Lord Ram, lord Krishna: Modi can play any role but that of PM
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reference to Ramayan (Ramanand Sagar's tele serial) to take a swipe at Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury in the Rajya Sabha, in a thinly veiled reference to Surpanakha, is only the latest in a long series of mythology-obsessed remarks and innuendoes that drive the Indian politician’s populist rhetoric.
The epics and their key characters are internalised in the mass psyche and such allusions guarantee instant connects and desired knee-jerk effects. This has been long in the making.
If his adversaries are labelled as demonic characters, then Modi himself is valorised as the hero of these narratives. On January 27, 2016, BJP MP Paresh Rawal had showered praises on Modi, comparing his charisma with that of Lord Ram. Addressing students of Nirma University during a programme, Rawal said like the stones with Lord Ram's name on them floated on water in Ramayana, Modi’s name ensured victory of the BJP in the 2014 General Elections.
On February 16 last year, at a rally in Uttar Pradesh, Modi, in election mode, had said like Lord Krishna, he was adopted by the state of Uttar Pradesh, which he considers to be his "mai-baap (mother and father)" and he now wished to serve it like a true son.
Last year on August 26, while addressing a gathering of engineering students of the Institute of Infrastructure Technology Research and Management in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s BJP chief minister Vijay Rupani compared the arrows of Lord Ram with ISRO missiles. “Ram na ek ek teer, ek ek missile haata. Ane ISRO je kaam kare chhe, yeh bhagwan Ram ye, tyaare chhodta hata (Every arrow of Rama was a missile. The work that ISRO does, Lord Ram used to release those),” Rupani said in Gujarati. Rupani also said that when Hanuman was injured in the Ramayana, experts knew of a herb in the north that would cure him. According to him, Hanuman forgetting the name of the herb and then lifting an entire mountain was a marvel of infrastructure development.
On October 16, 2017, the entire city of Ayodhya, including the banks of Saryu, was cleared of garbage and encroachments, and prettified for UP CM Yogi Adityanath, to worship Lord Ram for Diwali and light 1.8 lakh earthen lamps along with other BJP leaders. This event provided the impetus for an ambitious project - the Rs 133 crore Ramayana Circuit to be sponsored by the central government. The circuit includes a state-of-the-art digital museum depicting the legend of Ram, and an urban "haat" along the Saryu riverfront.
Yogi Adityanath also promised a 100-metre-tall Ram statue and several facilities for devotees in Ayodhya. All this will be ready by early 2019, for the next parliamentary elections.
On July 27 last year, PM Modi flagged off a weekly train, Shraddha Sethu Express, that links Ayodhya and Rameswaram.
If, as they say, there are 300 Ramayanas, there also have been, over the centuries and generations, millions of grandparents and parents passing down the Ramayana and Mahabharata, each with their own subtle perspectives.
Families have engaged in debates, taken sides, outraged or laughed over the foibles of their gods, and these tributaries too have formed the discourse of these myths.
The gods and heroes and heroines of our legends have always been close to us. Their foibles reflect ours. Shakuntala is like Shalini, the girl next door who was mesmerised by the rich NRI. Yudhisthir is like Khanna uncle, devout and fair-minded, but still badly in need for therapy for his addictive behaviour on payday.
The Kauravas are your rich cousins who covet your land and burn your homestead with all the state power they influence. And Ekalavya is the watchman’s son who can’t get into an International Baccalaureate school. These are socio-economic truisms he has absorbed since birth. His concept of history is timeless.
It has been a long journey from Raja Ravi Varma’s idealised-yet-so-close-to-home mythological paintings to the sketchily obscurantist Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) figures and finally the aggressive Hanuman vector-based stickers that are being displayed on auto-rickshaws. There is no question about it; Vishnu is Chelpark blue, the rakshasas are bilious green with pronounced Dravidian features, and the “ancient Indians” wore the same clothes and built houses the same way for an indeterminate period of history – until “they” (the Muslims) came and ruined everything. It is, of course, a minor and petty point that all the gods of our pantheon (and the creatures of our fables) speak in a strange syntax reminiscent of moffussil government clerks in pre-Independence India, in these comics.
Under the prolonged onslaught of Bollywood films, and numerous serials, they have become whittled down to monoliths and their key characters that carried depths of nuance and layers of meaning reduced to tropes for the easy consumption of the simple-minded.
It has been almost 25 years that one was subjected to the spectacle of grown men, old men, posturing on caparisoned vans made to look like chariots, brandishing bows and arrows, looking every bit like characters out of ACK comics. They were ostensibly on their way to create a perfect state based on the blueprints of an Utopia a mythical god-king had supposedly founded millennia ago.
They succeeded, in establishing, not a heaven upon earth, but a fringe political party as a major contender among the heavyweights, and a constituency that seemed to spring up from nowhere.
As in Eugene Ionesco's play, The Rhinoceros, where one by one, to the utter amazement of the protagonist, humans turned into bestial and insensitive pachyderms around him, we too found close friends and associates suddenly metamorphosed, speaking the language of the new lexicon, and bestowing cult status on a new term that wrecked Hinduism beyond recognition.
We have indeed come full circle. On February 13, a rath yatra backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh will start from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh and gather in Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, after travelling through Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala.
The “demonic” and recalcitrant South is to be conquered once again by the armies of lord Ram.