Making of Selfie Nationalism: Narendra Modi,the Paradigm Shift to Social Media Governance,and Crisis of Democracy

Modi’s India of Gods, Saints, and Heroes

According to Jaffrelot (2015), Modi, since his time as chief minister of Gujarat, has relied on a “discourse that combines Hindu nationalism (slightly de-emphasized) and development (considerably over-emphasized)” (p. 821). Modi continued to use the rhetoric he had honed in Gujarat politics—the “banalization of Hindutva” (Jaffrelot, 2015, p. 821)—at the national level, in which the conflation of Hinduism with India was seen as natural and pedestrian; this comes across strongly in his Twitter messages. In a speech posted on his Twitter account, he says:

I am a product of the ancient tradition that firmly believes in dialogue on difficult issues… .The ancient Indian concept of Tarka Shastra [laws of argumentation] is founded on dialogue and debate as the model for exchange of views and avoidance of conflict… .Growing up, I heard stories of Lord Rama, Lord Krishna, Lord Buddha and Bhakta Prahlada… .The purpose of each of their actions was to uphold Dharma, which has sustained Indians from ancient to modern times. (April 18, 2017)

While the Congress Party had few minorities in positions of power and routinely invoked the communal card, most famously by Indira Gandhi in her acquiescence to cultural demands from the most conservative elements of minority communities (Mitra, 2016). For Modi, communalism is naturalized in the discourse of his language on social media. In all his tweeted political observations, sometimes several times a day, Modi never mentions dharmanirpaksh (secularism) as a value that India’s loktantra (democracy) must embrace. Long before the rise of BJP and Modi, scholars, historians, and policy mavens have doubted the success of India’s pragmatic secularism, marked by active state indifference to and neutrality regarding religion and a sturdy refusal by the state to recognize or evaluate religion, except in so far as religious practice and religious institutions contravene other fundamentals of individual or collective citizenship and social well-being, which the state is obligated to protect. Bhatt (2004) writes that such a strong version of secularism, while written in India’s constitution, was never feasible in contemporary India. “There are influential democratic and anti-communal voices that support some variety of institutionalized intervention,” writes Bhatt, “by religious institutions into state and political affairs” (p. 136). One can further debate whether Modi’s rise to power is based on failures of ideological secularism or “distinct Indian secularism” (Bhargava, 2007, p. 20). It is nonetheless clear that Modi himself is noncommittal to secularism in his social media messaging.

It Is a Land of Unbridled Growth and “Ease of Business”

The idea of vikas (development) was important campaign rhetoric, which Modi adopted during the Gujarat elections and resuscitated in the 2014 national elections. His Twitter posts are replete with development-oriented slogans such as “Securing India’s future through infrastructure” (April 17, 2017) and “Make in India” (September 14, 2016) as he relentlessly pushes the theme, “Sabka hain, vishwas hain, ho rahan vikas hain” (It is our own, we believe in it, we are witnessing development). The concept of vikas, however, is far from Keynesian welfare and the developmental economics adopted by postindependent planning commissions, which made economic policy recommendations to the government until it was dissolved by Modi’s government in 2014. For the first eight plans, beginning in 1951, the emphasis was on a growing public sector with massive investments in basic and heavy industries and “the effective and balanced utilization of [the] country’s resources” (Mehrotra, 2014). This philosophy had started to change by 1997, and the emphasis on the public sector has become less pronounced with increasing focus toward privatization and deregulation. In dissolving the planning commission, Modi’s economic agenda was driven by his slogan, “Best regulation is no regulation” (September 22, 2017). He repeats, in his speeches and Twitter messages, his commitment to the end of a seemingly over-regulatory culture:

Anyone in the world [who] wants to add India to his or her vikas patra [development chart], they are welcome here … We are open for global business, [there is an] ease of doing business and in three years I have made 7000 pro-business reforms. (June 2, 2017)

