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Eventocracy: Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational
Fascism
Rohan Kalyan
Theory & Event, Volume 23, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 4-28 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/747093
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Eventocracy: Media and Politics in Times of
Aspirational Fascism
Rohan Kalyan
Abstract Eventocracy, or rule by event, describes the strategic
manipulation of media events to gain political advantage. This
essay examines the eventocratic rise of Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi from 2002 to 2014. It describes and analyzes four
key events in this time period that served to establish Modi’s pop-
ular base while cultivating an expanding political subjectivity
around the ideologies of Hindu nationalism and economic global-
ization. Modi’s story demonstrates how contemporary subjectiva-
tion works through the mediation of such critical events. I con-
clude with the question of what this link between media events
and subjectivation portends in times of rising fascisms around the
world.
1. Demonetization as Event
At 8:00 pm on November 8, 2016, in an unannounced speech, Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared on national television. Modi
declared that in precisely four hours (at the stroke of midnight) all
existing Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes would be “demonetized,” or stripped
of their value and declared void. People in possession of these notes
would have 50 days to exchange their old currency for new Rs 500 and
Rs 2000 notes (with the Rs 1000 now discontinued).1
Given the huge quantity of cash to be demonetized, remonetized
and distributed to thousands of banks and ATMs across the country,
with the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes altogether representing 86% of the
existing cash value in circulation, demonetization was sure to be a dis-
ruptive event.2 Modi’s justifications for the surprise move, outlined
in his initial speech, were two-fold: (1) to combat illegal hoarding of
“black money” (or money gained through illicit or dubious means)
and (2) to curb the use of counterfeit currency in financing terrorism.
In order to catch corrupt money hoarders and counterfeiters the policy
was kept secret from the Indian public, with little-to-no visible prepa-
rations made before the event.
Theory & Event Vol. 23, No. 1, 4–28 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University PressBut given also India’s large “informal economy,” and the fact that
hundreds of millions were dependent on cash for day-to-day transac-
tions and long-term savings, the political stakes seemed high indeed.3
Soon after the announcement of demonetization, stories of ill-prepara-
tion and a disorganized rollout began to circulate in the news media,
including on television, the internet and print.4 Already dumbfounded
by the surprise announcement of demonetization, the Indian public
now experienced shortages of the new currency around the country.
Adding fuel to the building spectacle, various media reported long
lines at banks and ATMs, as hapless workers were forced to miss valu-
able time from their jobs to wait in line. Meanwhile, many employers
had to delay paying their employees. This caused a sharp drop in con-
sumer demand, threatening to slow India’s fast-growing economy.5
Before long it became clear that Modi had stumbled quite pub-
licly on the very terrain he had previously mastered in his unexpected
rise to political power.6 As I show in this essay, Modi employed savvy
public relations (PR) strategies, timely social media communiques and
enjoyed largely positive mainstream news coverage in dramatically
winning the national election just two years before.7 For the usually
cunning Modi, however, the surprise event of demonetization had
seemingly backfired. How would he respond? And what about those
most negatively impacted by demonetization?
In the mainstream press and social media alike, two opposing
camps soon emerged with quite different interpretations of the event.
For one group, demonetization was Modi’s long-awaited strategic
blunder. Modi, the charasmatic leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), whose confidence and wisdom in front of his followers
was seemingly unimpeachable, was finally stripped of his aura of
invincibility. Much to the satisfaction of his critics, demonetization
revealed Modi for what he always was: a mortal politician who had
made a costly mistake. As such, the debacle of demonetization was
sure to hurt Modi’s carefully cultivated image and impact the BJP at
the next elections.8
But for a very different group, Modi’s move to implement demon-
etization was seen as a brilliant, if unorthodox move. They saw it as
a “surgical strike” against some of India’s most intractable problems:
rampant corruption, black money and counterfeit currency, all of which
had deleterious effects on India’s economy and some of which posed a
threat to national security. For this group of supporters, Modi did what
was necessary for the nation, making a difficult but bold decision that
other, less visionary leaders would have hesitated to make.9 This was,
after all, why they had elected Modi in the first place, for his assertive
leadership qualities. It was now the responsibility of patriotic citizens
to make a “maha yagna,” or “great sacrifice” for the nation, echoing
Modi’s call in his November speech.6 Theory & Event
In the midst of this polarized debate an article in The Indian
Express stood out for the way in which it illuminated the larger media
spectacle taking place. Entitled “Welcome the Eventocracy, Tracked
by Comedia,” the article was written by Ravish Kumar, a promi-
nent journalist known for his critical appraisals of the Modi govern-
ment.10 Coming some 50 days after Modi’s live-TV announcement on
November 8, Kumar provocatively argued that demonetization exem-
plified what he called “eventocracy,” or
a new form of democracy where there is nothing greater than the
event. Any policy announcement has so many events that people
have begun to believe in the arrival of an avatar. They believe a
divine voice is being heard from the skies. The politician as policy
announcer appears on a stage, like a divine being. The stage itself
resembles calendar art, with heavenly rays shining behind a great
soul’s head. When the event becomes the norm of democracy, fact
is replaced by fiction and implementation by intention—these
become vital.11
Kumar’s insight arguably resonates with recent scholarship on the
affective force and disruptive politics of media events.12 We might say
that in an eventocracy the news media no longer “represents” political
life (through its reporting) but actively comes to shape it (through its
coverage and captivation).13 Television ratings and the number of fol-
lowers or “likes” on social media become a more valuable metric than
mass surveys and opinion polls, precisely because the former can now
easily influence the latter.14 And because this is so, eventocratic rulers
are compelled to conjure up new surprises everyday, so that the pub-
lic’s attention continually moves from event to event, at a loss for what
might come next. What matters is not so much the content of the event
or the particular issue at hand, but rather the public’s attention itself.
