It seems as it were only yesterday that then Congress president D.K. Barooah declared that “India was Indira and Indira was India.” In reality, it was four decades ago, but what we have witnessed over the past couple of years is a brilliant political and marketing campaign by the likes of adman Piyush Pandey and BJP president Amit Shah to elevate Narendra Modi to the status of a demi-god. To wit, from Piyush Pandey’s otherwise utterly unmemorable memoir is this nugget from the advertising campaign launched for the Lok Sabha elections of 2014, "The brief [from the party] was crystal clear. There would be only one name, Narendra Modi, in all communication, which led, unambiguously, to Abki baar, Modi Sarkar."
We have had the media play its role in this orchestrated campaign and India’s foreign policy become in essence a one-man road show with the foreign minister scarcely visible. From the Prime Minister’s photo ops with the terracotta warriors in Xian in China to his steering Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg out of the way of the cameras pointing at him, the media’s coverage of these foreign visits have seemed like the scrapbook a fan might keep of a superstar. We have even had more discussion of the Prime Minister’s stylish wardrobe than we have had of a movie star’s. Only one idiosyncratic columnist has had the temerity to say that, on occasion, the much lauded Modi bandis do not match the rest of his ensemble.
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From “only one name, Narendra Modi, in all communication” that was then carried over to the government’s campaigns from Swachh Bharat (remember that?) to Jan Dhan Yojana, it was a short if ugly journey to Amit Shah’s extraordinary statement – much worse than D.K. Barooah’s sycophancy – that if the BJP lost in Bihar, firecrackers would be burst in Pakistan. In a delicious irony, the first firecrackers were burst outside the BJP offices in Bihar after party workers decided prematurely that the party was winning. Mr Modi himself lowered the tone by suggesting that if the Grand Alliance won, they would apportion reservations to the minority community.
It is hard to recall a state election fought so long and so hard and where the name-calling was this ugly. It is hard to remember when a prime minister spent this much time at election rally after election rally in a single state. It was always clear who the Grand Alliance’s chief ministerial candidate was. In another reflection of this personality cult, however, the prime minister was ‘elevated’ to the de facto candidate for the BJP in Bihar.
The unity of the opposition may not hold at a national level even as Nitish Kumar emerges from this election looking wise and statesman-like with the pundits already predicting that he might lead a grand alliance in 2019. That is perhaps premature. Mr Modi still has Doordarshan and Mann ki Baat at his disposal to keep looking presidential. The private news channels and many newspapers may hang on his every word as the most charismatic -- and polarizing -- personality in Indian politics since Indira Gandhi. Some in the media and their pusillanimous proprietors may hold back delivering the bad news as some TV news channels appeared to do in the Bihar election But, with apologies, to Mr Shah, the voices of dissent and disagreement are going to get louder. Which is as it should be in a democracy.
Time and again in the past few months, any criticism of the ruling party has been equated with being anti-national. On Sunday, a good proportion of a famously impoverished state of 100 million, a nation-state of its own, delivered the most apt rebuttal to this sycophantic, anti-democratic notion.
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