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Beautiful Chaos as Alibi: What The Spinoff's Modi Coverage Performs



Beautiful Chaos as Alibi: What The Spinoff's Modi Coverage Performs

Mohan J. Dutta

The Spinoff's account of Narendra Modi's Auckland visit is labelled analysis, and that label is the first thing to examine, because what the piece delivers is not analysis but atmosphere: a colour diary of pōwhiri protocol, motorcades, translation earpieces and arena euphoria, written with genuine craft and almost no critical function. The entirety of Modi's record, the stoking of Hindu nationalism, the jailing of critics and journalists, the treatment of Muslims and other minorities, is dispatched in a single subordinate clause, wedged after his 70 percent approval rating and the description of India as the largest democracy on earth. One clause, and the ledger is considered balanced for the remaining two thousand words of spectacle.

Consider what the piece then does with that spectacle. Modi is introduced as a global political rockstar; the crowd's screaming is compared to a One Direction concert; his speech is judged, by the crowd's reaction alone, as possibly the greatest political speech ever given on New Zealand soil. The journalist tells us frankly that the speech was entirely in Hindi, that no translation was available, and that his comprehension amounted to a list of scattered proper nouns. Read that sequence again: a reporter who could not understand a word of the content pronounced it oratory brilliance on the strength of its affect. But manufactured affect is precisely what an authoritarian populist rally is engineered to produce, and coverage that transmits the awe while confessing it could not access the words is not describing the production; it has been conscripted into it. The rally exists to generate exactly this artefact, the wide-eyed dispatch from a prestige outlet confirming that the leader conducts crowds like an orchestra, and the artefact will now circulate through the Hindutva media ecosystem as proof of global blessing. The piece's irony, the vegetarian lunch joke, the volunteer on the wheelie bin, functions as an alibi: knowingness performing the work that scrutiny should have done.

Ask, next, who the piece is written for, because the implied reader is doing a great deal of unacknowledged work. The dispatch opens on a bare-buttocked warrior swinging a weapon at Modi's face, glides through the anthropological juxtaposition of New Zealand's casual matesy-ness against India's hierarchical formality, delights in the dance performances and the screaming, and closes by adopting an attendee's phrase, beautiful chaos, as its own verdict, having already promised madness and mania in the headline. This is the grammar of exotica, and it is far older than the outlet publishing it: India as gorgeous pandemonium, brown political life as colour and noise, dished up for a white liberal audience that gets to consume difference as spectacle for twenty-four hours and come home charmed. The reporter's confessed incomprehension, played as self-deprecating whimsy, is the tell. Whiteness here is not a skin but an epistemic position: the licence to file two thousand words on a speech one could not understand and have it published as analysis, because the audience being served was never expected to understand either. The madness is theirs, the chaos is theirs, and both are beautiful, safely over there.

This is the standing problem of white liberal journalism's multiculturalism, which treats culture as festival, saris, dances, cuisine, arena euphoria, to be promoted uncritically, and treats the politics organising the festival as invisible or, worse, as impolite to raise. Multiculturalism of this kind flattens a community of a quarter of a million people into a single celebrating mass, which is why the Indian progressives outside the barricades cannot be heard inside the piece: in the festival frame there is no room for a community that is internally contested, that contains Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits and dissidents for whom the man on stage is not a rockstar but a danger. They receive one clause, unnamed and unquoted, fused into the same sentence as a Brian Tamaki-associated anti-immigration group, as though the communities warning about an extremist ideology and the ethno-nationalists targeting those very communities were symmetrical noises off. And this uncritical promotion of the cultural is not a neutral blind spot; it is the exact opening Hindutva is engineered to exploit, because an ideology that travels wearing the clothing of culture requires an audience trained to believe that culture must never be questioned. White liberal multiculturalism and majoritarian cultural nationalism meet, quite comfortably, at the same buffet.

To be fair, the piece is not stenography throughout: the $20 billion investment discrepancy is pursued honestly, and the referral to Ravi Bajpai's Awaaz report is a genuine service. But this makes the surrounding capitulation more instructive, because it shows the outlet knows how to interrogate a claim when it chooses to. Nowhere, meanwhile, does the strategic partnership spanning everything from counterterrorism to traditional medicines get probed beyond its comic vagueness; nowhere does “electoral autocracy” appear; nowhere is it noted that the visiting leader has not taken an unscripted question from his own country's press in over a decade, an omission of particular weight in a piece whose author was himself denied both translation and access.

What would critical analysis have brought? The organising infrastructure behind the arena, and who owns it. The fact that New Zealand's own post-Christchurch Violent Extremism Ideological Framework names Hindutva identity-motivated violent extremism among its categories. The SIS's warnings on transnational repression and foreign states mislabelling New Zealand communities. The V-Dem classification, the press freedom collapse, the missing press conference. Named, quoted voices from the Sikh, Muslim and progressive Indian New Zealanders outside the barricades, treated as the political adults they are. The discipline of distinguishing Hinduism, which filled that arena with legitimate joy, from Hindutva, the political production that harvested it. And a multiculturalism worthy of the name, one that engages minority communities as internally plural and politically alive, with their own struggles over power, rather than as festivals to be consumed. Beautiful chaos is a lovely closing line. It is also what exotica sounds like when it is well written, and what propaganda looks like when it is served to liberals.

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