A Journey Narendra Modi, Ravi Mantha (tr.) Rupa Publications Pages: 112 Rs. 295 Saffron hope springs eternal in the Modisphere Narendra Modi’s poems are really extended campaign posters. They are grandiose to the point of being shamelessly self-laudatory, writes Shougat Dasgupta. Shougat Dasgupta 26th Apr 2014 Narendra Modi arendra Modi, putative prime-minister-in-waiting, is a poet. It should come as no surprise. After all, in the tautological words of a recent admiring biographer, Andy Marino, "Narendra Modi is both a complex and simple man, but within a multilayered persona." The first translations of his poems into English, a collection titled A Journey, was released this week. Modi joins a long line of Indian poet-statesmen. And Mamata Banerjee. Both Banerjee, in her collection Earthsong, and Modi have written poems called Hope and they are useful introductions to their different styles. "We dreamt of it and now it's here", declares Banerjee, "The return of truth, freedom from fear." That first line has a strong iambic beat, the stresses falling on "dreamt", "it", "now" and "here". Let's not worry about the second line (anapestic trimetre?). The rhyme scheme is a straightforward A, A. After these lines, the poem abandons rhyme and metre for an intellectual and sensual evocation of freedom: "Transformation / Unification / Smell of earth / Innocent dust / Green grass" Finally, after some exhortation — Forget the differences / Show your magnanimity — she ends her poem with a pentasyllabic pep talk: "The future is here / For Bengal to lead." Hope, then, is a Mamataesque muddle in which we somehow get from "Innocent dust" and "Light and trust" to Bengali triumphalism in three bewildering verses. Modi, on the other hand, is not muddled. He is writing, amidst cogitations on honeybees and butterflies, his messianic autobiography. "A flame of hope has burst forth today," he writes, "To sear the darkness with its might." This flame, naturally, blazes forth from helipads around the country. Hope, according to Modi, is "Unshakeable resolve and steadfast righteousness / The twin armours of the bearer of progress." This "warrior for progress nurtures no likes or dislikes / Nor any concern for the adulation of crowds / With Lord Rama filling his heart / Full of forgiveness he treads the path / And becomes that light of hope, that slayer of darkness." This is not poetry so much as a florid campaign poster. Let us pretend that Modi is not a terrible poet. After all, the English translation, by Ravi Mantha, a campaign adviser and investments expert, may miss the particular music of his original Gujarati. But even if Modi is not a terrible poet (he is), he's a self-serving one, eager to embellish his legend, eager to seek cover in banality rather than be honest. In Banerjee's poem Hindu Muslims (it was once published "Hindu-Muslims"; Amit Chaudhuri demolished the hyphen in a review. The hyphen was a Freudian slip perhaps, at odds with the purported point of the poem.), she wrote, "Can one ever drive apart / Us brothers, Hindu Muslim / Come let's build a palace / Where empathy can dream." This is the homiletic guff politicians peddle. Modi, too, is fond of combining disingenuous truisms with Miss World-style non-thoughts in his verses. Take, for instance, To Wake, and to Shape Our Destiny: "A victory for all, come let us cheer / The burial of enmities past / In a fragrance of understanding, of friendship / We awaken into this golden dawn / Living together, united as one." Coming from Modi, whatever you believe was the extent of his collusion in the mass murders of Muslims in the state he governed in 2002, this is shameless. Was his henchman Amit Shah burying past enmities when the Election Commission saw fit to ban him (a ban later lifted) for hate speech? Was Modi himself clouding "enmities past / In a fragrance... of friendship" when he compared his sorrow over the death of thousands to the sorrow a passenger in a car might evince when the driver has run over a puppy? oetry is not about expressing "higher feelings" or sentimentality. Poetry is not about hypocrisy. Poetry is an attempt to get at the truth of what it is to be human, what it is to feel — to feel love, joy, yearning, hate, lust, disgust, rage. Of course, Modi tries to have it both ways. In Devotion he fixes his thoughts on Ayodhya; and in it the eternal Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram. In Proud, as a Hindu, he writes: "I feel proud as a human, as a Hindu... / My faith is not at the expense of another's... / One religious sect is not my street / Diverse my school of learning." It's a nonsensical poem; an appeal, at once, to Hindu pride while suggesting a broad-minded ecumenical regard for all faiths. An ecumenicism so broad-minded that he refuses to wear a skull cap because such an action would, as he said, have violated his tradition. He also said that he didn't believe in token gestures but in helping Muslims escape poverty. Perhaps one man's "token gesture" is another man's extension of generosity, a show of respect for the tokens of all faiths. Surely in a secular country token gestures matter as a demonstration that faith is a private act, and that all faiths can be respected and celebrated even if you only belong to a specific faith. Turn to Modi's own words in Tomorrow's Challenge to realise that even he knows "Soothing words of equality remained just talk / Unity was crushed / Constitution's door closed / Leaving behind a cesspit of vengeance." It has become fashionable to express a kind of weariness with talk of 2002. "What about 1984," goes the argument, "what do the 'sickulars' say about that?" They're all as bad as each other is not any sort of answer to this question: is it hypocritical for the prime ministerial candidate of a party for whom building a Ram temple in Ayodhya is part of its election manifesto, the Chief Minister of a state in which Muslims were systematically butchered, to write poetry about "living together, united as one?" If wearing a skull cap on the campaign trail is dismissed as a token gesture, how hollow, how token is Narendra Modi's poetry? The Slovenian philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek, reviewing a collection of poems by Radovan Karadzic, on trial in the Hague for war crimes including the massacre in Srebrenica of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, observed that Karadzic›s "poetry should not be dismissed as ridiculous: it deserves a close reading, since it tells us something about the way ethnic cleansing works." Similarly, Modi's poetry may be ridiculous but it tells us something about the way his mind, or rather ego, works. "I am a man who relishes a challenge," he writes in his poem Strength, "Not satisfied reflecting others' glory / I am myself a burning lantern / No reliance on other dazzling lights / My own light is enough for me." Murli Manohar Joshi, Jaswant Singh, L.K. Advani and any number of senior BJP leaders can attest to that fact. In Modi's world, as in his poetry, there is no room for anyone else. We are on the verge, if polls are to be believed, of electing a cult leader, a man who spends some of his leisure time writing paeans to himself. The "bright lotus", Modi writes, gives him energy. It blinds the rest of us with its grim halogen glare. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF