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In public speeches in the Hindi heartland, the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, blends what were until now considered contradictory elements. With a facade that combines caste and class, Modi stresses his backward caste origins while promising efficient governance and state of the art infrastructure. Obviously Narendra Modi is aiming his marketing skills at what he calls the "neo" middle classes who form a signifi cant part of the semi-empowered castes.
In public speeches in the Hindi heartland, the Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, blends what were until now considered contradictory elements. With a facade that combines caste and class, Modi stresses his backward caste origins while promising efficient governance and state of the art infrastructure. Obviously Narendra Modi is aiming his marketing skills at what he calls the "neo" middle classes who form a signifi cant part of the semi-empowered castes.
It is the idea of an individual pandering to dreams woven from the endless vistas thrown up by capital, technology, individual diligence, private entrepreneurship and notions of being a global superpower that celebrates the jingoistic concept of “India First”. On Modi’s busy and surreal canvas, the government is relegated to a dot-like presence that was captured in another of his catch lines used at a media event in Delhi last year: “Maximum governance, minimum government”.
This conceals a well-crafted political agenda, aiming for the first time, to make captive and consolidate the loyalties of a vast social grouping spread across the country through the narrative of an indigent tea vendor endowed with the potential to make it to the country’s top position. Modi’s speeches delivered at public and party meetings since September 2013, when he was announced as the putative prime minister, are instructive in comprehending his personality and aspects of his politics such as his relationship with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), his ideological parent, the BJP and its prospective political allies.
Of late, Modi has not been opening up to the media, not even to his favourite media persons. The only comprehensive interview he granted was to a western news agency and his response to a query in the course of the interview stoked a huge debate. On his alleged role in the 2002 communal pogrom in Gujarat, he said he felt as agonised over the massacres as he would if his car ran over a puppy.
Capturing the Mood
It is not as though Modi is less sensitive to a community’s feelings than his seniors and peers in the BJP. In that sense, he remains faithful to his provenance as an RSS swayamsevak (worker). Modi’s discourse is not vastly different from that of another eminent “swayamsevak”, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the only prime minister the BJP has had. Vajpayee was never comfortable with press interviews because of his predilection for pausing for long before answering a question though he came into his own on the podium at public rallies. Like Modi, Vajpayee tailored his speeches to suit the mood of the hour, the political context and the audience.
Vajpayee cloaked his “vision” of “Ram rajya” to a rural congregation in Uttar Pradesh (UP) in earthy images of kheer (a sweet dish) prepared with the “purest cow’s milk” and rice from the season’s first harvest and came across as a benign ruler in the feudal mai-baap template. However, that mask would be deftly discarded when it was his turn to attack the minorities as he did in Goa in April 2002. In a public speech made hours after his proposal to replace Modi as the Gujarat chief minister for not adhering to rajdharma (the ethics of governance) was overwhelmingly voted out by the BJP’s national executive, Vajpayee alleged that wherever Muslims were in a majority, they never “lived in peace” with people of other religious denominations.
Modi too uses such veneers. Right now, he and his advisers have realised that it would be impolitic to even mention “Hindutva” or deploy an idiom suggestive of religious polarisation. They know that it would be more expedient to package and project Modi as India’s “hold-all solution” for “good governance and fast-track development” and “plug in the gaping holes left on India’s map” by 10 years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. So when Modi spoke to the people of Meerut on 2 February, there was no reference to Muzaffarnagar, the epicentre of the last big communal violence that shook UP. Muzaffarnagar is just some miles from Meerut. Two of the BJP legislators who were accused of fomenting the violence, Sangeet Singh Som and Suresh Rana, were present on Modi’s dais that day and garlanded him along with the other representatives from that area but he stayed aloof from them.
However, Modi did not embark on his country-wide peregrination with exceptional clarity of aims and intentions. If anything, initially he came across as an entertainer out to amuse the crowds that usually cry out “Modi, Modi” in chorus and perform acrobatics on the poles holding up the canopy to catch his eye. In his first meeting in Jaipur on 10 September 2013 just four days before he was announced as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate he harped on the financial controversies that dogged the UPA regimes and poked fun at Sonia and Rahul Gandhi for likening power to poison. His audience gave the impression that they had come to see him in the flesh and were not particularly bothered about what he would say.
But the Jaipur rally sent out a significant signal. Modi had achieved what L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and his peers like Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh could not in the last 10 years that the party had been out of power. He succeeded in mobilising its cadre and expanded its support to beyond the faithful.
First Choice
Before picking Modi over the other claimants, the RSS had done its homework. In the past three-odd years it had asked its swayamsevaks to keep their ears to the ground, elicit “objective” feedback from the BJP’s core constituents and beyond on Modi, and assess if his projection would cause a reverse polarisation of the minority votes towards the Congress. The RSS had obviously learnt from the 2004 elections when it had mistakenly believed that Modi’s success in Gujarat after the 2002 killings would be replicated nationally and bring Hindus to the BJP in the other states, regardless of caste and class. In those elections, the Hindu votes dispersed in different directions while the minorities voted conclusively for the Congress and its allies in most states.