Modi, the World Leader, and Modi, the Commoner

Without a doubt, Modi’s Twitter content is driven by global images, such as photographs with heads of states when they visit India; photographs with heads of state when Modi visits their countries, or when he meets them for global or regional summits such as SAARC, G20, or BRICS; birthday wishes to various elected and appointed heads of state (including those in nondemocratic countries); and meetings with diasporic Indians, congratulating them on their successes abroad. The sheer volume of his tweets increases when Modi travels abroad and Prime Minister Modi metamorphoses, in his social media messaging, into the global Modi who presents himself as a cooperative and visionary world leader, willing and able to put India on the world map as a regional, military, and technological power. Under the veneer of the global Modi, writes Deb (2016), rages the commoner Modi who, in his now famous speech given at Madison Square Garden in New York in 2014, had said, “Our country has become very devalued. Our ancestors used to play with snakes. We play with the mouse.” Cheers had resounded, Deb observed, because,

in the twist of a metaphor, Modi had restored the honor of the nation … India was not a nation of snake charmers but of high-tech mouse managers. And Modi understood this, because he too was an Indian driven by rage and humiliation, a newcomer to the system and a latecomer to modernity, a leader who would transform India into a land of Silicon Valley white magic, but who would retain its authentic Hindu core.

The Politics of What’s Untweeted

The analysis of Modi’s social media would not be complete without identifying the various silences. The most significant of them are as follows:

Recognition and celebration of India’s plural religious traditions especially those of Islam and Christianity. While the idea of “national heritage” (Harris, 2015, p. 712) is always a contested one, Modi’s Twitter is unequivocally Hindu with few references to major non-Hindu religious holidays and no references to non-Hindu religious figures. According to Palshikar (2015), majoritarian Hindutva is more than intercommunity violence; it is about holding and articulating a set of views and ideas that uphold a majoritarian worldview. Modi’s Twitter messages are full of incipient and majoritarian sentiment that tries to retain a “centrist” image but continuously pushes the center toward a pro-Hindutva platform.

Selfie Nationalism, Polarization, and Delegative Democracy

By the 1980s, the Congress Party had abandoned its role as an ideological pole that discouraged communal fault lines; instead, it seemed to contribute to the politics of community identity among both the majority and the minority. In this sense, the story of reshaping BJP’s Hindutva nationalism is intertwined with the story of the Congress Party’s decline. However, Modi’s version of nationalism is shaped by some unique features that cannot be comfortably and easily mapped onto the rise of Hindutva as majoritarian politics alone. He advocated for a kind of nationalism that I categorize as “selfie nationalism.” One can derive four dominant characteristics of this nationalism from Modi’s social media messaging. First, it is a nationalism where Modi (as a symbol) is personification of a ubiquitous and anointed leader—via frequent use of photographs and selfies—a symbol around which BJP and the party’s political structure revolves. It was, therefore, not unusual to see Modi tweet posters where he was seen with a halo indicating Hindu symbolism of gods who glow like surya (the sun god). Second, selfie nationalism is driven by economic and technological globalization, and a discourse that rejects, culturally and religiously, any plural narratives of the nation state. Modi’s popular slogan, which he often tweets, “IT + IT = IT … Indian talent + Information technology = India Tomorrow” (May 10, 2017), conflates India and Indian nationalism with technical globalization. The technocentric Indian is, also, a Hindu who finds comfort in his newly found place of prestige in the global order after having finally shed the last remnants of colonialism. Third, the rhetoric of selfie nationalism is uniquely ephemeral. It is a discourse with a short shelf life driven by optics, as in the frequent launch of a new policy initiative that is, then, tweeted. Indian governments have had enduring national policy initiatives, sometimes lasting two decades, such as garibi hatao (“abolish poverty” to reduce rural poverty levels) and hum do, hamare do (“we two, our two” to encourage family planning). In the era of Modi’s selfie nationalism, major policies—their planning and implementation—last for a short duration and disappear even before economists and policy-makers are able to understand the implications of such policies. A good example is the recently launched—and quickly discontinued—bank note demonetization, which led to nationwide chaos and misery for the poor and very poor when a large amount of cash was removed from circulation. While it is unclear as to the depth of the impact of demonetization on poor people’s lives, it is clear that it did little to change the nature and existence of the “shadow economy” it was meant to dismantle and any associated corruption (Crabtree, 2017). Instead, Modi gave a speech—posted on his Twitter—conflating the policy with national pride and patriotism, “Whether it is the 1962 war or the 1965 war, India has seen the patriotism of its people” (November 8, 2016); “India has become witness to a shuddhikaran [purification] drive” (November 8, 2016); and “To fight external evils is an ordinary thing but when ordinary Indians come to fight the evil within, it is inspiring” (November 8, 2016). The fourth feature of Modi’s selfie nationalism is a rejection of the role of traditional media in a democratic society and an emphasis on media use rather than access. Tweeting catchwords and phrases such as digidhan (digital wealth) and “e-governance” (July 30, 2017) do not focus on whether people have access to media—or if people have basic infrastructure to allow connectivity—but rather on the use of media as a potential for profit and growth.