Mediated attention becomes the currency of political and economic
power in an eventocracy.
In what follows I retell Modi’s eventocratic rise to power in India,
both building on Kumar’s keen insights but extending them in more
speculative directions. In the next two sections I provide some histor-
ical and theoretical background on the politics of media events, before
contextualizing Modi and the BJP’s contemporary rise in postcolonial
India. I then describe and analyze four key events in Modi’s career
as an elected politician that served as transformational moments of
subjectivation, that is, decisive turning points that expanded Modi’s
popular base and cultivated a novel political subjectivity around the
ideologies of Hindu nationalism and economic globalization. In the
end, I return to the demonetization debacle in order to argue that
Modi’s eventocratic rise must be situated within an expansive globalKalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 7
media ecology in which events and their subjectivation become the
pre-conditions for the emergence of new fascisms and hyper-national-
isms around the world.15
2. The Politics of Media Events
In his classic 1852 study of the autocratic rise of Napoleon III in France,
Karl Marx indirectly foreshadows Ravish Kumar’s notion of eventoc-
racy by analyzing the coup d’etat of the previous year. The relevant
passage comes near the end of Marx’s breathless and brilliant analysis:
Driven by the contradictory demands of his situation, and being
at the same time, like a juggler, under the necessity of keeping
the public gaze on himself, as Napoleon’s successor, by springing
constant surprises––that is to say, under the necessity of arrang-
ing a coup d’état in miniature every day––Bonaparte throws the
whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that
seemed inviolable to the Revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant
of revolution and makes others lust for it, and produces anarchy in
the name of order, while at the same time stripping the entire state
machinery of its halo, profaning it and making it at once loath-
some and ridiculous.16
“Arranging a coup d’état in miniature everyday”—it is as if Marx pre-
saged Twitter and social media and foretold their turbulent role in the
eventocratic rise of leaders like Modi, Donald Trump and others, men
obsessed with “keeping the public gaze on [themselves],” whatever the
cost. Whether through dramatic policy pronouncements like demon-
etization, or menacing “tweets” threatening trade wars with China or
nuclear war with North Korea, the digital eventocracy of today, even
more so than in Napoleon III’s print-centric era, distracts and divides
the public, forcing subjects to take sides on issues they never thought
about politically before.17 Everyone, even the so-called experts, are at
a loss as to what will happen next. What new issue will arise? Which
new event will unfold and (seemingly) change everything (again)?
Certain eventocratic leaders “succeed” because they are able to “throw
the whole bourgeois economy into confusion,” producing a sense of
visceral crisis that demands the stabilizing intervention of an authori-
tarian figure. Yet such authority was fragile. As Marx seemed to recog-
nize in his own day, the currency of power was ultimately the public’s
attention itself. In order to captivate and keep an audience new events
would have to be manufactured daily, new coups d’etat in miniature
would have to be arranged. It wasn’t so much that the public had to
unanimously side with the leader’s desired interpretation of events. It
was the fact that they were compelled to take sides in the first place.
For no matter which side they took, they reproduced the power of the8 Theory & Event
eventocratic leader by keeping the public conversation fixated on this
figure. Our times resonate oddly with Marx’s, but the resonance is
unmistakable. How did we get here (again)?
Media scholars have fervently debated the extent to which media
events shape politics and vice versa in modern societies.18 Such
debates are rendered more complex in an era of new media, digital
communications technologies and decentralized network connectivity.
In contrast, older media like radio and television were characteristic
of a twentieth-century model in which media content was produced
centrally and broadcast to dispersed audiences in their homes. To be
sure, such broadcast media networks were radical in their own time,
as scholars like Marshall McLuhan have famously argued.19 Broadcast
television brought distant events into the intimate spaces of individ-
uals and families at home. Moreover, it presented these events in more
vivid, proximate and potentially manipulative ways than traditional
print media did. By experiencing distant “mediated” events on screen,
it was if the home audience’s eyes and ears were extended in space and
time. Simultaneously, such spaces of virtual intimacy and distant prox-
imity were now accessible to powerful bureaucratic institutions, like
states and monopolistic corporations, to influence and mold in their
image. As commercialized television proliferated during the second
half of the twentieth century, more channels led to the creation of more
content under conditions of generalized market competition (espe-
cially in countries with relatively free press). In such a plural media
ecology, profit-seeking companies were compelled to cultivate the vir-
tual intimacy of television in manipulative ways: to create and keep
captive viewers. This manipulation continues well into the present.20
Compared with older media forms like newspapers, radio and
television, newer media technologies (i.e. those using computer tech-
nology) produce an even more intimate and visceral experience of pol-
itics—and no longer just at home but virtually anywhere one might
wish to transport their mobile screens.21 This enables a more syn-
chronic and interactive experience of media events, with likes, shares,
re-tweets and viral distribution continually adding new feedback to
media platforms and the richly imagined worlds they mediate.22 But
exactly where the mediation begins and ends is no longer as clear as
switching a television On or Off. Communication no longer merely
flows from central broadcast towers to peripheral receptive devices.
Through the internet and its interactive platforms and emergent net-
works, communication now flows in multiple, non-linear directions.
