From Republic Day 2015 to Republic Day 2016, Modi's slow descent

The leitmotif of the Indian political story between Republic Day 2015 and that of this year has been the fall of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, albeit in slow motion, from the exalted perch he had occupied so stunningly in May 2014.

The fall of Modi began with the Capital shutting down in 2015, as it does every year, to prepare for the Republic Day parade, at which US President Barrack Obama was the chief guest. At one of his meetings with Obama, the Indian prime minister appeared in a most unsuitable suit – one on which his full name, Narendra Damodardas Modi, was monogrammed as pinstripes.

The suit, rightly or wrongly, conveyed the impression of a chaiwalla’s son having become enamoured of power, of flaunting expensive clothes in complete contrast to his rhetoric of working for the poor, of letting his electoral triumphs swell his ego to the point of becoming arrogant.

In reaction, they voted against him and the party in Delhi a fortnight or so after he had donned the monogrammed suit. Anecdotal accounts would have us believe that the suit cost the Bharatiya Janata Party a percentage of votes. Then Bihar walloped the BJP, stemming, to a degree, the very font of electoral success that had Modi's charisma and aura of invincibility.

Expressing dissent

What symbolises Modi’s fall is not his party’s electoral defeats, but an event that occurred at the convocation ceremony of Lucknow's Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University last week. Before Modi was to begin to his speech on Friday, three men stunned the audience – and the nation – by shouting slogans against him, in the hope of prodding the government to respond sensitively to the suicide of Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad.

Who could have imagined this situation a year ago, of students having the temerity to disrupt his meeting? Such was the awe Modi struck in the people, the feverish excitement he inspired in his audience, and the embodiment of hope he had become for the nation.

The unsuitable suit was the zenith of the graph Modi scaled since he became Prime Minister in May 2014. The worm has been turning since, though it still isn't anywhere near the point that reflects mass revulsion and anger. However, Modi would do well to recognise the outcry at Ambedkar University as a scream against what many people think is his arrogance.

But, really, why should people view Modi as arrogant, given his remarkable propensity to talk and tweet, his near-permanent presence in our lives, staring out of newspaper advertisements or from TV screens or delivering soliloquies to the nation on the radio? There was never, ever a prime minister who insinuated himself into our lives with such determination.

Another view

This is because a large segment of the population sees his near-permanent presence in their lives as self-serving. He is there to speak to them but not to listen; he seems to slip into a cocoon of silence every time people through individual or collective action express their woes or, alternatively, continues to speak without alluding to what distresses them. In such moments he appears to tell the people, Marie Antoinette-like, “If you are angry or unhappy, live on my words of hope.”

The three men who shouted slogans against Modi were, in a way, protesting against his style of communication, which entails disregarding the hierarchy of issues people consider important and instead imposing on them a register of ideas the prime minister or his government or party considers significant.

It is the acute dissonance between two perceptions – one of the people and the other of the government – that have turned sections of the people to increasingly interpret Modi’s verbosity as arrogance.

Take the suicide of Rohith Vemula. True, you can’t expect the Prime Minister to comment on every death in the country, however tragic. But his government went ahead to deny the Dalit-ness of Rohith’s death, so to speak, then to deprive him of even his Dalit identity, to even accuse others of politicising his death. As prime minister, he stood implicated in his government’s conduct.

It is only when the fury did not show signs of abating that Modi chose to speak in Lucknow. For many, his intervention did not seem a belated corrective measure. To them, it appeared he had expressed sympathy at the death of Vemula only because he feared continued silence could prematurely abort his concerted attempt to woo the Dalit vote.

A deep-rooted mindset

Modi has been singing paeans to Ambedkar for months, extolling his vision and contribution to the making of modern India. It, therefore, seemed odd of him not to have empathised spontaneously with Vemula's death. It seemed odder still because only two days before he had waxed eloquent on his own Start-up India initiative.

It wasn’t a case of poor judgement. It is more an aspect of the party’s mindset that Modi represents. He believes that through his constant invocation of Ambedkar, he could win over Dalits because of their respect for their icon. He hopes to stoke the pride that they derive from him.

But Dalit politics has long gone past such tokenism. The dominant Dalit consciousness focuses on enforcement of rights and demands for participation in institutions and the political realm. These issues Modi is not seen to be addressing. Instead, he offers to them the panacea of development.

However, for Dalits, as for other marginalised groups, it is also about access to whatever fruits of development are available now – and what might be in the future. Modi is viewed arrogant because he seems to Dalits to have immense faith in his ability to persuade them about the wisdom of his vision. He is seen, willy-nilly, to mock their quests.

Remember that his government prompted IIT-Madras in June to derecognise the Ambedkar Periyar Student Circle. In addition, Modi has not forcefully addressed the popular fears that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Mohan Bhagwat and, more recently, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan triggered through their remarks on the reservations policy.

A deep chasm

It is always about Modi’s vision and ideas regarding the future of the country, not about the quests and anxieties of its people. The yawning gap between the two indeed fuelled, to a great extent, the controversy over the horrific Dadri episode for weeks last year.

Modi courted silence as the nation writhed in agony at the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq; he did not condemn luminaries of his party who seemed to rationalise the killing. Nor did he express his disapproval of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who described as a "manufactured revolt" the decision of writers to return to their Sahitya Akademi awards in protest against what they believed was rising intolerance in India.

Ultimately, Modi did speak – and he did it many times. But it was always, more or less, about India having always been innately tolerant, about the diversity of its culture, stressing on the need to focus on development than social strife, extolling Sufism, consciously naming Muslims in his speeches as symbols of rising India, confident India.

These homilies, though welcome, fell short of the popular expectations. What the people wanted from him was to demonstrate a resolute intent to take action against those targeting their own countrymen, to at least restrain his own party people from making intemperate remarks or playing victim and justifying their barbarity.

Too long gone

This isn’t to say that Modi doesn’t wish to break away from the past image of himself. The biographical section of his official website notes under the title, Humble Beginnings: The Early Years, “Narendra Modi had a wide range of friends from all the communities. As a child he often celebrated both Hindu and Muslim festivals considering the large number of Muslim friends he had in the neighbourhood." (Emphasis the website’s.)

But for just too long, he has been the Hindu Hriday Samrat (Emperor of Hindu Hearts) for chauvinistic Hindus and hotheaded Hindutva footsoldiers; for too long, he too has deliberately played along with the powerful Brahmin-Bania segments of the Sangh Parivar which see in his popularity the chance to protect and promote their interests, and whose Other Backward Classes background could thwart the pressure from subaltern social groups for equal participation and share in governance. Modi simply played along with it.

For Modi to now invent a new persona for even instrumental reasons (obviously, to command power and prestige) implies alienating his core supporters. He must, therefore, walk the tightrope and deliver speeches in which are not reflected the quests of a large segment of the population.

This is why the unsuitable suit has become the symbol of Modi’s arrogance, mocking of the minorities, the marginalised groups, and those who don’t subscribe to Hindutva. Modi seemed to be telling the people that he was justified to flaunt the expensive suit because he had devised a form of governance, as also a model of development, which could efface their insecurity and hardship. It was construed as an insult to the popular intelligence, of taking their support for granted, of being insensitive to them.

From this perspective, Republic Day 2015 and Republic Day 2016 are linked, just as the unsuitable suit is to the protest of Lucknow’s Dalit students, by a line sloping down on the political graph of Modi. As Modi watches the soldiers and tableaux wind down Delhi’s Rajpath, he might reflect and rethink his own politics, both in style and substance.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It is available in bookstores.