On the sidelines of Operation Sindoor — the stunning multiple military strikes on Pakistan, now pronounced to be the new normal — has prospered another canon that has received no mean spurring under the Narendra Modi establishment: salesmanship.
Operation Sindoor, still underway on good and high authority, is a strictly military mission, but a hive of would-be collateral beneficiaries may tell you it’s also a profit-rich branding prospect. Countless hands are reaching out to make a grab at what they imagine to be a runaway derby bet.
Pause a moment and plot the line from the horrific enactment at the high Pahalgam meadow to the pre-dawn thud of the first Indian missile deep into Pakistan and you will know just why Operation Sindoor makes an alchemy of symbolisms like no other currently in sight. It blistered datelines across Pakistan, it ran riot on the imagination of profits in India.
Any wonder that well more than a dozen movie producers — T-Series, Madhur Bhandarkar and Zee Studios reportedly among them — ran for rights? Any wonder that close to two dozen corporate entities scrambled to secure the trademark on the potency of the name and image of sindoor spilt around the case? Reliance was among those companies, though they swiftly withdrew.
We have no way of knowing yet what volumes and variants of illicit merchandising of Operation Sindoor have already gone into the works in retail manufacturing and sales hubs. What we can be certain of is the lead merchandiser.
It should cause no wonder at all that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the keenest on profit and the first to make good the grab and staple himself to the prize tag — script, style, statement, staging, symbolism, signature, the whole deal. Had he not declared with pride in public way back in 2014, shortly after assuming reins of Delhi, that as a Gujarati “commerce is in my veins”?
The boardrooms and studios were still devising strategies when Indian Railways tickets had begun to roll off printers with Operation Sindoor emblazoned to one side of the top and Modi, in ramrod straight salute mode, to the other.
Rail Bhavan itself appeared locked in pre-emptive mode. Before any indignant noise rose, it had pushed out a bland press note: The use of Prime Minister Modi’s picture “saluting the heroes of Operation Sindoor” on train tickets is a tribute to the soldiers’ valour. Be done.
But the confetti of criticism is thickening nevertheless, quite as it did when Covid-19 vaccine certificates began to roll off with Modi’s faceprominently embossed. The lead Opposition, the Congress, led the opposing. “Modi has turned the valour and sacrifices of our armed forces intohis PR stamp, this time on railway tickets,” the party’s X handle said.
A Covid-19 vaccination certificate with Narendra Modi's picture on it
The Congress’s Kerala handle, often more acidic, said: “We, the tax payers,are paying the price for this bad product unfortunately. These vultures exploit every opportunity to ride on the back of our soldiers to market their pathetic, unsellable product.”
The sense of unease and anger was wider than just political. “This (kind of publicity) may have happened on odd occasions in the past, but Modi has done this on every occasion. It is not just publicity but plain rent seeking,” an indignant M.G. Devasahayam, former IAS officer and retired Major of the Madras Regiment who served in the 1965 war, told The Telegraph.
Asked if past Prime Ministers like Indira Gandhi too hadn’t imposed their personas on government programmes, Mridula Mukherjee, retired professor of history at JNU, said: “One doesn’t justify the other. I don’t recall how it was used by Indira Gandhi. But I find placing Operation Sindoor on railway tickets itself objectionable. And using the PM’s photo makes it even more so. Must we politicise everything?”
Former bureaucrat, activist and a forthright critic of the Modi dispensation, Harsh Mander, said: “For the Prime Minister, every act of public duty is an opportunity for self-promotion. But a line must be drawn somewhere. India’s armed forces are proudly apolitical. Let them remain so, none should seek to derive mileage from this.”
Have the election banners and posters from 2019 that displayed our soldiery pre- and post-Pulwama been forgotten?