Bhakts are confident that Rahul Gandhi and his party will be routed in 2019, and Amit Shah will make Narendra Modi invincible.
While there is an overall industrial decline and investment is drying up, two industries are flourishing with vengeance. One is the Rahul Advisory Industry, and the other is the Modi Image Promotion Industry. Rahul Gandhi is receiving unsolicited and even unwarranted advice from all kinds of people. There is no GST for this.
Television channels and some leading commentators spend a lot of time and space on critical national issues like: Should Rahul be clean-shaved or sport a beard; should that beard, if he chooses to have one, be like Virat Kohli or Ranveer Singh; should he wear salwar kameez (white or brown) or jeans; should he move his arms and roll up his sleeves like Shah Rukh Khan; should he speak in Hindi, English (or Italian); should he get married or remain a bachelor; should he travel abroad on vacation or spend all his time with party workers, and so on and so forth.
(I wonder what advice these dress code designers would have given to Gandhiji, if they were to be around then.)
I have not seen or heard anybody advising Narendra Modi to have a clean shave or keep a beard like Guru Golwalkar (Modi will feel macho-less and completely lost without that beard). Indeed, he perhaps thinks that he can display his distinct superiority (or hide his inferiority complex!) with that unkempt beard.
Earlier, Modi did receive advice that he must not wear those funny suits or jackets, which have his name embroidered all over. So, he auctioned one of those jackets for a few crore rupees and started wearing fancy ones, one each for every occasion. A dress designer friend of mine has counted 128 versions of his jackets, in various colours and design! (Should Rahul be advised to see Modi’s wardrobe?)
Foreign jaunts, tight hugs
One can understand and even generously forgive Modi for constantly feeling that he is competing with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for image and historical role on the international stage. So, he promotes himself as a “brand” for that kurta-jacket dress, and then regularly visits foreign capitals to hug intensely other heads of states. No one has, so far, reported on what these heads of states must be feeling about those passionate hugs.
But one thing is for sure: he tries to impress Indian masses through televised images of his foreign jaunts. (His visits are hardly noticed by the media or the people in the host countries.)
Modi’s image handlers have perhaps told him that the Indian middle-class, particularly the youth in the sunrise or IT Industry, are hugely impressed by his foreign tours. The more he addresses public gatherings abroad, the more euphoric they become, be they in Mumbai, Bengaluru or Hyderabad. In fact, the epicentre of the Modi Promotion Industry and Nehru or Rahul Bashing Industry is the NRI community.
The Image Building Industry for Modi has now gone into a super overdrive with his completion of four years in office and the general elections approaching. The two projects are concomitant. Hype Modi image, and ruin Rahul image! The trial runs for these two projects did not go according to plan in Gujarat and Karnataka. In Gujarat, the BJP won a “humiliating victory” and in Karnataka, an embarrassing setback. The image handlers cannot take risk in the build-up for 2019.
It is not as if this is the first government which has completed four straight years. Manmohan Singh achieved the four year-score twice. But there was no such brouhaha. Even Vajpayee completed four years in 2003, without much fanfare. But his image-builder-in-chief, Pramod Mahajan, launched a blitzkrieg campaign for 2004 with the slogan “India Shining”. The carpet-bombing promotion drive of “India Shining” failed miserably with Mahajan owning the responsibility publicly. (Interestingly, Vajpayee is known to have said that his party, the BJP, lost because of Modi’s criminal neglect of Gujarat in 2002.)
Modi believes that media can mesmerise people and, thereby, de-sensitise them. He surely succeeded in 2014 with ‘Barbarosa’-style massive invasion of the Congress territory. But then, he was tremendously helped by the complacency and smugness of the Congress Party.
Anti-incumbency following 10 years of the UPA rule was an additional factor. Of course, Modi’s aggressive deployment of media, and Amit Shah’s “war” management of election armament and finance are copied straight from Pentagon. Also, Modi’s personality and his political and organisational skills are far more ruthless.
Obsession with Rahul’s image makeover
Now, back to the main theme of image makeover for Rahul, which seems to be an obsession among some well-wishers as well as a concern among some critics and media commentators. All of them feel that Rahul’s image issue is valid only till 2019 elections.
The Modi bhakts and Modi supporters are confident that Rahul and his party will be routed in this election, and Modi will prove to be invincible. Amit Shah will see to that.
Their only worry is that if Modi does not win a majority, there could be a crisis for the BJP, for the RSS, and of course for Modi. So, efforts are on to consolidate the Hindus and polarise the voting behaviour. For that, strategists feel Modi will have to go to war with Pakistan. It would then be possible to whip up ultra-nationalist feelings and hyper-patriotism.
Similarly, the campaign must establish links with the vast Hindu masses and convert, as much as possible, them into vote bank. Anything from communal conflagration to building of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya will be an attempt to polarise Hindus and Muslims. Christians have already been marginalised. Sikh community does not respect Modi as much as it did before.
The idea is to put Rahul and his image makeover teams on the defensive. He would not be able to either oppose Ram Mandir in Ayodhya or support Masjid construction in the name of secular principles. Similarly, in case of a war, he too would be forced to take a patriotic line. And, if Modi succeeds in bringing Dawood Ibrahim back (or manages to eliminate him), his juggernaut cannot be stopped, or so his supporters feel.
The current theory among the conspiracy units of the Modi campaign team is that when the court cases against Sonia and Rahul are brought on trial, whatever image Rahul has been able to create or recreate will crash to the ground.
The image makeover, therefore, does not depend on whether Rahul grows beard or not, or which dress code he follows. The game has gone beyond dress and demeanour, and far beyond Modi’s “successful” four-year rule!
Kumar Ketkar is a former editor and Congress member of Rajya Sabha.
How can you say Modi’s beard is unkempt? You lose Total credibility for bias, and I’m not familiar of Mr. Modi!
Look beyond the Gandhi caps and what do you find? unbelievable levels of corruption and Bhakti toward the relics of the dynasty and cronies like this commentator!