Megalo-Media: Noopolitics of Representation
fig.35 A forty feet cut-out made by the artists in Varanasi of Modi and Emmanuel Macron during his trip to Varanasi, placed on the Assi Ghat.
Half of politics is image-making; the other half is the art of making people believe the image. -Hannah Arendt, Crises of Republic,1972.87 Wrapped in a saffron88 shawl, with sandalwood paste rubbed all across his forehead, Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the inauguration of the Kashi Corridor project on the 8th of March, 2019 (fig.36). The image of Narendra Modi, next to Yogi Adityanath (A Hindu Brahmin Priest who is also the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh), larger than life cutouts of himself sporadically spread throughout the blank site, with the barricaded Gyanvapi Mosque in the backdrop concretizes the right-wing populist rhetoric within the hegemonic hierarchies of power. While addressing the country via the locals of Varanasi through his speech on the same day, ‘Har Har Mahadev…God told me, you talk a lot, now it’s time to work. You may call it Bhole Baba’s (Lord Shiva) will or blessing, that today, is 87
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), CCXIX. 88 Saffron has very important connotations in the Hindu tradition and it’s also the colour of the BJP.
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