What Sardar Patel's statue tells us of Modi's politics

There is something literal about Modi. He seems tangible, concrete, he can be equated with numbers, with productivity charts, with development statistics, with defence data. In a concrete sense, Modi has become a larger than life hoarding.

Probably the most literal thing Modi has done is to plan the Sardar’s statue and the statue is the most intriguing thing about Modi. Through it Modi tries to recreate a unity, a unification around the Sardar statue. It is 182m , bigger than the Statue of Liberty, a literal rectification of history claiming that Patel can no longer be ignored. Token rituals like the unity run, of villagers carrying iron and stone gives it a pseudo mythic quality.

In a typical developmentelese tokenism Modi promises that the Rs 2,500 crore statue will contribute to tribal development, environmental protection. Indians who love the literalism of statistics often recite that it is twice the height of Liberty and five times taller than the Christ at Rio in Brazil. Yet the Sardar statue is not something we can accept at face value. It is a reflection of something deeper. At 597 ft it is one of the greatest Rorschach’s in history, a psychological projection which has to be sociologically understood.

Tokensim

A Sardar is a chief or leader, a commander, evoking military rank but going beyond it. The word became more general and indicated a position of high administrative rank. In fact, it became a name adopted by men and women across the Balkans, Iran. Sardar conveys the concreteness of power and yet has a tenacity as symbol. Sardar Patel conveys that concreteness.

Here was a man who "unified India", made the Nizam blink, when Nehru and other leaders were dithering. This was a leader who gave tangible expression to the nation state, who protected its territory. Patel embodied the forceful politician who was not above the use of force to maintain territorial integrity. He was thus called the "Indian Bismarck" the "Iron Man of India". History and myth have to combine to create the Sardar as he exists now. He is a symbol of the nation state, a forceful, masculine, leader, known for his sacrifice and not fully acknowledged by history.

The stage is set to recover a symbol and create symbolic justice for one of the ignored heroes of history. Symbolic justice has to go beyond compensation or historical restitution. Symbols need a sense of redundancy, of excess, they should create a larger than life feeling. A small statue will not do. An abstract symbol does not carry weight.

One needs an incarnation of the Sardar, a presence so huge that the tangibility of the message is not lost. Concreteness demands the literalness of the statue. He was a giant and giants cannot be miniaturised. In this era where records count. Sardar has to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Most regimes prefer being in the Guinness Book of Records to being indicators in the Human Development Report.

The former is the stuff of gossip, folklore, citation. The biggest is often equated by regimes with the best. There is a second mode of logic behind the Sardar statue. The Sardar is symbolic of the new determination of the nation state. India is virtually saying that if it had followed the logic of the Sardar, it would have been a powerful super power. No elite suffers from superpower envy like our elite. The statue signals a statement of intentions, India’s need for political dominance.

Nationalism

Thirdly, as an observer pointed out Sardar in Modi’s head is only a substitute for Veer Savarkar. Savarkar and Sardar are siblings, symptoms, substitutes for the nation state. Both were strong nationalists from different parties. So in a symbolic sense they become synonyms, on rather metonyms for the nation state. A metonyms is a symbol where the part conveys the whole when you see Sardar, you breathe in the nation state.

The symbolic Sardar has to have several levels. For Modi, it does not suffice to have a Gujarati model of development. He needs a Gujarati variant of nationalism. Sardar can evoke nation state and development Gujarati-style. Yet the second level has to transcend the parochial or regional and be national. But even national is not enough. A Sardar statue has to evoke global comparisons. It has to evoke the Statue of Liberty but dwarf it. History can only settle for bigger and biggest and Sardar symbolises the bigness of the new India. One wonders whether Patel who was a modest man, who could curb his ego would have been pleased with such a public display of collective emotion.

Idolatry

Idolatry is the new domain of nationalist politicians. Icons demand reading, idols are narrower, reductive , more powerful as messages. Idols summon the collective, they demand worship, they insist on the solidarity of presence.

The next great Guinness record will list the number of people who visited the Sardar memorial. Nationalism needs new public rituals, new introductions of adrenaline and the Sardar Statue, a creature out of Guinness Books and Ripley’s Believe It or Not provides the occasion. Decades later, the statue will survive as a symbol of a nationalist India, a collective dream of an India tough on security, clear on citizenship or will history be ironic and confine the statue to birds treating him indifferently; only the future will tell. Till then one watches one of the great cults of the new nationalist post-Nehruvian state with awe, irony and interest.