Cause and effect become as dissociated as space and time. Media is no
longer either “hot” or “cold,” as McLuhan would have it, but de-ter-
ritorializing and re-territorializing meaning, identity and ideology in
ways that openly defy the reproduction of a singular common sensi-
bility or apprehension of the present.23Kalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 9
In the context of media and politics in India, one witnesses the
relatively belated arrival of a pluralistic media ecology, especially with
respect to television.24 Only one TV channel existed prior to 1991 and
this was the state-run Doordarshan network. Since the 1990s, how-
ever, this has changed rapidly. Thanks to “liberal” economic reforms
that privileged private sector competition over public monopolies
and allowed private investment in mass communications, by 2005
there were over 200 digital channels available to Indian viewership.25
Consistent with economic liberalization in other domains of social
life, TV media production has seen an increasing commodification
of content so as to attract advertising revenue and grow audiences in
a highly competitive market environment. Corporate domination of
the TV news mediascape especially has led to what scholars call the
“Murdochization of news” in India, with spectacle, hyperbole, and
personalization of politics becoming increasingly common in “news”
reportage.26 In his Indian Express article Ravish Kumar opined that this
sensationalist style of news presentation, reminiscent of FoxNews in
the US (founded by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch), was a
central feature of eventocracy in India:
Governments can change. An eventocracy’s first-lead here can
thus change. But the hero of the second lead stays fixed. That is
the news anchor. Friend of the big messiah––the small messiah.
There is an old Bollywood film Ram-Balram––the politician and
the anchor are the eventocracy’s Ram-Balram.27
The reference is to a 1980 Bollywood film involving an unequal part-
nership of criminals. But it also indirectly references Hindu mythology
(in particular the god figure Ram of the Hindu epic The Ramayana).
Kumar’s recourse to both Bollywood and Hindu mythology here is
apt, as the Hindu right and Modi especially have thrived in an evento-
cratic media environment.
3. Modi and the BJP
Narendra Modi is in many ways the synergistic product of the BJP
and its main ideological organ (and cultural precursor) the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose “fundamentalist” idea of Hindu
nationalism (Hindutva) originates in the colonial-era revivalist move-
ments of the early nineteenth century. As the Indian political psychol-
ogist Ashis Nandy has shown, fundamentalist Hindu nationalism was
a very modern response to the colonial encounter in South Asia. It was
also in many ways a direct result of British “divide and rule” strate-
gies.28 Among other things, Hindutva imagined a pristine pre-colonial
past when the entire Indian subcontinent was constituted as a great10 Theory & Event
Hindu civilization. This was a “golden era” before the present age of
foreign domination, first by Muslim invaders from central and west
Asia (in the thirteenth century) and subsequently by European colo-
nizers from further west (in the eighteenth century).29 These various
outsiders became a discursive means through which Hindu national-
ists could imagine a homogenous Indian identity.
Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 at the hand of a right-
wing Hindu extremist resulted in the political marginalization of
many revivalist groups following independence, including the RSS,
which was effectively banned in India until the mid-1950s. Instead,
the secular Congress Party, behind Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter
Indira Gandhi (no relation to the Gandhi above), dominated Indian
national politics through the first three-and-a-half decades of inde-
pendence. Over this time political institutions came to embody the
so-called “Nehruvian Consensus,” based on ideals of secularism,
socialism and state-led development.30 Meanwhile, Hindu right-
wing politics initially went underground before re-organizing in the
shadows of the Congress Party’s decades-long rule in the ‘50s, ‘60s
and ‘70s. Hindu fundamentalist groups slowly began emerging from
their peripheral status through steady on-the-ground organizing by
dedicated field-workers like Modi, expanding from their upper-caste
origins to capture broader mass appeal in the 1970s and ‘80s. But the
movement as a whole also benefited from the growing disenchant-
ment with the Nehruvian Consensus, which predictably failed to live
up to its lofty modernist ideals. Campaigning in aggressive opposition
to the Congress Party’s “pseudo-secularism” (which it saw as minority
appeasement and foreign to India’s “indigenous” secular culture) and
inability to deliver high economic growth (especially in comparison
with other economies in Asia), opposition Hindu nationalist parties
began competing and doing well in both local and state elections, par-
ticularly in north India. And following Indira Gandhi’s declaration of
Emergency Rule from 1975–77, indicating the waning of Congress
hegemony, the Hindu right became an assertive presence in national
politics, with the BJP eventually leading coalition governments in the
Center in 1996 and 1998.31
But long before their national emergence Hindu political and
cultural organizations were already active in Modi’s home state of
Gujarat when he was growing up as a child and young adult.32 Modi
was born in 1950 into a lower-caste family, the son of a tea seller in the
town of Vadnagar, Gujarat. The young Modi was drawn to Hindutva
ideology when he joined the local youth-wing of the RSS.33 As a young
man he became a full-time apparatchik (pracharak) for the RSS and later
was promoted to party secretary for the BJP, first at the state and then
at regional and national levels. By all accounts Modi stood out from
his peers for his organizational and managerial talents, his ability toKalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 11
carry out complicated tasks with unusual efficiency. Yet Modi was
also known for his strong fascistic traits, with a tendency to hold onto
grudges and seek out retribution against those he felt wronged him.34
Clearly fit for the cut-throat world of right-wing politics, Modi rose
up the ranks to BJP regional secretary in 1996 before he was appointed
chief minister of Gujarat in 2001 by higher-ups following the sudden
resignation of his predecessor. From here Modi’s political star would
continue its rapid ascent, only now in the limelight of state, national
and international media. But we will return to this story shortly.
Meanwhile, the 1970s and ‘80s were important decades for the BJP
(and its predecessors the Janata Party and Bharatiya Jana Sangh), as
the party moved from a peripheral position to one that was increas-
ingly formidable in inter-party coalitions in the central government.
Key to the BJP’s emergence during this time, in addition to its orga-
nizing efforts and the gradual decline of the Congress Party described
above, was its innovative production and mediation of public events
that served to galvanize a political subjectivity around the BJP’s core
ideology of Hindutva. Not all of these media events were of the BJP’s
own making. For instance, the party and its Hindu revivalist move-
ment benefited from the national broadcasting of Hindu mythol-
ogies on ostensibly secular state-run TV (the serials Ramayana and
Mahabarata) in the late 1980s.35 Yet other events were entirely of the
BJP’s own design, most notably the frequent large-scale religious pro-
cessions (called yathras) that crossed dozens of cities and states during
election campaigns, drawing huge crowds while garnering sustained
national media attention.36 The yathra politics of the BJP, along with
other contingent political events, injected an aggressive brand of spec-
tacle-fueled Hindutva into the public sphere, one that Modi and others
would further weaponize in due time.
