Modi the wax dummy: What you see is what you get

Public figures are more than persons. They often carry what media students call a persona, a larger-than-life projection, an aura which magnifies the self, and creates a sense of charisma. The public persona can be hyperbolic, exaggerating the impact of a person. Worse, it can be erratic, deflating a politician into less than a person.

Cartoons often perform this function reducing the power, the impact of a person. Cartoons performed this act of condensation and rejection on Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi. As their power waned, they shrank and the shrinkage was best captured in cartoons of Rahul resplendent in a pram or Manmohan sulking in a corner behind Sonia Gandhi.

Expressions

Unlike Congress politicians who kept shrinking over the decade, Narendra Modi has created an interesting array of expressions and extensions of himself.

As one explores the diversity of these expressions, one realises the political range of the man and his future limits. Modi's career became a Rorschach. A person's perception of order, the emotional state is understood through the Rorschach. In reading politics of our time as inkblots our middle class created and projected a Modi. Modi, in that sense, was not a person but a psychological symptom of a middle class tired of the Congress. Wanting decisiveness and security.

As his politics escalated, Modi became a hoarding. A hoarding is a larger-than -life size portrait of a politician or a film star. Film star politicians like MGR, NTR, Jayalalithaa loved their hoardings announcing benefits they had granted the people.

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Hoardings of Modi announcing his achievements looked benevolently over traffic at Ahmedabad. The hoarding still mimics the body. The hoarding emphasises the dominance, the overarching presence of a politician. Between the megaphone projecting his speeches and the hoarding Modi in his initial campaigns appeared a giant next to Singh and Rahul.

As his popularity increased, his publicity managers realised that the hoarding was too large. It was gargantuan. One needed something personal, something which was half memento, which humanised Modi. Thus was born the Modi mask.

Photographs of Modi's followers all in masks virtually emphasised the redundancy of support for Modi. The Modi mask as a form of currency was a form of currency emphasising the easy convertibility of Modi from emotion to vote. The mask in its multiplicity and redundancy evoked the demographic power of Modi.

Gujarati society in media portrayals almost becomes an ensemble of masks. The mask emphasises the uniformity of emotion, the face, the variety. By reducing society to a collection of Modi masks one sensed the enormous impact of Modi. A mask, beyond a point, is a thing of beauty and a toy forever. Toys tend to be abandoned and often become idiosyncratic.

Toys entertain but lack the fury and focus Modi's electoral campaign needed. Toys are eventually anecdotal and Modi's campaign managers realised that they needed a force, a medium which expressed in a combined way, his historical and technological chutzpah. Modi needed to look different, be different and be seen as different. Enter the hologram.

Presence

Modi wanted the simultaneity of presence, the fact he was at many places at once. It gave a power and magic to his campaign. Media crowed about the power and range of the hologram because in a sense the medium had become the message.

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Hologram technology allowed Modi to speak live to the Indian electorate at dozens of rallies across the country. The hologram conveyed a gargantuan presence, emphasised that Modi's campaign was moving like a juggernaut across the country. A hologram replicated Modi's being and provided an epidemic power to his impact. The hologram helped create a magical avatar of Modi, helped create through technological metaphor the idea of a Modi wave. It aids in a sense of idol worship. The Modi hologram seemed more real than the empirical Modi. It conveyed his spirit of modernism, his sense of ease and his flair with technology.

By the time Modi got elected, history and technology had helped enforce his presence. Technology kept magnifying his image conveying a PM whose time had come. As Modi's regime stabilised, the Modi campaign ran out of ideas and gimmicks. Modi, whose voice and message was always amplified, soon degenerated from a megaphonic presence to a set of silences.

Voice

Rahul might squeak like a mouse but his protest still had a sense of voice, it still sounded human, even humane, next to the silence of Modi over Dadri, over the farmers' suicides. Technology which was till then seen as an aid, an extension and amplification of the man, now made him seem like a ventriloquist's dummy.

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The timing of Modi's figure as an icon at Madame Tussaud's was both apt and ironic. It led to the predictable expected puns of how the literal waxing of the man reflected his waning magic.

The very process of sculpting the man projected him as a mechanical figure. It is as if the Modi magic and the mana had run out, that the great animated figure of the last ten years had now deteriorated to a waxen dummy, a taxidermist's delight.

Technology now played ironic. A man once seen as progressive master of the tweet, a digital hero, an electronic avatar, a technologically affable reproduction was now a waxen dummy. It was almost as if rigor mortis was a few weeks away.

Technology and politics had come full circle. The animated Modi appeared as dead wood. His face looked immobile, his mannerisms wooden. It was as if the very semiotics of the pictures, the technological symptoms Modi was displaying were signalling his future. It makes one pause and think about the nature and use of technology in contemporary times.

Political campaigns which exaggerate the person and overemphasise technology seem to lose out in the long run. The BJP will have to get ready to confront the anti-climatic era of Modi, where the person sounds mute against the Frankenstein fictions of hologram and mask. Politics creates ironies which we still do not understand fully.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)