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.

Fowl Game Homo-Gallus

Sitting in his swanky Massachusetts Avenue office in Washington, the Indian Ambassador to the United States Ronen Sen closes his eyes for a second.

He is having strange eerie visions these days:

Honourable MPs with red cockscombs and wattles cackling endlessly about chicken recipes and heating up a huge 'Privilege' tandoor.

The backdrop for the scene is the Parliament of India.

In the night he wakes up with beads of sweat, after being ridiculously made to count headless chicken armed with gun mikes prancing around his bed and asking him for 'bites'. It looks like a scene lifted from a film scripted by Louis Bunuel and directed by Ram Gopal Verma.

In the spare time he is penning 'Chicken Zen: A linguistic guide to naive and seasoned diplomats'. A whole chapter in the primer is dedicated to fowl metaphors.

Perhaps Sen should play it cool. He should be telling all those MP's baying for his blood that that being a headless chicken is not that bad after all. Especially, in India. Perhaps he should write a letter to the Ministry of Sports to help organise an annual 'headless chicken race' for politicians and journalists.

He could extensively quote from the inspiring story of Mike, a young Wyandotte rooster from Fruita, Colarado who escaped being the dinner of a farmer Lloyd Olsen in the year 1945.

For all those who haven't heard, the story: Olsen dreaming of a pot of chicken cooked by his wife Clara tried to chop of Mike's head using an axe, but missed it by more than a few proverbial whiskers. The only things intact in the head-part of Mike after the botched butchering job where a single ear and part of the brain stem.

The physically challenged fowl flapped around miraculously for another 18 months pecking for grains and worms and earning the poor farmer some $4500 every month.

It's inspiring to know there is hope, even if you have lost your mind.

But if somebody thought the business chicken had with things nuclear ended with a diplomat's linguistic misadventure they are thoroughly mistaken.

It was as if your world suddenly turned into a coop, teeming with millions of chicken. Some with their heads intact, others with their limbs missing.

As the N-deal between India and the US was being hammered out, a new species called homo-gallus was invading our broadcast and print space.

One theory that went around was that this Gallusean invasion because too much of chicken is being served in the parties hosted by diplomats and politicians, where pork and the beef are considered a taboo. Does eating too much headless chicken make you one? We are afterall what we eat.

Statements and counter statements started ruffling feathers. It suddenly became fashionable for page three queens and even the chics who walk the ramp to peck at the N-issue. Manmohan Singh too was feeling hen-pecked by Prakash Karat.

Columnists said the whole spat was over the style of prepearing chicken: ie Cantonese vs Kentucky Fried and nothing more. Nobody was reading the hapless chicken's horoscope.

The Left didn't quote Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, but said Manmohan Singh was submitting his scalp and the nation for a peck from a bird of higher rank. Karat was having dreams of painted chics being snatched by an imperialist eagle.

To top it all the UPA and the Left started playing the game of Chicken (Hawk-Dove) in Game Theory. A metaphor for a situation where two parties engage in a showdown, despite the fact that the outcome where neither person yields is the worst possible one for both players. Only their pride stops from backing down.

In the game playing Dove is equivalent to threat displays (Left's posture of withdrawng support to the government). According to the Game Theory if both the players choose the Hawk strategy, they have to fight until one of them wins. If both players adopt a Dove strategy, there is a tie. But the payoffs for the players are lower.

The tussle between the UPA and the Left over the N-deal issue acquired the character of 'War of attrition' model rather than a game of 'Chicken' at a later stage. Though both the games are models of escalation of conflict, they differ in the form in which the conflict gets escalated.

The outcome of a 'Chicken' game might not be agreeable for the contestants: it's either life or death.

The 'War of attrition' game models a situation in which the outcomes differ only in degrees. Think of contestants in a reality TV show having to decide whether the prize is worth the cost of risk they have to take.

With this realisation came the final 'chickening out' and the discovery that the N-deal is no Big deal. I don't mind catching Alektorphobia for a while. Do you?