Even before the BJP’s contemporary rise to power, staged media
events had a certain salience in Indian political life. Under the early
Congress governments in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Nehruvian state put
on public spectacles of nationalism and political subjectivation that
were intended to project the nation as an imagined community.37 These
events included public parades and national holidays, documentary
films and showcase development projects. All commonly evoked the
ideals that underpinned the aforementioned Nehruvian Consensus:
secularism, modern technological development and egalitarian social
progress. But as scholars of postcolonial Indian politics like Nandy
have argued, the Nehruvian Consensus was unable to overcome a
fundamental ambivalence, or gap, in its political culture, a haunting
legacy of colonialism.38 Perhaps this is why the Consensus slowly but
surely splintered, thanks in no small part to the aggressive anti-Con-
gress efforts of the BJP.39 Since the early 1980s especially, official secu-
larism has been increasingly challenged by public assertions of reli-12 Theory & Event
gious and caste identity in popular politics.40 Meanwhile state-led
development and centralized economic planning have given way to
greater reliance on private capital, international trade and investment
markets, exposing increasing numbers of Indians to the vicissitudes of
global capitalism.41 By the late ‘90s the Congress Party’s (liberal, sec-
ular, socialist) events failed to captivate as they once had, and other,
more media-savvy actors like the BJP were able to step in with more
seductive and affective media events that better articulated the new
economics of de-territorialization (i.e. capitalist globalization) with
a sense of cultural re-territorialization (i.e religious-nationalism).42
Perhaps no one was better suited to execute a militant re-imagining
of postcolonial Indian identity (through Hindutva and globalization),
and in the process begin to cultivate a new culture of national politics,
than Narendra Modi.
4. The Eventocratic Rise of Narendra Modi
2002—The Gujarat Riots
Any event-centric account of Modi’s political ascendance would have
to begin with the infamous 2002 Gujarat Riots, perhaps the event that
cemented Modi’s place in national and international media attention.
Modi continues to do battle with the ghosts of 2002, although he is also
an exemplar of the cynical maxim: might makes right. That February,
just five months into his position as chief minister of Gujarat (his first
appointment to elected office), a train car full of Hindu activists was
attacked and set aflame in the town of Godhra, Gujarat, ostensibly by a
gang of Muslim men. All 58 people trapped on board burned to death.
What followed were some of the worst Hindu-Muslim “communal
riots” seen in post-independence India (with more than a thousand
fatalities, and tens of thousands displaced, mostly Muslims). For some
the event recalled the worst excesses of violence during the Partition
of India and Pakistan.43
Prior to this event, Modi was practically unknown outside of
Gujarat. Afterwards his name would ring with infamy in India and
beyond. For in the midst of the violence and carnage, when it was clear
that most of it was directed against Muslim minorities in a few major
cities, Modi reportedly told the state police to stand down, to let the
riled up crowds “work out their feelings.” This potentially led to a far
higher number of casualties (again, mostly Muslims) than might have
otherwise occurred. Moreover, in full public view Modi controver-
sially pushed the national government (then under control of the BJP)
to hold the Gujarat state elections several months ahead of schedule.44
During the ensuing campaign Modi took advantage of the tense, com-
munalized environment in order to rally an aggressive Hindu baseKalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 13
ahead of the vote. In political speeches Modi unabashedly utilized
anti-Pakistan/anti-Muslim/anti-terrorist rhetoric, while maliciously
characterizing his critics as anti-Gujarati or even anti-Hindu. From
this darkly majoritarian imagination, Modi enchanted large Hindu
crowds, including, no doubt, some of the same mobs that were directly
responsible for the violence just months before, when police, govern-
ment officials, and most infamously, Modi, looked the other way.45 His
party won handily a short eight months after Godhra.46
Both nationally and internationally Modi’s image was severely tar-
nished by the collective bloodletting that his government oversaw and
did little to avert in February and March of 2002. But in Gujarat Modi
emerged stronger than ever. As noted above, Modi took full advan-
tage of the social polarization afterwards in advancing state elections
and “maximizing the gains from the post-Godhra violence.”47 Modi
had learned the cynical political lesson of Godhra. Namely, how to use
anti-minority sentiments and violent events to serve crass electoral
strategies. Modi’s speeches riled up Hindu crowds and performed a
lethal ideological subjectivation strategy that he has only perfected
over time, particularly in his subsequent re-election campaigns in
Gujarat, as well as his national campaigns in 2014 and 2019.48
2003—Vibrant Gujarat
The anthropologist of globalization Anna Tsing coined the term
“economy of appearances” to describe the way transnational capital
works to create a world in its own image, that is, a world suitable for
extractive profiteering made possible by pliant postcolonial states.
Tsing finds that today such states are just like start-up companies in
that both “must dramatize their dreams in order to attract the capital
they need to operate and expand.”49 In an economy of appearances it
becomes increasingly important for postcolonial states and start-ups
alike to project images of themselves that are appealing to foreign
investors, images of a promising future contingent upon a certain
appearance of the present. Investors must see a profitable business
environment, including a relatively stable political system, coopera-
tive leadership, secure and reliable infrastructure and so on.
