MIGA -- Make India Great Again

Ruchira Paul, a Facebook friend of Indian origin whom I have known as long as Facebook has been around, makes some keen observations about political developments there when she linked How Hinduism Became a Political Weapon in India in the current Atlantic. Some Facebook posts have a handy embed option but not this one, so I'm blogging her comments here for ready access.

MIGA - Make India Great Again. 

India is no longer the place I call home. I don't live there, don't vote in its elections and own no assets there that I need to worry about. But it is my place of birth, I have family and friends in India and my mind retains many pleasant memories of my early life there. Noting the parallels between what has happened in the US and is happening in many places of the world, I cannot but help wonder about the emerging politics and culture of India. ((Anyone who tells me it is none of my business will be unceremoniously unfriended) 

"From the distance of Delhi, it can look as if Hindutva was the determining factor in this election—and perhaps the driving force in India’s political future. But so many things in India resemble Schrödinger’s cat: They simultaneously are and are not. Yes, Hindutva dominated the national debate. Yes, Modi ran on Hindutva themes. And, yes, voters responded to them in a way that strengthens the power of Hindutva as a political and social creed. But to a large degree, the success of Hindutva today lies less in its ideology than in its rebranding of prosaic, everyday concerns as matters of personal identity: When Modi speaks, many voters feel, he’s speaking for me. ... 

....None of them knew whether the GDP per capita had gone up or down, and none of them cared. Modi’s most ardent admirers spoke of vikas (“development”) and swasti (“success”). Said a shop assistant named Yogis Dubey outside the polling station at Gurudham Chauraha: “Kashi ko saaf benaiya!” (“He made Varanasi clean!”). 

The streets of India’s holiest city are, in fact, still thick with the excrement of goats, sheep, dogs, pigs, water buffalo, and herds of auspicious cattle. But that’s not really the point: Hindutva is not about what your eyes tell you; it’s about what your heart tells you. It’s not about what you see; it’s about how you see yourself. How you see your identity, your brand, your place in the world. Understand this, and you can better understand the changes under way in India." 

Parallels between political trends in India and the US are unmistakable. Check this excerpt and compare:

The term Hindutva can be (sort of) translated as “Hindu-ness,” and that gets (sort of) at what it’s all about: Hinduism not a theology, but an identity. The movement’s intellectual father, Veer Savarkar, wrote its foundational text (helpfully titled Hindutva) a century ago. At the time, the notion of a unified faith or doctrine, let alone a shared identity, would have left most Hindus simply confused: Identity was determined by a person’s family, village, caste. The very term Hindu is merely a loanword (most likely from Persian), referring to “the people who live across the Indus River.” Until the 20th century, most Hindus had never felt the need to describe themselves in any comprehensive way.
It was the colonial experience that created Hindutva: Why, Savarkar and his comrades wondered, had India been dominated for centuries by a relatively small number of Muslim Mughals and Christian British? Was monotheism simply better suited for ruling? If so, what did that mean for a faith with more deities than days in the year? During the founding decades of the Hindutva movement, much effort revolved around making Hinduism more like its rivals: building a single shared identity to unite everyone for whom India was, in Savarkar’s words, “his Fatherland as well as his Holy-land.” This definition conveniently roped in Sikhs (a disproportionate number of whom served in the army), Buddhists (whose spiritual cachet helped give the movement credibility), and Jains (who tended, then and now, to be quite rich).
What it pointedly did not do was dictate what this newly lumped-together group of people should believe. Indeed, very few of Hindutva’s leading lights have been holy men, or even particularly devout; Savarkar and K. B. Hedgewar (the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS—the primary vehicle for Hindutva mobilization) are both described as having been atheists or agnostics. The point wasn’t doctrine, but branding.
The only figure who did more to reshape Hinduism than the Hindutva founders was Mahatma Gandhi. His vision of the faith was, in many ways, the absolute inverse of Hindutva: He cared nothing about branding, and a great deal about belief. It was an ideal so familiar today that one can easily forget what a break from the past it represented. Gandhi’s radical embrace of nonviolence drew not only from Hindu tradition, but, as he famously said, also from the Sermon on the Mount, from Buddhist texts, and even from Leo Tolstoy. After a member of Savarkar’s group assassinated Gandhi in 1948, the entire Hindutva movement was discredited for a generation.

When I read the article that word branding jumped off the screen at me and I left this comment:

I finally got around to this link. Insightful and informative, especially the distinctions between Hinduism and Hindutva. Branding is the magic word. I couldn't help the drone of US/Trumpian themes playing in the back of my mind. Long before he made a play for politics Donald Trump's whole business model rested not on the usual business arrangements but the strength of the Trump brand. Licensing that name has been the one constant (success or failure of whatever it was being peddled being of no real importance). As long as a revenue stream was flowing nothing else matters. And thanks to the fortunes being tossed about (by OTHERS, incidentally) any money-laundering that happened was/is just an incidental feature of the enterprise.
Having said all that, I can't help wondering if Modi might be crafting similar schemes.