Scholars have written about populist nationalism, and selfie nationalism shares some characteristics with the rise of the kind of populism we have witnessed in the United States and Europe (Brubaker, 2017; Groshek & Koc-Michalska, 2017; Vittori, 2017). These nationalist populisms have formed a distinctive cluster within the wider global conjuncture and in construing the opposition between self and other not in narrowly national but in broader civilizational terms. This shift, writes Brubaker, can be termed as “civilizationism” (p. 1193) and has been driven by the notion of a civilizational threat from Islam. This has given rise to an identitarian “Christianism,” a seeming secularist posture, and an ostensibly liberal defense of gender equality, gay rights, and freedom of speech. Modi’s selfie nationalism, while sharing some commonalities with such type of populism (e.g., being anti-Islam) nevertheless has its own distinctiveness.

Modi’s brand of nationalism, Jaffrelot (2015) suggests, is premised on wide disparities signifying economic, income, and sociopolitical polarization. Jafferlot writes about the “Gujarat model” failing to benefit about one third of the citizens of the state (a group predominantly comprising untouchables, tribals, and Muslims living in rural areas) and rising inequality between the urban and rural poor. If anything, the divide between the urban and rural has dramatically increased in India since the 1990s—reversing earlier trends—and has resulted in mass migration to cities. A much remarked upon manifestation of agrarian distress has been the phenomenon of suicides of thousands of farmers in various regions of India since the late 1990s (Reddy & Mishra, 2009). In a country where agriculture remains the largest employment sector, it contributed only 13.7% to the gross domestic product in 2015 to 2016 with those numbers likely to decline in the future (Hnatkovskaa & Lahiri, 2013). When one looks at India’s rural–urban polarization, in terms of wages and consumption, one can observe that it has been rising since the 1980s but has increased at a very rapid pace since the 1990s. It may not be a coincidence that among the various cleavages that exist in Indian society such as caste, gender, and religion, the rural–urban one is characterized by the most significant and increased polarization (Bandyopadhyay, 2012, 2013). This polarization extends to digital technology where, as recent news reports suggest, only 8% of Indians have regular access to the Internet and about 19% have occasional access (Chopra, 2017). Of all Internet users, urban India has close to 60% Internet penetration, reflecting a level of saturation, but there are 750 million users in rural India who remain disconnected from the digital sphere (Wu, 2016). While Modi’s idea of e-governance was lauded by diasporic and urban Indians, preliminary research shows that it has made almost no impact on the lives of the rural Indian in municipality or gram panchayat (village) governance (Chatterji, 2017). Modi’s social media messages—and policy initiatives—clearly indicate that the rural poor are not the focus of his development strategies and that his rhetoric of vikas is not about reducing economic or digital polarization, instead about but creating wealth.