After the Gujarat riots of 2002, Modi set out to create an economy
of appearances that would not only help rebuild a state badly dam-
aged by the state-wide riots, but also shift popular attention away from
communal violence to the more attractive theme of economic devel-
opment. The Vibrant Gujarat Business Summit was an investor and
business leader conference that Modi both created and hosted, begin-
ning in 2003 and held every two years since then. These high-profile
state-sponsored events gave Modi the chance to invite private capital
(both foreign and domestic) to partner with the Gujarat government14 Theory & Event
and invest in development projects in the state. For his part, Modi pro-
jected himself as a visionary leader with a pragmatic, business-friendly
approach to development. This was a far cry from the Gujarat riots
of the previous year, with images of smoldering buildings and burnt
homes, despondent families grieving the loss of loved ones, tens of
thousands languishing in refugee camps. Vibrant Gujarat promised
to put all this behind him by projecting the optimistic appearance of
investor-driven development. As the writer Vinod Jose wrote in 2012,
following the fifth Vibrant Gujarat Summit, “Modi has turned the act of
investing in what has long been one of India’s most business-friendly
and industrialized states into a high-profile spectacle—and amplified
the disclosure of annual investment inflows into singular triumphant
announcements.”50 Modi was transforming economic development
into a media event.
In fact, Modi has proven himself to be a master conjurer of such
events, employing expensive PR firms to publicize his government’s
accomplishments while using social media to directly reach out to
his followers both in India and abroad.51 As a result of his tech-savvy
and pro-business approach, Modi has gained increasing support from
India’s urban middle classes, the wealthy parts of the Indian diaspora,
and eventually the corporate media. These relatively elite groups had
previously seen Modi as toxic (for his alleged complicity in the Gujarat
riots and ties to the RSS), but now galvanized around his attractive
pro-development politics.52 Modi seemingly realized—in a way that
his contemporaries had not—that appearances mattered in politics
and that an optimistic and seductive depiction of social reality could
become a self-fulfilling prophecy under the right cultural conditions.
The circular logic of this mediated economy of appearances is a central
feature of Modi’s eventocratic rise.
Modi soon harnessed the popular nickname “Development Man”
or “Vikas Purush” both in Gujarat and outside of the state in the national
press.53 Under his well-publicized leadership, Gujarat’s economy wit-
nessed robust growth and attracted both foreign and domestic capital
investment.54 But as Modi’s biographer Nikhil Mukhopadhyay notes,
there were significant gaps between the promotional image of devel-
opment that Modi’s events were designed to project and real invest-
ments and improvements made in Gujarat. Comparing promises of
investment at Vibrant Gujarat summits from 2003–2011—through
what are called Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) made between
the state and private investors—with actual investments of capital,
Mukhopadhyay finds:
In the first Vibrant Gujarat Business Summit, out of 76 MOUs
that were signed, only 42 projects were actually started with an
investment of 38,000 crores against the promised amount of 66,068Kalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 15
crores. The numbers declined further in the second, third, fourth
and fifth summits: in percentage terms it stood at 36 percent, 23
percent, eight percent and just 1.4 percent in the last Summit in
2011.55
This growing gap between appearance and reality arguably applies
to Gujarat’s economy as a whole. For despite being one of the fastest
growing states in India, in terms of social indicators like health, educa-
tion and inequality, Gujarat actually lagged significantly behind other,
less prosperous Indian states, leading to what one scholar has called
“growth without development” in Modi’s Gujarat.56 But in a broader
sense, Modi’s “eventification” of development in Gujarat exemplifies a
model of “spectacular accumulation” that is part of Tsing’s economy of
appearances.57 Modi’s Gujarat combined minimal government regula-
tion with generous corporate incentives, such as tax-breaks and cheap
land for factories, along with the use of state muscle to discipline labor
and other unruly political elements. Under such ad hoc arrangements
between state and big business, combined with savvy PR and splashy
investor-friendly events, Modi utilized this economy of appearances
rebrand himself from a political pariah to a pragmatic leader.
2008—The Tata Nano Coup
Operating comfortably within this economy of appearances, Modi
further enhanced his image as Vikas Purush in the eyes of a growing
base of supporters through the so-called Tata Nano coup of 2008. This
event did for Modi nationally what hosting the Vibrant Gujarat events
attempted to do for Modi internationally. Both allowed Modi to shift
the public conversation about himself from communal riots and reli-
gious violence to spectacular and successful economic development.
Announced in 2006, the Tata Nano was to be the world’s cheapest
production car, targeted especially at India’s rising middle classes.58
The state of West Bengal, run by an increasingly corporate-friendly
Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), got the prized Tata fac-
tory and the projected jobs and ancillary benefits to went along with
it. By 2007 the state government began allocating and acquiring land
for a large car-manufacturing plant in Singur, an agricultural district
located 34 kilometers west of Kolkata.
By late 2008, however, Tata Motors abruptly stated that it would
be terminating its project in West Bengal.59 After months of disputes
between farmers and the state institution in charge of acquiring land
for the factory, and increasingly violent confrontations between protes-
tors and the police, Ratan Tata, head of Tata Motors, announced that the
company would be moving the project to the more business-friendly
state of Gujarat. Narendra Modi, still in his role as Chief Minister and
on his way to winning a third consecutive term in 2012, once more cap-16 Theory & Event
italized on the media attention with a highly publicized letter featured
in newspapers across India. The letter was addressed directly to Chief
Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, leader of the CPI-M, which had
governed West Bengal since the 1970s. In characteristic fashion, Modi
minced no words when speaking to a political enemy.
