Not everyone can carry off that hornbill hat from Arunachal Pradesh with an airy sangfroid. Or that traditional outfit from Leh which made him look like a portly Indian businessman in a golden dressing gown with a grand vizier hat. But those were fashion faux pas.
The Modi-Modi-everywhere suit was a political faux pas – an ostentatious and self-centred display of grandiosity that was at odds with his carefully cultivated image of the outsider who was the sevak of the people. That was a rare moment of sartorial overreach by a man with an impeccable sense of image management. "How can the PM wear something like that? I am Gareeb Max. Vote for honesty, vote for freedom, vote for free WIFI!" Tweeted Arvind Kerjiwal.
Now by putting it up for auction for a good cause, along with 455 other gifts he received, Modi hopes to make lemonade out of that lemon. The suit started off with bids for Rs 51 lakh and 1 crore and 1.11 crore, finally going to NRI businessman Viral Chowksi,for Rs 1.1 crore An NRI businessman? But of course. Suresh Aggarwal who made the 1 crore offer told the Hindu “I have offered Rs 1 crore. This is work of charity and when the Prime Minister is doing for a great cause like the cleaning of the Ganga, I decided to go ahead and buy the suit."
That should shut his critics up. Except what next? The PM could make himself a diamond-encrusted gold crown and then auction it off for flood victims and earn kudos? It sends out precisely the wrong message — that an exorbitantly priced sartorial choice is okay because it fulfills the old adage that in order to make money you must first spend a lot of it.
A suit like that draws so much attention you cannot really wear it twice like any other pin stripe. It ceases to be a special occasion standard because everybody remembers it thus rendering it a one-time novelty. One just wonders what these good businessmen who were bidding on this suit meant to do with. Hopefully they were not planning to roam around town in it like a walking talking incantation of the PM.
But it does point to the cult status of Modi that everything he touches, even briefly, becomes a commodity. It is part of the greater story of the commodification of Modi. In an aspirational India he remains the brand to aspire to.
There are long-sleeved kurtas with the NaMo Mantra inscribed on it. There is the NaMo store in Ahmedabad. Modi Lion toys. Even Barack Obama said he wanted a Modi kurta and said that the PM was a “style icon”. And after the successful building of Brand Modi it’s only natural that it is now a commodity that can be cashed in.
In the old socialist India, apart from the Nehru jacket there was little about the political leaders that could be commoditised. So they showed their power by their names becoming part of government schemes and programmes. Or by taking over the name of a street. But that was a kind of power the aam aadmi could never aspire to. Only someone with real connections could get a street named after him, Rajesh Pilot being a good example. His main claim to fame was always “Friend of Rajiv Gandhi”.
But Modi is part of a commoditisation that is accessible to everyone who has the money to indulge in it. As I have said before “Brand Modi becomes an act of reflection with the multiplying effect of a hall of mirrors. As Modi stands at the rally, beaming, waving to the crowd, the jubilant crowd gazes back at him draped in NaMo paraphernalia - Modi masks, Modi t-shirts, Modi-kurtas.”
A Modi mask can cost just a few rupees, a Modi suit 1.11 crore but they both represent the coming together of our insatiable hunger for brands and our appetite for politics. For the right price that commodity can belong to any of us as well.
It’s commendable that the suit is not going to just hang in some closet, no longer used though not forgotten. India might be a little cleaner thanks to it but just because it now has a new charitable avatar does not mean it wipes the slate clean of its original vanity. That remains written all over it.
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