Modi as Le Pen, critics as imbeciles

A day before India celebrates it's 58th Republic Day Gujarat will get to see a film that talks to them on what an ideal Chief Minister should be.

The movie directed by Ajisingh Jhala has been titled Gujarat No Nath (Lord of Gujarat) and stars Akhilendra Mishra in the role of Namo Narayan Jogi. (Now don't ask if L.K. Advani paid the director money for not naming it Bharath No Nath.)

But even before the lights go off and the titles for the tax-free psuedo-biopic begins to run, one can be doubly sure - the movie is going to be a Box Office hit.
Much like Narendra Modi himself whom the film intends to eulogise.

There should not be any surprises here, for Modi is already a blockbuster flick in the Indian political theatre. A razzle-dazzle movie in which he plays the hero and the villain.

But it's also one that you cannot afford to miss, even if you hate the actor, because the movie is hugely popular.

Sugar-coated and compelling the Modi-movie however has lite-fascism as its virile core, which makes it irresistable for the Hindu urban middle class.
The cocktail Modi delivers is a perfect potion for a generation that is insecure about its identity and finds salvation in wealth creation.

Ten years ago philosopher Jean Baudrillard lampooned the French political class for their impotence before Le Pen, an iconic rabble rouser of the far right.
The vitriolic essay 'A conjuration of imbeciles' drew parallels between the 'worthless' world of contemporary art and French politics.

Baudrillard argued that both the situations - the worthlessness of the contemporary art and the kind of politics that is rendered disfunctional when dealing with demagogues like Le Pen - are exchangeable and their solutions transferable.

If Narendra Modi can be imagined as the Indian equivalent of Le Pen then his critics belonging to the hues of Left and the Right can be truly dubbed as imbeciles.

The problem lies in the degeneration and the shift from traditional discourse and values these political spaces enjoyed.

While the Right in India was quick to compromise with the decay of its value system, flirted with totalitarianism and showed it's capability of being tempted easily by soft Hindutva, the Left were gradually deprived of its political energy.

The Left failed to move even an inch in the political scale, but instead shamelessly morphed into a 'moralistic law-making structure' - a 'representative of universal values' and the 'sacred holder of the reign of virtue'.

Baudrillard says when the traditional Left and the Right are deprived of political substance, the political moves to the far right. The only valid political discourse in such a scenario would that be of Le Pen/Modi. All the rest will be pedagogic and moral.

The more the Le Pen is antagonized by a moral coalition, which according to Baudrillard is a sign of political impotence, the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality.

But what if the Le Pen did not exist? Baudrillard says it would become necessary for us to invent him. "If he were to disappear...we would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, nationalist viruses".

The Le Pen according to Baudrillard is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses to conjure up its own evils, just like an individual who use the political class to cast away the corruption inherent in the society.

Which shows we are all one: screen and audience, the projector and the projected all fused into a movie.