In Gujarat, we have a consistent industrial policy. Marxists like
you had once opposed industrialization. You had resisted entry
of computers and now you are talking about industrializa-
tion. Neither your party nor the administration is providing
whole-hearted support. We have created a land bank and have
an industrial map ready. We acquire land in advance through dis-
cussions with farmers. This is a continuous process. I admit that
your state has much more cultivable land than we have and acqui-
sition is difficult. Therefore, it is important to keep the opposition
in the loop and continue discussions throughout the year. We do
just that.60
In writing the letter Modi contrasted the “harmonious” culture of
politics in Gujarat with the obviously dysfunctional version in West
Bengal, communicating in effect with a future national electorate.61
In 2012 Modi was reelected in Gujarat by (once again) wide mar-
gins.62 Meanwhile, the CPI saw its three-decade long rule in West
Bengal come to an abrupt end in 2011. Quite fittingly, the latter were
voted out of office and replaced by the Trinamool Congress Party of
Mamata Banerjee, the same person that led the vociferous farmers’
protests against the state’s land acquisition plans in Singur two years
before.63
With both the one-off Tata Nano event and the biennial Vibrant
Gujarat events Modi seemed to be sending a strong signal to capitalists
around the world: Gujarat was open for business. The capitalist world
returned the favor by publicly touting Modi’s visionary acumen, his
stalwart leadership qualities, his self-discipline. They did this when
many in the mainstream media (both in India and abroad) continued
to see Modi as a problematic figure.64 For his part Modi was demon-
strating a clear knack for turning unexpected events, such as violence
in Godhra and messy land politics in West Bengal, into opportunities
to publicize himself and extend his popular base. Such mobilizations
were instrumental in Modi’s “rebranding” from a communal instigator
in the aftermath of 2002 to someone capable of holding the highest
political office in India just twelve years later.65
2014—“Acche Din Aane Wale Hain” (“Good Days Are Coming”)
In May 2014, after the most expensive national election campaign
in Indian history, the Modi-led BJP and its coalition partners in the
National Democratic Alliance (NDA) won a rousing two-thirdsKalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 17
majority in the lower house of Parliament (or Lok Sabha), awarding
its leader Narendra Modi the post of prime minister.66 By itself the
BJP won an outright majority in government, something unseen in
Indian politics since 1984, following the outpouring of national sym-
pathy for the Congress Party in the wake of the assassination of Indira
Gandhi.67 While many predicted a comfortable BJP win in 2014, what
surprised prognosticators was the extent of anti-incumbency in the
election, directed against ten years of Congress-led rule. From winning
206 seats (out of a total of 543 constituencies) and leading the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) to reelection in 2009, Congress’s tally fell to
a mere 44 seats, while the BJP’s total climbed from 116 in 2009 to 282 in
2014. It was a dramatic turn of events.
Scholars of Indian media and politics have noted that in the con-
text of the 2014 elections, a few prominent themes stood out. First,
there was the visibly Modi-centric campaign on the part of the BJP,
with the inauguration of candidate-driven “horse race” politics, pre-
viously under-played in India’s more party-centric parliamentary
system.68 Modi’s was perhaps the most personality-driven candidacy
since Indira Gandhi’s “Indira is India, India is Indira” campaign in
the early 1970s. Second, one saw the innovative use of social media to
further personalize Modi’s campaign as he connected with millions
around the country and the world (including the Indian diaspora).69
Third, there was the near unanimous backing of big business and
corporate television media, which garnered Modi disproportionate
coverage throughout the race.70 Fourth and finally, Modi and the BJP
won the overwhelming support of the urban middle class, who appar-
ently took more to Modi’s credentials as a pro-development leader in
Gujarat than to his reputation for anti-minority politics. Or else they
were simply unbothered by Modi’s identity politics because they iden-
tified with the majority.71
If we analyze these four events together—the riots of 2002, the
Vibrant Gujarat summits beginning in 2003, the Nano coup of 2008,
and the electoral victory of 2014—we can see how they form a kind
of composite subjectivity that broadly describes the media politics
of Narendra Modi: the appearance of economic pragmatism and a
pro-business disposition mixed with the projection of religio-cultural
assertiveness, masculinity and majoritarian nationalism. In so far as
Modi has found (and continues to find) success as an elected politi-
cian, his supporters ostensibly identify with some or all aspects of this
composite subjectivity. This allows us to ask a timely question: what
are the limits of Modi’s composite, mass-mediated subjectivity? To
return to the demonetization episode with which I began this essay,
demonetization was a debacle precisely because it backfired as a polit-
ical event. Unlike the four events described and analyzed above, the18 Theory & Event
popular interpretation of demonetization quickly spun out of Modi’s
normally tightfisted control.72 And yet, not only has Modi successfully
weathered the calamity of this event, he won re-election in 2019 by
even wider margins than in 2014.73 Thinking from this unexpected turn
of events, in the last part of this essay I turn my focus to the specula-
tive link between events, media and subjectivation in light of rising
neo-fascist politics around the world.
5. Eventocracy and Aspirational Fascism
What is it about events and their mediation that prove so decisive in
our divisive politics of today? For we could easily extend the analysis
of eventocracy to Trump in the United States, Erdogan in Turkey, Putin
in Russia, and so on. It is against the spirit of this study to simply assert
the specificity of eventocracy in a place like India and end the analysis
there. For what links events and politics more globally is the process
of subjectivation, that is, the transformation of concrete, heterogeneous
individuals into political subjects through the mediation of events. As
various philosophers of “the event” have noted in recent decades,
events can introduce unexpected ruptures into “normal” everyday
existence, forcing individuals or groups to think and act differently
than they did before.74 This gives events a “virtual” potency in political
life, in so far as their power exists in the realm of potentiality, without
having to necessarily be “actual” or “true” in order for events to exert
an absent presence in a given situation. In an era of social media, dig-
ital technology and economic globalization, the virtual capacities of
events multiply.75 And so too do the potential for manipulative and
deceptive events. Here the specter of aspirational fascism in places like
India and the US today becomes particularly urgent to consider.