This time, the Sangh’s estimation was that the urban votes barring Bengaluru that had migrated from the BJP to the Congress in 2009 were returning to the BJP, courtesy of Modi. He was the cadre’s first choice, and if his hailing from the most backward caste of Ghanchis or Telis (oil-pressers) was emphasised, the wheel of “Mandalisation”, set off by V P Singh in 1989, could turn full circle in the hope that India would get its first backward caste prime minister. Modi as a backward caste prime minister of “humble” origins would be the cherry on the cake’s icing.
Modi first mentioned this biographical detail by advertising his “hard luck” story in Haryana’s Rewari, a town peopled largely by ex-servicemen. He told them how he had wanted to study in a sainik school at Jamnagar and eventually join the Army. But his father could not afford to pay the entrance fee and thus he ended up supplementing his family’s income selling tea on the railway platform at Vadnagar, his hometown. He remembered serving tea to the soldiers who journeyed through Vadnagar to guard Gujarat’s border during the 1962 war and spoke of wanting to change places with one of them.
In the Name of the Poor
The class and caste allusions continued to be accentuated in his addresses in UP. In his first rally there at Kanpur, he announced he was “born into poverty” and “spent a childhood in poverty” unlike Rahul Gandhi, who he termed shehzada (prince). For Rahul, therefore, “poverty is a state of mind”; for Modi, it is a lived experience, he seemed to tell his audience. Poverty was a motif that Modi rarely if ever employed in his speeches in Gujarat. In his home state, it was all about the sheen and glitz he brought in as the chief minister, ignoring the fact that the growth figures other states recorded were accompanied by correspondingly impressive statistics on social indices. In contrast to them Gujarat has been critiqued by eminent economists and social scientists for its below-par showing in gender equity, health, nutrition and female literacy.
That people were not entirely taken in by Modi’s poor-as-the-church-mouse act was apparent at Jhansi in Bundelkhand, UP’s most backward region. He claimed he did not come to Bundelkhand to share “sob stories” of penury but to “wipe the tears on the faces of the poor”. However, apart from critiquing the centre and the UP government for “short-changing” the region with funds and siphoning off money for personal aggrandisement, Modi had nothing to offer except to say that a BJP government at the centre would ensure that money reached the targeted recipients.
Realising that there was no response to his “promises”, Modi – who apparently thinks on his feet – assured Bundelkhand’s migrants that he would make sure that those among them working in Gujarat would get a six-month paid sabbatical so that they could attend to harvesting in their villages. That was his only statement that drew applause. Since he was in the heart of a backward caste-dominated region, Modi who reportedly finds it imprudent to “show off” one’s caste (a belief that is relevant in Gujarat where his own caste is in a minuscule minority) made an exception at Jhansi. He said he was born into a pichchada (backward caste) family.
The RSS’s foot soldiers are on the job in UP, Bihar and the rest of the Hindi heartland to propagate that a vote for Modi effectively means a vote for India’s first backward caste prime minister. The backward castes have seldom voted as a block for a party although lately they did do so in UP, first for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and later for the Samajwadi Party (SP). The BJP hopes to score a first in the Lok Sabha poll by knitting the disparate and often competing backward castes in Modi’s name.
Modi was most vocal about his caste and class bloodline while addressing the BJP’s national council in Delhi on 19 January. The spur was Congressman Mani Shankar Aiyar’s jibe on Modi’s stint as a tea vendor. He used Aiyar’s remark to underscore his “underprivileged” upbringing as opposed to the Congress leaders.
That the use of “caste and class” is a political tactic is evident from what Modi’s close aides say about his dislike for the “culture” of state freebies and subsidies. He reportedly exulted at the poll results in Rajasthan where Ashok Gehlot’s munificent roll-outs reduced the Congress to its lowest ever tally. The economic “ideal” he aspires to draws its inspiration from the south-east Asian countries where the façade of affluence and order conceals deep fault-lines running through the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversities. Much like Gujarat’s “success” chronicles that conceal the exploitation and inequities suffered by the adivasis and dalits.
Modi’s national council speech was remarkable for his expatiations on urban India and industry that contrasted with the passing, almost token, mentions of the poor and women. He came into his aggressive own when he spoke of integrating India’s economy more closely with the global order, of flagging off a “next generation infrastructure” programme whose components include bullet trains, more roads, optical fibre networks, a strong coastal infrastructure, a gas grid, a 100 more new cities including niche ones catering to sports and “health wellness”.
His blending of ostensibly contradictory elements (few parties imagined that a projection of caste can coexist with that of “efficient” governance and foolproof delivery systems) is of a piece with his strategy of using the “best” at his disposal. It is predicated on the assumption that caste equations are not frozen in time because as BJP strategists claimed, job and education reservations brought empowerment and with that come aspirations and ambitions. Modi aims the marketing of his dreams at the “aspirational” sections from the semi-empowered castes. He described them as the “neo” middle class while releasing the manifesto for the Gujarat elections in 2012. Will they buy into his merchandise?
Source: http://www.epw.in/commentary/narendra-modis-revealing-speeches.html
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