Fantastic figures are being unleashed on popular consciousness with higher frequency. The Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon, Batman, Superman, all with their ornamental female partners, are particularly inspirational for the male of the species. From my perennially excitable nephew to the denim-clad, comb-in-the-pocket youngsters styling ladies’ hair in the neighbourhood beauty parlour, the superhero personifies an ideal.

The suspension of this disbelief is not temporary. We would like to believe they exist in real life; that they relieve us of the harsh realities of our existence. Nowhere is this disbelief so clearly expressed as in politics. Thus, in his heyday as the angry young man, Amitabh Bachchan could trounce the veteran Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna in Allahabad, Rajesh Khanna almost defeated Lal Krishna Advani, Dharmendra emerged victorious in Bikaner and down south, the political landscape is dotted with glittering cine stars — MGR, NTR, J Jayalalithaa, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth et al. The women, of course, hardly have a choice when rakish knaves decide to claim their hearts with a thump of their muscular chest.

The chest, all the proclaimed 56-inches of it, is not the only recurring masculine motif sported by the Superman of Indian politics. Through his utterances and gestures over the last few months, Narendra Modi has created exactly the kind of dominant discourse that perpetrates brazenly masculine and patriarchal notions. His appeal to a collective manliness is coupled with an archaic, patronising promise to his female audience.

Sample the suggestion he made to a farmer, obviously male, when he is obviously burdened with the birth of a daughter. “If five trees are planted when a daughter is born in the family, these five trees, when the time comes, can be cut and sold to arrange the money for the wedding of the daughter and our farmers would be saved from taking loans, but to take society ahead, we need proper thought, aim and leadership,” he said in Gorakhpur on January 25.

Not exactly ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ (Children, Kitchen, Church) but it does reflect the predominant ethos of his ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS does not include women among its pracharaks, an apparently celibate tribe of full-timers who have officially renounced worldly desires and family life for the larger good of the Nation. Modi is a pracharak.

In her paper ‘Manwatching Mister Modi’, linguist Rukmini Bhaya Nair illustrates how people identify fight (aggressive) or flight (defensive) gestures and are subliminally influenced by a strong ‘fight’ gestural system used by a given politician. Modi’s gestures were almost invariably judged to be heavily skewed towards an unambiguous ‘fight’ schema. The paper examines Modi’s language by analysing a number of his speeches made over the past two years.

“A determined effort to include women is revealed in the bar-graphs on gender. Women, these graphs show, are mostly seen in relational terms (sisters, mothers, daughters) except for the ubiquitous use of the term ‘ladies’, which appears to be a polite way to refer to working women. References to men and brothers, understandably, outnumber ones to women and sisters. To me, perhaps the most interesting feature hidden away in this gender-chart is that sons are mentioned twice as often as daughters,” writes Nair.

Thus, in Modi’s India, ‘daughters’ are to be protected and the sanctity of marriage upheld even at the cost of burdening fathers/brothers with debts. The ‘mothers’, of course, are to be revered.

“In our culture and heritage, mothers come above everyone else. ‘Ma’ evokes reverence — that is our tradition. We call ‘Bharat’ — our country — Ma... anything we hold in reverence we address as Ma. I know of families where women have decided not to marry so they can dedicate their lives to looking after their parents in their old age…Women say ‘I have been burnt’ to get their husbands’ attention. That same woman will concentrate on buying a saree from a sale but will drop everything when her house is on fire — if her child is stuck inside, she will try and get the child out of a burning house — that same mother who was singed by a roti. That is the power of a woman,” Modi told businesswomen in FICCI on April 8.

Of course, allowances have to be made to the likes of Jassuben, who launched a successful pizza brand in Gujarat, but as a matter of routine, women are viewed in relation to the men and their primary role is that of a homemaker.

The menfolk must attend to the more serious business of earning a livelihood. Whether it is his party’s manifesto or public rallies, the predominant responses are towards an aggressive male and universally dissatisfied followers. From tiny, decrepit towns to glittering metropolises, his largely male audience throngs his public meetings in a euphoric haze, looking for answers no ordinary politician can provide.

He rises spectacularly to the challenge. His image magnified in three dimensions, he promises them jobs, rapid growth, 100 new smart cities, bullet trains, a whole new world. As he traipses around from Solapur to Jammu and Bareilly, he sells a dream that seduces the cynical and hypnotises those who are desperately seeking a new India. There is, of course, some space there for brave mothers, daughters and wives. For those who may have opted for singlehood, be sure it is only in the service of the family. But for the ones living in sin, Hindu Rashtra may not exactly resemble Ram Rajya. Metaphorically speaking.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW