Modi equals to Mota Bhai
No stars in BJP Haryana or in BJP Maharashtra? No problem. Mota Bhai is here. For those who don't understand Gujarati, the current first language of the country (though there is no first family, that lodestar of Indian dynasty politics, phew), Mota Bhai means Big Brother. Literally; it has a rather Orwellian ring to it, if you have seen the BJP campaign trucks with giant-size plasma screens beaming videos of PM Narendra Modi, exhorting voters to give him one sweet chance to convert Haryana or Maharashtra into that supreme state of Gujarat. Note: Haryana and, much less, Maharashtra are no boondocks states, stuck in some insulting abbreviation thought up in the late 70s.
George Orwell's 1984 has the omnipresence of the moustachioed Big Brother looking at whoever is looking at pictures of him anywhere, from any angle. A rebuke of the Stalinist USSR, Big Brother was modelled on Stalin himself: the moustache, the grey glance, neither happy nor sad. But Mota Bhai is all Indian; even better, he has jumped from Big Brother’s left-of-centre to the very Bharatiya right and is regaling everyone with thoughts on yoga and climate change. He smiles, he playfully pulled the ears of a little black boy in New York – or was it in Japan? He has humour.
His constituency loves him. The Indian vote, as proven in the general elections of May 2014, went to what it wanted - a Big Brother to look after it and its mundane concerns of roti, kapda, makaan and GDP growth. Ho, how else will we beat the Chinese, whose President Eleven – oops, Xi - Jinping - was walked around Sabarmati Ashram by Mota Bhai himself? But the Chinese, the double-dealing, scheming Chinis, were already in Chumar before their president left from Colombo for India. The Chinese are not the point, Mota Bhai is.
The Indian voter doesn't believe in himself. He believes democracy is right, whatever be his understanding of democracy and how the downtrodden and caste-oppressed make their Hobson's choices in a multi-party system that has more parties than colours in the rainbow. The voter believes in development, doesn’t care what the cost is. What is individual liberty? Who are those who hold up development for the rights of one, a few, or forests? Development will brook no barriers even if individual liberty is compromised for the good of the country, nay motherland, fatherland, some land.
He is right, should he bother about everybody or just about what he wants and wills to do with his hard-earned money: that is a result of privilege and thievery since the people who could compete for it have no legs to compete with and no even ground to compete on (some put this down to what they call merit). Oil prices are slipping round the globe – but, hail Mota Bhai, a petrol price cut is due effective October 15, the day Maharashtra and Haryana vote. Double hail, triple hail.
The Indian voter needs a Big Brother and who else but Mota Bhai could fill those shoes, he who never used his power for the welfare of his mother and siblings? Supremely self-sacrificing he is. Noble, yes, though not Nobel, at least not yet. All of this hides the other parts of the personality, the uncomfortable parts that talk of 2002 every time a firang writes a news feature on him, the Hindutva agenda evidenced with the spurt in temple, cow slaughter, love jihad and other such cause célèbre. Nobody is watching, nobody is listening, all rapt in thrall.
Mota Bhai will swell to the size of Giant Robot – remember the Japanese serial where the boy could command the Steel Super-robot’s presence by speaking into his watch?
Mota Bhai will deliver. And they wait in anticipation of their rewards because Mota Bhai has a special clever capability to coin slogans and appropriate days and events that were monopolised by the party of The Family. If he can do this, then he will also deliver. For in him, we trust.
In late August, the BJP won four of ten Bihar Assembly by-poll seats. That feat was crowed out by the RJD-JDU-Congress combine’s six seats, the careful reconstruction of the grand secular alliance from the debris which was left in post the Lok Sabha elections. But Mota Bhai ensured the BJP got the highest numbers for a single party.
Will Big Brother, er, Mota Bhai, work the same magic in Maharashtra and Haryana? Or will he get the majority he exhorted in multiple rallies in both states? The party awaits the results, knowing its tide will ebb in the surge of Big Brother’s chutzpah. But that’s something for counting day, October 19.