In the first part of the narrative, one sees a culture reading the defeat of the Congress. One is reading it like the end of an empire. For an interlude of 70 years, India read narratives within a progressive liberal axis. Let us call the era the first Republic. Today, Modi’s election inaugurates the second Republic. The surprise is not his durability but the change in categories used to comprehend him.

Today, Modi is no longer read through social science, he has become a part of the idioms of folklore. His regime, his presence, has to be read differently. The focus is not on how he perpetuates himself in power. Modi is no longer an act of producing power. He is now subject to a process of consumption. The consumption is not at the level of a voter or sociologist, but an act of internalization. The process moves from individual to collective, conscious to unconscious, from governance to civilization. Central to such a process is Delhi and UP, not as spaces but as metaphors of how we read power and learn to live with it. There are civilizational styles endemic here that demand we deconstruct modernity.

Any culture takes time in the way it accepts or shrugs off a phenomena. It is also selective about how it copes with events, sometimes periodizing what it wants to problematize. For India, unlike the secular social scientist, it was not the rise of Modi that had to be explained. Modi was a colourful object in a fair. He was mask and holograph. He had to be enjoyed. In a folkloristic sense, he had to be given a ‘chance’. Chance in Indian folklore is a polyphonic world. It exudes numbers, a sense of folk justice. There was a sense that he deserved his term in power. While he got used to it, society was more keen to complete the erasure of the Congress. It wanted to map the end of the Empire. The Congress was a legendary landscape. It was an epic phenomena full of larger than life characters including Nehru, Patel, Gandhi and Indira. Its failure had to be explained not through voting or categories like secularism, but through a moral sense.

 

One needed a sense of folklore to see how an epic party which evoked history is now a non-entity. One cannot do this through analysing power or psychoanalysing the party. One has to read three things. The Congress was a creation of modernity and a victim of modernity. Second, the definition of the party changed from a nationalist to a domestic canvas. The Congress now is just a family surrounded by a few retainers. The epic proportions of a Nehru and Indira have shrunk, and one now meets a Rajiv, a Sonia, a Rahul. A Rahul is weaker than a Salman Khan. He is the boy next door, affable but mediocre in his affability.

A nation has a wider contour while a family drama is a domestic drama, and is also easy to domesticate. A family squandering its legacy, falling into bad days, is easy to explain. It is the stuff of moral dramas. Indians who are coy about the official and the historical can be ruthless analysts of family morality. In fact, the targeting of Rahul is strategic, even psychological. He is a targetable fiction, a boy who refuses to grow up. He cannot lead a family, a khandaan. The question of leading a party or a nation does not even arise. This shrinkage is not a political tactic. It is a narrative strategy; it is not a social science trope; it is the wisdom of folklore. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy and the people to vote out, they first banalize. From a piece of magic, when power and distance protected him, he now becomes a creature of ordinariness, the boy next door, the baba surrounded by baba log.

Rahul can now be subjected to a secular critique in its everydayness. He lacks the halo of power and or image, the aura of power or the mystique of a film star. His ordinariness exudes no populism – he is more an aristocrat fallen on bad times. The shrinking of Rahul in a way was the shrinking of the party. He became synecdochal to the party; he was part to its whole. As he shrunk, the Congress as a presence started disappearing. Even gossip was strategic. It was a ruthless elimination of possibilities, a cutting down of political options from Priyanka to Scindia or Pilot. The Congress was merely an assorted gang that could not shoot straight. Simultaneously, the Congress, which epitomized modernity, was rejected as modern, alien and unappealing.

 

The narratives of the Congress made little sense and the BJP was picked to offer us a new narrative of modernity. The Congress cap gave way to the shakha prachark. There was a feeling that the idioms of the Congress, especially its secularism which it presented like prim exclusive table manners, made little sense. Society shed the Congress like a snake sheds its skin, desperate for something more liveable and familiar. The third step, beyond an unsuccessful family and a mediocre modernity, needed a folk sense of justice. People felt they had paid their dues to the Congress. Rahul did not understand this. He literally oozed the idea that his family sacrificed for the nation. The nation, indifferent to this argument, felt it had suffered the Congress for too long. The Congress felt like a costume the society had outgrown. The Congress could not survive the folk sense of morality or justice. In an idiomatic sense, the Congress did not belong. It no longer created a sense of homecoming to minority or margin.

 

The Congress sadly did not speak in terms of folk idioms which would appeal to the societal unconscious. It either appealed to history as a personal legacy or it offered a new modernity of managerialism. It did not domesticate managerialism like Modi did. Instead, it had Sam Pitroda argue for the corporatization of the Congress. Pitroda could have been from Mars. Such was the alien-ness of his suggestion. Society has ejected the Congress as an indigestible force. It had no presence now, not even as nostalgia. It is now a neutral object, not even an absence. This process is not psychoanalytic. It is a part of the dynamics of folklore. The Congress has lost its membership in the everydayness of folklore, except as slapstick or spoof.

