Afterword: Modi’s symbolic state

Integral to Narendra Modi’s approach to governing is the management of images and public emotions through the organisation of studiously choreographed and mass-mediated spectacles. Symbols embody affective appeals that activate attachments and identities that rational appeals cannot easily reach. The symbolic interventions of the Modi administration attempt to narrate and visualise an alternative version of the Indian nation, working across multiple domains simultaneously. Stamps, radio broadcasts, international summitry and memory politics together are not parallel but interconnected, different facets of a single, coherent project. These interventions are significant, but their ‘newness’ is queried. The tradition of nation-building by symbolic means has to be kept in view. Elements of the old order have been erased, but also the Hindu right has encroached on and appropriated elements of an inherited symbolic field. However, populist politics and media transformation have introduced genuinely new dimensions that amplify and reconfigure the official project of nation construction.