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00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Omni-Present, Omniscent".
00:06 The issue looks at Modi's personality, his cult and his brand in the light of the recent consecration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya,
00:14 which also kick-starts the election campaign.
00:17 Modi is an avatar, a statesman, a saint.
00:21 Beyond Hindutva, there is now the Moditva project.
00:25 A Modified Reality by Ajay Gudavarthi
00:28 Gudavarthi is Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
00:33 The Prime Minister has managed to ace the image game by being all-pervasive and at the same time being an elusive political persona.
00:43 Hinduism and Neoliberalism emerged as strange bedfellows in India at the turn of the century.
00:49 Post-colonial India was prided for its somewhat sacred separation between spirituality and materiality.
00:57 It was often argued that even under colonial rule, the inside India, marked by its spiritual pursuit, remained sovereign,
01:06 and it was only the outside that got colonized by materiality, the market and technology.
01:13 In today's, or rather, Modi's new India, the market and spirituality are having a gala time together in a bonhomie that is here to last.
01:24 What is even more important to note is that both Hinduism and Neoliberalism are decentred and decentralized.
01:32 Hinduism is more of a way of life, encompassing countless local practices,
01:38 whereas Neoliberalism is a faceless, post-Westphalia phenomena without an anchor.
01:44 In a sense, both Hinduism and Neoliberalism have no nation or sanctum sanctorum to reach out to.
01:52 In an earlier articulation, Gandhi struck a chord by mobilizing diversity in all its beauty,
01:59 and the Congress Party, in its post-independence avatar, became representative of a decentred polity with the state
02:06 through its planning and welfare-oriented social-democratic vision, a conduit to hold dispersed realities together.
02:15 India was classically typified as a nation in the making.
02:19 Neoliberalism replaced the centrality of the state and welfare,
02:24 and replaced it with the processes of globalization and privatization.
02:29 The emergence of an omnipresent Modi is the personification of this transformed, modified reality.
02:37 Modi represents the uncertainty that Hinduism came to represent in Neoliberal times.
02:43 Both the processes lacking an anchor gave rise to a mass psyche of insecurity, confusion, and a sense of directionlessness.
02:53 In such a context, Modi rose to fame with a larger-than-life image that can provide the new anchor.
03:00 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.