The Making of a Brand New Nation | EXCERPT

Brand New Nation by Ravinder Kaur reveals the on-the-ground experience of the relentless transformation of the nation-state into an attractive investment destination for global capital. The infusion of capital not only rejuvenates the nation, it also produces investment-fuelled nationalism, a populist energy that can be turned into a powerful instrument of coercion. Read an excerpt from the preface:

“A new FDI has entered the field (that) the nation needs to be saved from,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned the members of the Rajya Sabha. “We need FDI—foreign direct investment. But we need to be protected from this new FDI—foreign destructive ideology.” This ringing alarm about the double-edged “foreign” in the FDI—the desirable and the undesirable kind—was raised in the first week of February 2021. That week, the eyes of the world had turned to India: Rihanna, the global pop icon had tweeted about the farmers’ protest to her more than 100 million followers. Her short tweet, almost instantly, had turned the cause of the protesters holding vigil at the borders of Delhi into a global cause as celebrities and mega-influencers with mass followings amplified support for the movement. If this infusion of global publicity gave a fresh momentum to the months-old farmers’ and workers’ movement, it activated too conspiracy theories and rumors of plots to defame and tarnish the image of the government. Consider the irony of this moment: India was trending in the circuits of global publicity, yet it was the kind of publicity that was deemed unwelcome, out-of-control, and even corrosive. What this moment put on full display instead was a key feature of post-liberalization India: brand politics as the central terrain upon which intense power contestations take place in more ways than one.

Mass politics has indeed always been inseparable from image politics, yet in post-liberalization India, the brand value of image—reputation, idea, icon—far exceeds the domain of politics. Image is a commodity, a brand essence that commands value in the market, and in turn fuels mass politics harnessed to the capitalist dreamworlds of the twenty-first-century futures. This entanglement has especially shaped the three decades of economic reform as the promise of “the market”—shorthand for capitalist growth—popularly came to be seen as the recipe of progress and prosperity. The underlying rationale is this: greater the nation brand image, greater the investment flows and, consequently, greater economic growth and prosperity for the people. The nation, here, came to be imagined as an enclosure of capital waiting to be tapped and made productive in a market economy. This is what was dubbed as the fabled “India growth story”, the hopeful telling of India’s transformation into a twenty-first-century economic miracle. That the market sans regulation has not always delivered what it promised, and that income gaps and inequality have actually widened has not dented this popular axiom. Instead, the fractious logic of the brand—to enhance, create, protect the image in order to shore up its commodity value—has permeated through the politics of a nation that continues to dream of good times, an event that keeps failing to arrive at the promised hour again and again. Here’s the paradox: faced with this failure, brand politics is not weakened, it merely turns failure into speculative hope-without-deadline of the arrival of a glorious future. Brand politics, furthermore, demands discipline in order to accelerate the engine of growth, to enhance the commodity value, and facilitate the assemblage of the factors of production. Any move seen as potentially corrosive to the brand, in this logic, is deemed to be disobedience or, worse still, treachery to the nation.

This is the theatre of brand politics upon which we witness two competing visions of post-liberalization India in the time of pandemic: the crisis-as-acceleration approach that saw the passage of new laws in two areas—farm and labor—to open more sectors of the economy to the market; and the disruption of this move through popular protest mobilizations against these laws. Note, then, that the invocation of the term “FDI” to fashion a new threat perception is hardly a coincidence. FDI, in the world of business and politics, is a coveted commodity that signals more than the stock of foreign direct investments. A highly sought-after ware actively courted by state-led investment programs, it not only seeks to draw in capital but also re-affirm the nation’s market value as a profitable enclosure of production and exchange in the domain of politics. But, during the protest mobilization against the new farm and labor laws, this desirable notion of FDI was emptied out and re-acronymized into a lurking danger, a counterfeit of the original which was clearly unwelcome. This warning about the imposter FDI underscored the emotional work the “foreign” performs in the capitalist imaginaries that shape twenty-first-century India. In post-1990s India, the performative work of foreign capital extends far beyond the domain of economy, it is often taken as an uplifting re-confirmation of the world’s desire for India, its economic value as well its cultural essence. If at all, then, the dual invocation of the foreign vividly brought to the surface how the nation-form itself has transformed into a branded commodity-form, one that relies on global capital even as it turns to nationalist politics, and that remains open (to capital) and closed (to ideas) at the same time.