The concept of “aspirational fascism” is borrowed from William
Connolly’s recent intervention of the same name.76 Connolly’s text is
an exploratory meditation on political life in Trump’s America, with
relevant historical comparisons with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Connolly pays particularly close attention to modes of attunement
that help suture an aspirational fascist figure like Trump, Hitler and
Mussolini to devoted masses of followers. I find much of interest
between the socio-political forces and resonance machines (including
evangelical capitalism in the US and Hindu developmentalism in
India) that produced Trump in the US and Modi in India (and osten-
sibly other aspirational fascists in political and cultural contexts else-
where). My hope is that this essay is the first of more to come in terms
of studying comparative cases of eventocracy (in different places, at
different scales), and bringing their disparate contexts, implications
and resonances to the fore.Kalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 19
In this last section I’d like to get started by positing the following
question: how might we distinguish manipulative events of the aspi-
rational fascist variety from the revolutionary kind that open up possi-
bilities in the direction of progressive politics? For the communist phi-
losopher Alain Badiou, truly progressive, often revolutionary events
always emerge as an exception to the dominant situation that pre-
cedes them, presenting existence with something that was previously
excluded from what he calls “the encyclopedia of the situation,” or the
realm of known possibilities.77 In short, events make the impossible
possible through the unexpected inclusion of parts that were previ-
ously excluded from the situation as it was dominantly known. In this
way truly significant events can be quite rare. They are also fleeting. But
certain events are completely unexpected and leave a lasting mark or
trace on certain individuals and groups. These groups become “subjec-
tivated” by the experience of the event, bearing witness to the moment
of radical rupture itself, the encounter with something revolutionary
and new. This newness Badiou names a “truth.” Individuals turn into
subjects by deciding to act in the name of this truth, to pursue the most
radical consequences of this decision in the wake of a “truth-event.”
Although he doesn’t use this word explicitly, for Badiou truth-
events can be considered “sublime” in the Kantian sense that they
bring the subject “into a state of disarray,”78 overwhelming the cog-
nitive faculties of perception, imagination and reason with sensory
overload at the sheer terror of the infinite and the ineffable. In contrast
to an object of beauty, whose finite and well-proportioned forms give
a sense of “pleasure” to the apprehending subject through the “free
play” of the subject’s faculties, “the quality of the feeling of the Sublime
is that it is a feeling of pain in reference to the faculty by which we
judge aesthetically of an object.”79 But for Badiou, after the painful,
shocking or merely disruptive (sublime) event, the individual or group
reconstitutes themselves as a subject of the event, one whose fidelity
is to its disruptive truth. Importantly, this truth is not something tran-
scendent that precedes the event, just waiting to be discovered. Rather,
truth is something that actively emerges with the event, opening up a
possibility that, through the affirmative decision on the part of sub-
jects to act in fidelity to it, would not otherwise exist. Truth here is
emergent and “virtual” in the sense that it exists as a potentiality that
must be actualized by concrete historical subjects who decide to act in
its name.80
Political theorist Michael Shapiro approaches events somewhat
differently. While he too sees sublime events as ruptures within pre-ex-
isting communities of sense (or situations, in Badiou), rather than
directing subjects toward fidelity to the universal truth of the event, for
Shapiro events politicize the perceptual lines that divide communities
of sense within a given polity. Shapiro characterizes as sublime those20 Theory & Event
“disruptive events that provoke the formation of oppositional com-
munities of sense, which register the existence of multiple experiential
thought worlds” (Shapiro, 2018: 4). Thus rather than assuming that
events resonate within a singular and universal common sense (which
both Kant and Badiou do), Shapiro argues that “sublime experiences
activate diverse sense-making communities within the body politic” (3).
Cross-hatching these perspectives, we can observe that certain
eventocratic leaders like Modi or Trump are at their most powerful
when they are able to manufacture events (or take advantage of unex-
pected events) that effectively split public opinion into oppositional
camps. For this divides the loyalists from the opposition, friends from
enemies, Self versus Other. But just as importantly it keeps the public
conversation fixated on the eventocratic figure themselves. This figure
is less interested in convincing everyone to agree with them and more
invested in securing a virtual plurality that suffices to keep the spec-
tacle going. And here divisive events become the means to shore up
a sufficiently loyal base that can perform its collective loyalty to the
leader over and over again. Eventocratic figures like Modi and Trump
are not the only ones seeking to shape the dominant interpretation of
events today but these figures have proven to be the ones that, in their
respective milieus, most dramatically force people to choose sides, to
decide on this or that particular truth, to join this or that community of
sense-making and performative interpretation.81 Eventocracy is about
the active mediation and partitioning of subjectivities in the context of
multiple, competing communities of sense, each invested in different
ideas of “truth.”
From Badiou’s perspective, these mass-mediated “truths” and
the eventocratic means through which they are conjured are largely
reactionary rather than progressive. They are forms of manipulation
which become sources of distraction and division in the body politic
rather than points of potential solidarity across difference. From this
perspective, it is imperative that critical scholarship takes the time to
rigorously analyze and expose these new mediated forms of manipu-
lation. By critiquing this mode of media politics, we can reveal its bla-
tant falsities, all while taking heed of the “powers of the false” that are
central to how the new digital media work.82 That is, how the media
captivates and captures new subjects by repeating certain “truths” and
their underlying “common” sensibilities. This critical praxis is a neces-
sary part of the politics of eventocracy.
But how to conjure events differently? How to evoke a different
power of the false, one that relates visceral media and the politics of
affect, but in tune with different, more egalitarian sensibilities? From
Shapiro’s perspective, the creative arts, and cultural production more
generally, can become key sites for the formation of counter-events
that not only challenge the false “truths” of eventocratic manipulators,Kalyan | Media and Politics in Times of Aspirational Fascism 21
but forge new truths and egalitarian sensibilities out of the mediated
realities we already inhabit and interpret every day. In this case, the
spectacle of aspirational fascism (i.e. eventocracy) in places like Modi’s
India and Trump’s US will have to be met with an anti-fascist political
culture which uses events and media to forge radical communities of
sense and sense-making in the hollowed out mediascapes of global
capitalism.
