Modi is the unreliable narrator of India. But there’s a little help from Salman Rushdie https://theprint.in/opinion/modi-is-the-unreliable-narrator-of-india-but-theres-a-little-help-from-salman-rushdie/748566/
A politician’s career is all about the narrative arc. But Modi’s 20 years of public service – from Gujarat CM to becoming the PM – doesn’t show one.
Modi is India’s chief narrator today. There is a concept in literary criticism called the ‘unreliable narrator’. An author or the narrator-protagonist in fiction is called an ‘unreliable narrator’ when their narration is deliberately misleading and manipulates the reader’s trust. A nation’s narrator can either be the public or the top politician.
the storyteller is the Gross Domestic Product, like in the tiger economies; or a military-Islamist ideology like in Pakistan
For the longest time in India, the narrators were Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,
for two decades beginning in 1991, the narrators were the people who contributed to the “India story”.
Now, Modi has assumed the role of a first-person narrator of a new Hindutva-guided India. India is, after Nehru and Indira Gandhi, in first-person narration style once again.
Other narratives:
Post-Independence, India’s upper-caste Hindu liberals have been the narrators. They have expressed superficial guilt about the caste system and Partition. like “unity in diversity”, “end to untouchability” and “castelessness”. They glossed over structural casteism, Islamic invasions and quickly fast-forwarded a few centuries to reach the glory of Mughal rule, Sufi mystics, and ganga-jamuni culture.
Peoples Narratives
The Constitutionalists were the new narrators of India in the 1990s and the 2000s.
The two decades that followed saw the rise of new social justice warriors, Ambedkar-ites, and public interest litigation-activists.
This ran parallel to the growth of the middle-class as the real chroniclers of what came to be known as the “India story”. An entire generation of GDP-worshippers was born overnight
In the new India, the Constitution isn’t what the Hindutva politicians hark back to. Instead, they locate the founding template of the republic in a much older time, which they can write upon as they wish.