A double act, staged barely a week apart, reveals the contradictory logic at the heart of politics in contemporary India. In early September, Ajay Singh Bisht, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, decided to change the name of an under-construction museum from the Mughal Museum to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum. “How can our heroes be Mughals?” Bisht—popularly known as Adityanath—asked, bolstering his action-oriented Hindu hardliner image. The word “Mughal” has become a shorthand for the Muslims-are-outsiders discourse that invokes a far-away past to settle political scores in the present.
A week later, the chief minister took on a dramatically different garb—that of a business-friendly globalist. The occasion was a high-level empowered committee meeting of Invest UP, a state government agency working to streamline its investment approval and other related procedures. There, Adityanath announced an optimistic goal of making Uttar Pradesh a trillion-dollar economy, inviting Indian and global investors to set up business in the state. He put forth the idea to turn the state into a prime investment destination, which would be open to modern initiatives typical of the 21st century, such as solar power and biofuel enterprises.
This politics of forked tongue can be confounding. How is one to read a leader who claims to espouse a “liberal” forward-looking vision of market freedom and simultaneously exhibits an “illiberal” cultural politics that relentlessly fixates on the past? What capricious logic enables the swift transformation of a Hindutva authoritarian to an aspiring manager of global capital?
These seemingly contradictory positions have become a package deal in Indian politics under the reign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This political-economic package belies the popular belief that liberal politics cohabits with liberal markets or that capital boosts democracy to shape a world of unrestricted freedoms. Instead, capital appears to be leveraged to establish a heavy-handed majoritarian rule that can restrict freedoms. The lure of markets can be deployed as a bargaining chip to preempt any potential condemnation from the rich and the powerful. This transaction was evident when Jammu and Kashmir’s special status was abrogated last year: investors were expected to overlook internal repression for the tantalising prospect of gaining access to new markets.
While the Congress had originally scripted the liberalisation programme in the 1990s, it was Modi who capitalised on this scheme to entrench Hindutva hyper-nationalism at the centre stage of Indian politics. As a chief minister, before 2014, he leveraged the capitalist promise of economic growth to boost the “Gujarat model”—a neoliberal playbook of “Vibrant Gujarat,” Modi’s flagship biennial international investors’ summit, combined with his strongman populism. This blueprint, which was dubbed as acche din, or good times—the open-ended promise of economic growth and the restoration of a Hindu civilisational past—is what brought him electoral success in 2014. With Adityanath taking a similar path, this neoliberal script of economic growth has not just been disentangled from secular democratic politics, but firmly harnessed to the project of Hindu nationalism.
The key to this messy politics is the formula of pitching a nation as an investment destination—a formula that I dissect in detail in my book, Brand New Nation. In the past three decades, India has largely internalised the idea that to aspire to be an attractive investment destination is to fully capitalise the nation into an income-generating asset. This entails re-imagining the national territory as an infrastructure-ready enclosure for capital investment, its cultural identity distilled into a competitive global brand and its inhabitants as income-generating human capital that can be deployed to generate more capitalist growth. The regions within the nation-state are imagined as sub-containers of capital—from Sunrise Andhra Pradesh to Bengal Means Business—that compete with each other to draw capital investments. Thus, the arena of economy increasingly appears as a competitive theatre where market-ready nations dressed up as exclusive brands vie to secure capital investments.
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