Enter the BJP cum RSS. Its first moves seem to hint it is a secondary Congress, a mimic creation. True, its initial moves were not adept, but the BJP knew it had time on its side. The first year was not about its entry into power. It was about Congress defeat. ‘Why the Congress lost?’ was the great quiz contest of the year. Ironically, it was a mystery mostly to the Congress. A few hours in any wayside dhaba or whiling away time in a barber’s saloon would have told the Congress why it lost. Even today, in one sense, the Congress does not grasp its secondariness, its absence from memory and not merely its loss of power.

Of course, when Modi came, social scientists treated him with contempt as a Johnny come lately. But while we psychologized Modi with all kinds of envy, we forget he had a better sense of the psyche of the people. What the elite thought was slapstick or crude drama tapped into the unconscious of the majoritarian nation. His strategy was five-fold and effective. He had to play modernist without creating the unease of inferiority. His choice was acutely tactical. He chose development as a nationalist discourse over modernity as an ideology. Development was instrumental, externalist; it did not trouble the psyche. Modernism was more demanding on the self. It created situations of one-upmanship that Indians could not play adeptly. For example, secularism made us embarrassed about our religious sensibility. We were condemned as superstitious by an elite which had little understanding of modernity. Development, like patriotism, was easier to acquire.

 

The strategy then unfolded with a masterly tactical cut. It divided the Congress as persona between a historical subject and pathetic present. The BJP displayed envy for the Congress as epic and history, while it demolished the party as a political presence. It could be adulatory about Patel or Gandhi, even reverential to exemplars, while showing contempt for the party as an organization. People saw it as a game and loved it. Love Gandhi and ridicule Rahul became a melodrama the voter enjoyed. It made politics feel less cynical. Third, Modi reinvented the rules of democracy by making democracy more accessible and aspirational. Democracy became both middle class and majoritarian. As a result, Congress looked like a bunch of unemployed or downwardly aristocrats. It looked snooty and Modi was determined to show that Congress needed to be humble because there was a lot to be humble about.

The Congress did not understand its political poverty, while it continued acting like a group cheated out of its legacy. Suddenly, the party made little populist sense. It was not intellectual arguments that it needed. It just was not musical anymore. Instead of looking into the mirror, it appealed to its past, to a generation for which 1947 was the beginning of history.

 

History as memory, as a framework of values is crucial. As secularists, we criticize the BJP’s understanding of the past as a construct. But where it was adept was in the way the past played into the present. What the BJP destroyed was the first Indian Republic, the Nehruvian dream as a value framework. What was poetic for my generation, it turned into drab prose. It turned science as culture into technological instrumentalism. It junked the scientific temper but dreamed of Chandrayan, of an Indian voting for it on the moon. It emasculated a certain cosmopolitanism ranging from the idea of non-alignment to a dream of internationalism, where India backed Palestine, fought apartheid. Instead it created a siblingship with Israel. It had little sense of nationalist struggles elsewhere.

Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nasser and Sukarno were dead ducks to it. Instead of internationalism, it opted for globalism. Globalism was parochial. In fact, India preened because it saw Modi as anticipating Trump. It abandoned the idealism that went with the third world, a sense of India as a moral force in international politics. It became pragmatic, masculinist. It saw Nehru like a latter-day Hamlet, humming and hawing over Pakistan and China. It erased a cosmopolitan India for a nationalist idea of the nation state, rejecting pluralism for predictability and uniformity, the univocality of patriotism. The Republic of Nehru sought plurality. The Republic of Modi insisted on the efficiency of univocality and this appealed to the middle class. For the Indian middle class, every crisis is eventually a law and order problem.

 

Finally, in terms of folklore, it spoke a Hindu idiom. First, it indigenized its modernity allowing Ramdev, Jaggi Vasudev, the Swami Naryan Gurus and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to represent it. It returns to UP as metaphor where Indian politics is just another Kumbh Mela. Adityanath provides a grammar which makes sense of the local, a grammar where violence is everyday. It is at the level of folklore, not civilization, that Modi won the battle of hearts. He was homespun in his ordinariness at this level. His ideas were accessible, quotable, anecdotal, ordinary. Any man could play Modi. India, as Dev Kant Barooah preened, might have been Indira but in an amiable, accessible, almost proletarian way, every Indian could be Modi. The chowkidar and chaivala felt Modi was accessible as an imagination in a way no Congressman could be.

The nation was no longer a club. It became a bandwagon. People realized it was difficult if you were left behind. There was no magic to Modi, only a seductiveness to his mediocrity. Modi, as an idea, as a programme, as an aspiration, as a promise was comprehensible, accessible, a Poor Richards Almanack for contemporary India. We did not need a Nehruvian Glimpses of World History, just a Chacha Chaudhry version of India. Modi realized that the Congress was text. He colonized the oral and the digital, the technological as social media and the oral as gossip, to defeat the Congress which had become a frozen text. In fact, even worse, an outdated textbook on how society thought or worked.

One must add, eventually, it was not Modi that colonized the Hindu way of life. It was Hinduism that indigenized the Modi model of development and majoritarian democracy, like the erstwhile ‘Hindu rate of growth’. Modi could be both proverb and policy in a way the Congress could not. He won the battle for the common denominator mind while creating a magic of anticipation around it. He sensed distant imaginations do not create instant dreams. He made India dream again. It was as simple as that, and he showed the Nehruvian dream had become every man’s nightmare. It was not a battle of ideologies or ideas. He won because his myths were local and accessible.

 

Modi is shrewd enough to understand that the Hindu way is anarchic, that anarchism tolerates violence and disorder, as long as it is accompanied by a dream of order. Governance is always a trifle utopian. Violence is appalling while we dream of a world of order. Modi senses our ability to live with contradictions. The durability of the regime lies in its ability to create separate myths of how power is produced and how power is consumed. If the first emphasizes the creative power of majoritarianism, the second shows how two kinds of folklore, the oral and the digital, face-to-face gossip and the social media, can combine to create new myths of support for the regime. There is, finally, a sense that what domesticates the regime is not politics but the culture of categories in which it embeds itself. What we call, stereotypically, the Hindu way of life encompasses other cultures.

It is our ability to domesticate power, indigenize it so that it becomes a way of life. As power domesticates us, we domesticate power, routinize it, create an everyday grammar of adjustment and compromise. Now Modi seems natural. He speaks the language of ordinariness and mediocrity, which makes him immortal. People now speak as if the regime was always there, growing quietly in our consciousness. It now seems a habit and inevitable. Today talk of subaltern or secular, or cosmopolitan, seems alien. We seem to be creating a domestication, an hierarchization where everyone is Hindu and secondarily Muslim or Christian. Majoritarianism now appears natural like a spoken language. India seems happy with its new subconscious. In fact, the secular, the cosmopolitan, the liberal appears alien forms of Nehruvian entropy. Even pluralism has lost its inventive power and there is a silence around any proposed dialogue of cultures. Nehru seems a false idiom the second Republic invented and outgrew. Our evil now suits our genius and this is the BJP’s great achievement, that we suddenly seem at ease with our cultural selves. Dissenters, like the present writer appear innocuous and ineffectual.

 

In a sense, Modi grasped the language of Bollywood better than Bollywood itself. The metaphor of Bollywood is critical and here one sees one final inversion. Bollywood provided a framework for reading both culture and politics. It was a grammar and a mirror for understanding ourselves. For a decade now, Bollywood as a myth has failed to work. It is as if Bollywood now realizes that Modi is the ultimate movie of our culture. He is what M.G. Ramachandran could not be, the everyman in all of us. Bollywood realizes that the cinematic imagination, the symbolic power has shifted to Modievian Delhi.

It is Modi who is creating trailer after trailer of our imagination. All his policies are trailers and people are succumbing to it. One senses it in the sycophancy of Vivek Oberoi, in the enthusiasm of Akshay Kumar and even in the ambivalences of a Shashi Tharoor or Jairam Ramesh. One can resent it, critique it, but one has to realize in some way he has woven himself into the primeval and primordial part of our culture. One cannot outvote him till we recognize our primordial selves. We need ojhas of the Indian mind, not psephologists totting-up scores and brownie points.

 

The sadness is that the idiocy, the pomposity of the Congress, prepared the way for him. No Congressman seems to ask why Nehruvian institutions collapse like skittles, as if they have lost the will to survive. What was once seen as impossible, even unacceptable, now seems a habit. It is as if a weakened Nehruvian India found in authoritarian Modi an answer to China as threat and anxiety. He has created a fusion of cinematic and the political that the South could not dream of.

Narendra Modi suddenly appears a myth that speaks for us, a middle class Cecil B. DeMille show that speaks for all that is in us. He does not need the scripts of Salman Akhtar to create voice or even ‘dialogue’. In fact, he creates the voice that middle class India claims is all of us. That is the power of his majoritarianism as India’s latest Hindu ‘myth’. Deconstructing it and devaluing it will be a herculean task. Modi needs to be defeated as a myth. Till then, he is the new Republican dream. When tyranny appears like a habit, we need a new language of resistance. Every dissenter has to confront this fact. Sadly, few of us have the idiom, the language, or the imagination to do it. Only a Gandhi could provide it.