Shining kitsch

Every society leaves behind symbolic as well as material debris.  A symbolic archaeology can be as fruitful as the material archaeology of moving around debris of old monuments and ruins. In fact election time would be a good time for symbolic archaeology to examine which slogans and symbols survive and which get transformed. Indian election slogans revolve around ideas of unity, stability and innovation. They are meditations of how parts fit into a bigger whole. Thus, we had the great slogans of garibi hatao, roti kapda aur makan, jai jawan jai kisan, or Rajiv Gandhi's 'India in the 21st century'. Each was a statement of how India was to be united; each a commitment to a nation-state project. Most of the 50 years of Indian independence were dominated by the Congress Party living off its nationalist symbols like the Nehru cap, the Gandhian charkha, Sardar Patel´s integrity or decisiveness, the large dams as temples of modern India, or the Green Revolution. The question is how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enters this symbolic space. It is a parvenu. It realises its own symbols would not take it too far — the lotus is hardly the Ashok Chakra or the khadi in terms of emotive power. It has to indulge in the politics of brand management. True, it does not have the Sumantra Ghosals or David Ogilvy by its side but it knows it has to fight a semiotic war to redefine nation, state, history, economics and geography.

The semiotic war that the BJP fought was conducted at four levels. First were the present Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani's rath-yatras (the age of 'Toyota chariots') that were generalised events. They galvanised the party more than the people. It used modern mediums to capture old symbolic domains. The second battle was conducted by appropriating Congress Party symbolism.  If the Congress gobbled up nationalism, what would be left for the BJP? What it generated therefore were acts of mimicry where Vajpayee was projected as a Nehruvian avatar and Advani as his Patel clone.  The shades were subtly different. The BJP was the party of patriots, from Subash Bose to Tilak, and from Lajpat Rai to Patel, and Jawaharlal was only a variant on the theme. It was brilliantly done. Congress president Sonia Gandhi was caught up with the 'foreign origin' issue while the BJP was stealing her domestic symbolic ware.