Of Narcissism and Submissive Masochism

Last week a senior journalist posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) an officially sponsored visual image relating to the January 22 consecration of the Ram Mandir that portrays the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi in holy robes and respectfully folded hands, towering over a miniscule idol of Ram Lalla. This was his accompanying caption: “Narcissism is often embedded in the visual image. See the sheer contrast between the stature of man and God! The devotee seems the medium as well as the message.” It set me thinking!

For the last month, the media has inundated us with such posters of the country’s anointed man eclipsing God (one poster shows our Supreme Leader holding the toddler Ram Lalla by his finger and escorting him to the temple) which makes one cudgel the brains trying to figure out who the star is and who the supporting cast in this glitzy celebration of the Ram Mandir.

But leaving alone the Almighty from this blasphemous false equivalence, we know who the chosen one is in our benighted country because we have his word for it. In a special audio message released on January 12, announcing a special ritual ahead of the grand event – a 11-day ‘anushsthan’ – the Prime Minister of a government that is still officially secular, went so far as to state that “God (no less) has chosen me to represent the people of India during pran pratishta”. Shortly thereafter came the endorsement from modern India’s Iron man-turned-yes-man who issued a public statement that Modi had been chosen by Lord Ram to preside over the consecration of the Ram Mandir.

Make no mistake; we are beholding an extraordinary human phenomenon who has upended all the conventional norms of leadership. Self-awareness, humility, and respectfulness as personal traits, the assumption that the PM is only first among equals, collective decision-making, team spirit, and empowering delegation are attributes of leadership that Modi has contemptuously discarded. In the last nine years the entire polity – humans and institutions – has slavishly revolved around this superman.

What’s playing out before the country is an extreme form of deification. His devotees see him variously as Lord Shiva, as an avatar of Lord Ram and Lord Krishna, as the 11th avatar of Lord Vishnu. J.P. Nadda – sycophant supreme – went over the top, describing his master as the king of Gods. Going beyond mere verbalism, there’s a Modi temple in the Rajkot district of Gujarat and, if media reports are to be believed, another one on the anvil in Meerut embellished with a 100-foot statue of Modi.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

The full might of government has been mobilised to project one man and his achievements – Modi’s guarantees, not the BJP’s – many of them apocryphal. Even criminal failures like the botched pandemic response are transformed through a bizarre alchemic process into unmitigated triumphs.

The latest shocker is the NITI Aayog report that claims a precipitate reduction in poverty levels. Through statistical sleight of hand, brilliantly described by one commentator as “magical realism”, multidimensional poverty is shown to have declined from 29.1% in 2013-14 to 11.28% in 2022-23, thereby lifting about 24.82 crore people out of poverty. (What then does one make of Modi’s guarantee of providing foodgrains to more than 80 crore people free of cost for the next five years – a case of carrying coal to Newcastle?) With the truth undermined and the distinction between fact and fantasy blurred, our Supreme Leader parades one falsehood after another with a disarming straight face!

Of the unabated, all-out government propaganda promoting our tinsel god, there’s nothing more in-your-face in its unblushing projection of the Supreme Leader than the legislated diktat – flagrantly intended to stimulate cult worship – directing universities and Indian Railways to set up selfie points at select locations and stations with pictures of the Prime Minister, presumably to enable us to bask in reflected glory. There are official instructions to army men proceeding on leave, and sundry government officials, to tom-tom the achievements of the Modi sarkar. So universal is the plague that even our Covid vaccination certificates and the 5 kg rice bags given as dole have our Supreme Leader’s trademark picture on them.

Not only the government but the BJP too has capitulated to the cult worship. Everybody else has been smudged out, including redoubtable stalwarts like L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. Possible competitors of his alter ego such as Nitin Gadkari, Yogi Adityanath, Shivraj Chauhan, and Vasundhara Raje Scindia have been reduced to insignificance. By picking nonentities as chief ministers in the three States where the BJP recently won big, the clear message conveyed was that it is one man alone who wins elections for the BJP. Everyone else is dispensible!

What we are witnessing today is no ordinary case of a leader in an exalted state of self-love or self-absorption; one suspects a deeper pathology that psychoanalysts have identified as narcissism. Equally unhinged is the ignoble servitude of the millions of devotees in the country who have come under the spell of this consummate artist.

Erich Fromm, one of the world’s foremost psychoanalysts and social philosophers, who has delved deep into the mind of the narcissist and his symbiotic connection with his submissive “masochistic” devotee, helps us understand the bizarre idol worship in our country today. According to Fromm, man’s sanity depends on his relatedness and communion with other human beings. This transcending of lonely individual existence and unifying with the other humans is achieved by the narcissist through domination and by the bhakt through submission but in the process of feeding on each other, they both lose their integrity and freedom. At the same time, they lose the capacity for the one passion that inspires solidarity with our fellow creatures which is love and empathy.

All very abstruse? Put simply, the narcissist fails to develop the capacity for love because for him “there is only one reality, that of his own thought processes, feelings and needs”.  Emotionally crippled, the narcissist sees the phenomena in the outside world only from the viewpoint of them being useful or dangerous to him. Fromm believes that in its most extreme form, narcissism can lead to insanity.

As for the submissive masochists, what is particularly disconcerting is the fact that overwhelming millions among us have enthusiastically bought into his overweening narcissism and sophistry. Which brings to mind Shakespeare’s brilliant diagnosis of why the egomaniacal Julius Caesar held sway: “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves….The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings….upon what meat (or dhokla) doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?” Shame on us!

Mathew John is a former civil servant.