This open/closed condition can be witnessed too in the persistent calls for “positivity” during the brutal second wave of the pandemic. Reiterating the logic of brand politics, a number of political leaders and government officials asked the public to share positive stories amid a catastrophe, a glass-half-full proposition that required disregarding or, at the very least, minimizing the extent of one’s own suffering and that unfolding around oneself. Positivity is often held out as a mode of building individual capacity for endurance, honing the art of remaining hopeful in the time of crisis. It entails looking far ahead into the future, to dream of better times while detaching oneself from the adversities in the present. To generate positivity at a national scale, then, requires a steady channeling of cheerful, uplifting images while countering or overlooking images deemed negative and unflattering. The citizens are expected to make a contribution to this endeavor by telling positive stories or, at the very least, not share their experiences of loss or lacks in the public infrastructures.

Clearly, this need for compulsory good news to keep optimism alive is at odds with the structures of democracy. After all, the heart of democracy is dissent, a practice that involves criticism, disagreement, and even expressions of disobedience. This contradiction has laid the foundations of a violent rupture and a new political category through the logic of the brand: the anti-nationals, the ones who corrode the brand value of the nation by exposing the negatives, the communal violence, caste atrocities, and poverty otherwise buried beneath the good news. The Covid-19 pandemic has only sharpened these contradictions. As the second wave of the pandemic ravaged cities and towns, the Indian public sphere was filled with endless SOS calls for help to procure ICU beds, oxygen, and medication. These cries for help opened a new risk, the potential of being accused of spreading negative news that threatened to harm the positivity drive. Or, worse still, the charge of tarnishing the nation’s image in the world by sharing one’s tragedy in the global publicity.

Brand politics is at the heart of these endless contradictions and confrontations in the new nation. These especially become apparent in the ongoing struggle to control images in mass media as well as social media platforms. The recent law to regulate seemingly out-of-control social media is one such move in that direction. Likewise, Internet shutdown has become a common mode of asserting control over digital connectivity by suspending it. What we witness in this image-world is the exercise of state sovereignty in ever-new forms: the visual power to celebrate the revitalized nation and to see and show the national territory and its population as valuable factors of production available to global capital. This visual re-territorialization of the nation inevitably entails the power to edit—to erase or enhance—people, regions, cultural practices in or out of the visual surface of the nation. This power to illuminate or conceal from the eyes of the world is what evolves into a proprietary claim—the claim to the natural and cultural possessions of the nation and the power to capitalize these possessions. If the visual frame of the nation is a form of public recognition of the nation’s cultural essence, then that unique difference acquires legitimacy precisely by being chosen for illumination by the state. This control clearly demarcates the “domestic” affairs as a forbidden territory for external actors. The tacit bargain is this: the state manages and facilitates capital mobility and, in return, retains the power to rearrange the domestic sphere without external interference or sanctions. Put simply, the strange condition, at once, of being open and closed can only be maintained through this tentative bargain. This delicate balance was tested during the pandemic in an encounter with the foreign: the media. As the death toll rose during the second wave this year, journalists and photographers—both Indian and foreign—produced ground reports of the crisis. Of these, some images became the battleground upon which power politics played out.

I end with one such image: the riverbank, at first, appears to be dotted with pebbles half covered in sand. Hold your gaze a bit longer and you notice the pebbles seem to be all painted in the same orange-yellow hue. Zoom in and you realize these are not pebbles. These are corpses that have washed ashore, now buried in the sand, brought back into public view by a swollen river. A controversy ensued soon after. It was less about the deaths and more about the image that had made the bodies visible, especially in the global publicity. Yet what the production and circulation of that image showed was all that exceeds the image: it laid bare the fractious politics of the brand and its fragile limits.

Ravinder Kaur

Copenhagen, Denmark

14 June 2021

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