For a few days last week, I was on Assignment Modi. I was there among his masked doubles--a plastic tribute to the cult of "Narendrabhai"--as he played with the mass mind with such demagogic panache. On evenings inundated with garishly exaggerated lotuses and enemies enlarged to demonic sizes like Sohrabuddin (who was killed in a controversial police encounter in Gujarat sometime ago) and Afzal Guru (who is still alive though the court sentenced him to death for his involvement in the terrorist attack on Parliament), Performance Modi was politics at its kitschy best. I mean kitsch in its original sense.
As Milan Kundera writes, "Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements." He elaborates in a conversation with Ian McEvan: "In my view, politics--in the sense of political parties, elections and modern politics--is unthinkable without kitsch. It is inevitable. The function of the successful politician is to please. He is meant to please the largest number of people humanly possible, and to please so many you must rely on the clichés they want to hear." Modi has multitudes to please, and he relies on more than clichés. He mines from sources as varied as mythology and the junkyard of secular India.
As the words left Planet Modi and reached the holy precincts of official secularism in Delhi and elsewhere in India, it was kitsch and clichés all over again. Modi the communal Caligula. Modi the bl