Notes
1. Modi delivered the speech first in Hindi and then in English. You can
view both versions at the Bharatiya Janata Party’s YouTube channel: “PM
Narendra Modi’s address to the nation on demonetization of Rs. 500 &
Rs. 1000 currency notes.” Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=rn64Vf6GEoo
2. For an overview of conditions in the month following Modi’s speech, see
Bhargav Rani, “Demonetization in India: the Political Economy of Waiting
Time,” Advocate, December 17, 2016. Available online at: http://gcadvocate.
com/2016/12/17/demonetization-india-political-economy-waiting-time/.
3. The concept of informality in contemporary India is contested but can be
provisionally defined as including those domains of economic production
and exchange that fall below “official count.” For a good overview of differ-
ent intellectual positions with respect to the term, see Ananya Roy, “Urban
Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American
Planning Association, Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 147–58.
4. Wade Shepard, “One month in, what’s the impact of India’s demonetization
fiasco,” Forbes, December 12, 2016, available online at: https://www.forbes.
com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/12/12/one-month-in-whats-the-impact-of-indias-de-
monetization-fiasco/#2ab7505a7ab1
5. Since the Indian state’s gradual and uneven implementation of economic
reform, its economy has now emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing
today, at least as measured by GDP. For a political economy analysis of the
most robust growth years, see R. Nagaraj “India’s dream run, 2003–08.”
Economic and Political Weekly 48.20 (2013): 39–51. Notwithstanding this
period of accelerated growth, however, India’s social indicators (includ-
ing poverty and health metrics) put it in league with some of the poorest
regions in the world. For more on uneven growth and structural economic
inequality see Atul Kohli, Poverty Amid Plenty in the New India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
6. For an account of Modi’s political rise, see Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay,
Narendra Modi: the Man, the Times (New Delhi: Westland 2013). Note: this
edition was written prior to Modi’s election as Indian Prime Minister in
2014 but fully anticipates it and has been updated since.
7. Paula Chakravartty and Srirupa Roy, “Mr. Modi Goes to Delhi: Mediated
Populism and the 2014 Indian Elections,” Television & Media, 16:4 (2015),
311–322. This is part of a special issue on Modi’s election (from a media
studies and comparative politics) point of view edited by these two authors.22 Theory & Event
8. Rohit Kumar, “Demonetization: The Poor and Elderly Are Worst Hit by
Modi’s ‘Financial Surgical Strike’”, HuffPost India, November 10, 2016.
Available online at: https://www.huffingtonpost.in/rohit-kumar/demonetiza-
tion-the-poor-and-elderly-are-worst-hit-by-modis-fi_a_21603320/. Kadayam
Subramanian, “India’s demonetization policy fails to address real prob-
lems,” Asia Times, November 24, 1016. Available online at:http://www.atimes.
com/indias-demonitization-policy-fails-address-real-problems/.
9. Sudhir Kumar, India Transforming: A Leader Changes the Destiny of a
Nation (New Delhi: Adhyyan Publications, 2015):Yogesh Dwivedi,
“Demonetization could spark a new digital economy in India,” Quartz India,
November 22, 1016. Available online at: https://qz.com/843872/indias-rupee-de-
monetization-could-spark-a-new-digital-economy-in-the-cash-reliant-country/, V.
Sastry, “Demonetization is Both Revolutionary and Responsibility,” Live
Law, December 9, 2016. Available online at: http://www.livelaw.in/demon-
etization-revolutionary-responsibility/, Sanjiv Shankaran, “Why Narendra
Modi’s demonetization move may make sense from a political cost-benefit
standpoint,” Times of India, December 10, 2016. Available online at: https://
blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cash-flow/why-narendra-modis-demonetization
-move-may-make-sense-from-a-political-cost-benefit-standpoint/, Rohit Gandhi,
“Demonetization: This is a new Indian Sunrise,” DNA, November 14, 2016.
Available online at: http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-this-is-a-new-
indian-sunrise-2273153.
10. See Ravish Kumar, The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation
(New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2018), for a sense of Kumar’s views on cul-
ture and politics in Modi’s India.
11. Ravish Kumar, “Welcome the eventocracy, tracked by comedia,” The
Indian Express, December 31, 2016. Available online at: https://indianexpress.
com/article/opinion/columns/events-eventocracy-policy-announcement-me-
dia-demonetisation-jnu-row-fake-news-4452319/
12. See Michael Shapiro, The Political Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018); Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text, 79 Vol 22,
No 1 , (Summer 2004): 117–139; Robert McChesney, “Interview with
Catalyst magazine,” Catalyst, Vol 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2018); and Jonathan
Crary, “Spectacle, attention, counter-memory.” October 50 (1989): 97–107;
and Johanna Maaria Sumiala, Katja Valaskivi, and Daniel Dayan, “From
Media Events to Expressive Events,” Television & New Media, 19:2 (2018):
177–187.
13. This is hardly a novel observation about the relationship between rep-
resentation and reality, mediated by images, simulations, programs and
codes, data and information, etc. in a decidedly post-industrial era. I
am edified by the likes of Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (London:
Bread & Circuses Publishing, 2012 [1968]); Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of
Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1969]); Gilles Deleuze,
“Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7; Jean
Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), and many others
who influenced me. My contribution in the project is to simply underline
the specific role of events as such in helping create the inter-subjective and
material conditions for an increasingly virtual/simulated mass society.You can also read
