PM Modi at election rally in Buxar. (Image: PTI)
Ashoak Upadhyay
A
s the nation nears the close of the voting for the general elections it ought to be pretty clear that the ‘festival of democracy’ has really been a grotesque display of vile demagoguery. Parliamentry democracy the world over has generated a language, a vocabulary and level of rhetoric that has always brought it close to the gutter but never before has any ruling party in this country hit registers of attack that actually smell of the gutter; we have come closest to the metaphor of the cesspool in the language used by the Prime Minister against the Gandhis and the Congress. Actually, he has dragged us into it, made us accessories to the grotesqueries of his wrathful and delusional diatribes that really deserve just one fitting reply: Enough!
Writing in The Citizen May 13 Avay Shukla lamented “If language is the window to a man’s soul then what PM Modi’s language reveals is the utter heart of darkness.” That analogy invests the PM’s diatribes with an ill-deserved tragic grandeur. It is not darkness we peer into but the cesspit of lynch-mob hatreds, delusional grandstanding and a juvenilerage at the recognition that the ground is slipping from under the feet.
As Shukla writes: “Only such a man would have used the words he did for Rajiv Gandhi, mocking his death: “when Rajiv Gandhi died he was ” Bhrashtachari no. 1.” Of course, we should have expected nothing better from a man who spews hatred and invective.
In the past he has referred to Sonia Gandhi as a widow who ( impliedly) benefits from a state pension and as a Jersey cow, and to Sunanda Pushkar as a ” fifty crore rupee girlfriend.”
Nothing is too crass, or obscene, or base for his tongue. He constantly derides the benefits of education ( ” hard work” vs ” Harvard” jibe), but just compare a speech of PM Modi with one by the man he has a pathological hatred of, Jawaharlal Nehru, and one can see what Mr. Modi has missed.
The vicious manner in which he has of late been vilifying an ex- Prime Minister who died 28 years ago may show his desperation, but it also reveals that he is perhaps also delusional and has lost touch with reality. He has robbed the office of Prime Minister of all dignity and gravitas.”
The “festival of democracy” catchphrase tweeted by the PM at the start of the elections, his pious statement that he felt “pure” after casting his vote, participating in this festival had the ring of a PR con job given the way he and his government have subverted so many institutions to serve the single-minded purpose of centralising power and ensuring his victory. It’s a slogan stripped of all meaning but one even if the sense of purification Modi asserted may have been used to invoke a sensation similar to a dip in the holy dirty Ganga.
The sense of festivity resonates in the ears of the PM and the ruling party like a drum roll urging the march towards demagoguery and lynch-mob politics. All politics, someone said, is the “organization of hatreds” but in the hands of the ruling party and in particular, the PM bursting with a 56” chest of delusional grandiosity, that hatred narrows to a pincer light on the Nehru-Gandhis and living memories of more civilized discourse of politics. But how would or why should, the PR hackwriters know that?
Reality is fictive; in the creation of the slogan, the sky is the limit. Ancient Hindus flew jets; voting is a festival of democracy. “The trouble with the mentality of the public-relations man,” wrote Hannah Arendt in the 1970s , “is that he deals only in opinions and ‘goodwill’, the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles, whose concrete reality is at a minimum.” (The Crisis…8)
Then the worm turns. The metaphor of the festive turns into the grotesquerie of the demoagogue. And it’s chief condiment is a six-pack of lies; lies spewed in public places, always public places in front of crowds that ring-fence the teller from the discomfort of questioning, articulated doubts. The bully pulpit works best; public rallies at which the demagogue is not accountable. The Prime Minster has never had a press conference other than a “manufactured” one; no press briefings. Even Donald trump has had some not Modi.
It’s not just contempt for the press or journalists that keeps him away. Sure, some of his party folks have expressed their contempt: calling them,variously, “presstitues” bazarus, “dalals” For Modi, the public rally holds the key to the dissemination of the Big Lie; a tapestry of brush-stroked deceptions and falsehoods and gestures to go with them, the voice ringing with faux-theatrics that are increasingly reverberating with a faltering nervousness, a recognition that people, his crowd s, are hearing but not listening.
Crowds, Like all demogogues, he feeds off crowds; crowds are a necessitate: unquestioning servile, perhaps paid to perform the obedient, the submissive. Crowds do not demand dialogue; individuals do. A crowd does not question; a farmer, a rape victim, a dalit a Muslim could and would. But crowds are also manufactured; created by dalals, through dog-whistles that transmit lies, insecurities that inspire fear, servility unquestioning obedience. Here’s Elias Canetti: “A command addressed to a large number of people has a very special character. It is intended to make a crowd of them and, in as far as it succeeds in this, it does not rouse fear The slogan of a demagogue impelling people in a certain dirction, has exactly the same function…[f]rom the point of view of the crowd which wants to come into existence quickly and to maintain itself as a unit, such slogans are useful and indeed indispensable. The art of a speaker consists in in compressing all his aims into slogans.” (cited in Jahanbegloo, 81)
Those slogans can be lies that are increasingly exposed not just by the Opposition but common citizens and yet the lies continue…at rallies simply because he has to just mouth them and walk away hoping they go down well. If there is any leader-politician who has understood the power of the spectacle it is PM Narendra Modi. He need not have read Guy Debord to believe that the spectacle of majoritarian machismo and muscular nationalism he embodies and transmits create collective sectarian identities built on violence and hatred. Hatred is what he sells. And unbridled power is the price he extracts from the crowd he thinks he has created and wishes to exploit.
Not surprisingly, there have been ripples of anger flowing from sections of civil society at the lies the PM has peddled repeatedly. But it might be useful to recall Hannah Arendt’s reminder back in the 1970s: “…let us remember that the the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage for this reason alone is not likely to make it disappear. The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no inherent truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are. Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehood or simply allowed to fall into oblivion.”
For five years as Prime Minster and earlier as Chief Minster of Gujarat, Narendra Modi got away with lies (among other things) because deception, says Arendt, “never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could have been as the liar maintains they were.Lies are much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality,since the liar has the advantage of knowing before handwhat the audience wishes or expects to hear…” (Arendt, 6)
Are the crowds thinning at the rallies of demagoguery and the demonic? Are Indians, oppressed for five years by lynch-mob rule, disastrous economic policies, rising unemployment a growing sense of anomie and rage at others as victimized as they are, waking up to the possibility of calling out the lies and engaging in truth-telling?
Elections and the vote are just the first steps towards the real festival of democracy; an ongoing carnival of becoming political, a process by which citizens acquire agency and autonomy. Democracy is a publicness as Ramin Jahanbegloo terms it of the political, an accessibility to ever-widening public spheres, unlike the politics of power; that publicness permits them to talk with each other, to disagree through a dialogic process of self-examination and accountability.
Will the “Divider-in-Chief” (Time magazine’s ponderous term) find out, as Arendt had warned that “…reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared?” (Arendt, 6-7)Under “normal circumstances” she holds, “the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar had to offer.” {7)
Is that reality dawning? Will truth call out the demagogue? Will we have voted not as a crowd but as autonomous individuals?
Notes Avay Shukla: https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/4/16920/PM-Modis-Language-Is-the-Utter-Soul-of-Darkness Hannah Arendt: Crises of the Republic. A Harvest Book.Harcourt Bruce & Company 1972 Ramin Jahaanbegloo: The Disobedient Indian. Towards a Gandhian Philosophy of Dissent.Speaking Tiger. New Delhi. 2018
A frightening and true assessment!
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