I argue that with the rise of Modi’s brand of selfie nationalism and increasing rural–urban polarization, democracy in India is more akin to what O’Donnell (1994) in his studies about Argentina, Chile, and Peru refers to as “delegative democracy” (p. 55). Delegative democracy rests on the idea that the paternal figure of the state, embodied in the elected official, is supposed to take care of the whole nation, and his or her political base is a movement signified by the supposedly vibrant overcoming of the factionalism of a multiparty system. In this system, other institutions such as the press, courts, and legislatures are nuisances to governance and must be undermined. Delegative democracy is more democratic than an authoritarian state, but is not intrinsically devoted to the needs, rights, and duties of all its citizens. O’Connell rightly argues that in a representational democratic system, accountability would run not only vertically but also horizontally, and this is where a network of relatively autonomous institutions is able to work independent from political interference from the state. By constantly undermining the press, legislative bodies, and judiciary, Modi has established himself as a delegative democratic leader: strongly individualistic, but more of a Hobbesian than of a Lockean variety; expecting the voters to choose him, irrespective of their identities and affiliations; and presenting himself as the individual who is most fit to take care of the destiny of India. A delegative democratic leader uses the rhetoric of majoritarianism, a voice of the marginalized majority, those who have somehow—often silently—suffered humiliation or defeat, or watched minorities being given privileges that she or he as a member of the majority either does not enjoy or cannot achieve. For example, Modi’s blueprint of the Hindutva discourse of “majority” is based on a historical humiliation by the Mughals, and the current epoch is a return to the masculine Hindu claiming his rightful majoritarian place in history. Further, this majoritarianism is based on a demographic calculus that is not a representational democratic precept. The “majority,” so conceived, certainly has no constitutional, legal—or indeed, real—status. If demographic majoritarianism controverts democratic principles, its rendition as an enumeration, exemplified by the need to cultivate a Hindu electoral vote bank, cannot be democratic. A permanent, religiously defined majority electorate, while conceivable and empirically possible, cannot be a principle of administrating democracy. Bhatt (2004) writes,

The Hindutva idea of [majority] “Hindu rights” is undemocratic in its very creation because the concept of “Hindu right” does not emerge from the field of political right (rights declared from a ground of political, deliberative, democratic, civic and constitutional processes) but emerges from an entirely different ground: the “rights” which flow from a sacralized, primordial conception of nation in which the Aryan-Hindu is the only legitimate inheritor of the land. (p. 152)

The most unique aspect of Modi’s selfie nationalism is defined by social media governance, which involves communicating directly to the people via a rhetoric steeped in slogans, obsessiveness with business, and a Hindu identity. Nanda (2010) calls this rhetoric part of a “state-temple-corporate complex” (p. 92), which yields decisive power in modern India. This social media governance is driven by Modi’s deep distrust of mainstream media. As Price (2015) writes, during Modi’s time as chief minister, he had become “wary of the big TV interviews” where he would be asked about communalism and where whatever he said in reply could “overshadow the positive message he wanted to put across” (p. 150). He has since shunned the mainstream media, but this media could not shun him and, instead, provided him—and continues to do so—with wall-to-wall coverage that no other candidate in India’s national elections had ever received. The “Modi effect,” thus, has been a clear break from India’s long history of representational democracy and moderate efforts at secularism, which had, for the first 65 years of its independence, slowly but steadily been building and strengthening vertical democratic institutions. His majoritarian neoliberal Hindutva politics is a flow of political power and knowledge, via social media, which does not foster democratic governance; it is more of a “democratic regime,” akin to delegative democracy. “Elections in delegative democracies are a very emotional and high-stakes process,” writes O’Donnell (1994, p. 60), “various candidates compete to be the absolutely zero-sum winner of the delegation to rule the country with no constraints”; after the election, voters are expected to return to the condition of passive, but hopefully cheering, spectators. Under Modi’s Hindutva regime, as historian Sarkar (2002) warns, a rewriting of the representative constitution is very much a possibility, if his messages are to be read critically, “Justice will be pushed down to the third place in the Preamble [of India’s constitution], far below security and prosperity” (p. 262).