Former Congress president and current Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi made an interesting comment during his speech in the Lok Sabha on February 2: that instead of it being run like a union of states, India is being run like a kingdom by a king. “There are two visions: one is a union of states, union of languages, union of cultures, a bouquet of beautiful flowers that can challenge any power in the world…there’s another vision; a centralising vision, the vision of a king, the idea of a king which the Congress removed in 1947. We smashed that idea of a king. Now that idea of a king has come back. That there is a king; a shahenshah; a ruler of rulers; a master of masters,” Gandhi said during the debate on the motion of thanks, which immediately drew howls of protest from the treasury benches. The oblique reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the ‘shahenshah’ comment was unmissable and rankled the Hindu right-wing, which responded by lampooning and deriding the Congress leader in the vilest language on social media. What, perhaps, hurt the Hindutva camp most was the use of a kingly title that the people at large associate with India’s Mughal emperors – who were all Muslim – for the avowedly Hindu Prime Minister, who is described as the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ (emperor of Hindu hearts) by his numerous bhakts since his days as the chief minister of Gujarat.Even though ‘shahenshah’ was a pre-Islamic Persian title of kingship, it was adopted by the kings of several Muslim dynasties in the Persianate world, from the Khwarazmid empire to the Safavid shahs of Iran to the Timurid emperors of India to the Afghan sultans of Bengal. The Mughal emperors styled themselves as ‘Shahenshah-i Hindustan‘ – a grand announcement of hegemonic authority, not just to other powers in the Indian subcontinent, but to also those that lay beyond. Rahul Gandhi may have become the first opposition leader to attack the Modi government, and particularly the Prime Minister, for behaving like a king. But he was only reiterating what many Modi supporters have been proudly claiming over the years.Also read: As CM, Narendra Modi Echoed Rahul Gandhi’s Statement on India as ‘Union of States’ Many TimesLast December, when Modi inaugurated the Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor project in an elaborate ceremony that blurred the distinction between the chief executive of a secular polity and a Hindu religious leader, some anchors and commentators on India’s rather raucous TV news media went into hyperdrive to favourably compare Modi to Emperor Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor who is known to the world as the grief-stricken monarch who built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved wife. In a rambunctious tirade of a speech in which he tried to take down the critics of Hindu nationalism, a TV news anchor claimed that Shah Jahan had cut off the hands of the workers who built the Taj Mahal (an old, much debunked claim that continues to survive in Hindu right-wing circles), but Modi showered flower petals on the workers who “built” the Kashi Vishwanath Dham, and even ate with them. The comparison of a piece of Muslim funerary architecture to a Hindu devotional space was bad enough, but the comparison of a 17th-century absolute monarch to a 21st-century elected leader didn’t strike the right-wing ecosystem as odd. And we know why. While the inauguration ceremony itself gave off the vibe of a Hindu emperor performing a grand ritual at the consecration of a temple, like the kings in the past, Modi himself threw in the Aurangzeb-Shivaji binary to suggest that the lost glory of the Hindus was being restored with this temple corridor. In doing so, Modi subtly presented himself as a Hindu king in Shivaji’s league who was on a civilisational quest to reclaim the glory of a Hindu past to wipe off the shame of centuries of Muslim rule. This TV speech, delivered with a lot of self-righteous anger, was just one example of the conception of Modi as a Hindu emperor; it was certainly not the first time it was done by BJP sympathisers and supporters. Also read: Kashi Corridor Inauguration: PM and BJP Leaders Invoked Gandhi’s Name But Went Against His SpiritWhen Modi performed the ‘bhoomi pujan’ ceremony for the Ram temple at Ayodhya in 2020, it was a similar spectacle. The symbolism of that was not lost on even foreign correspondents who noted, with great alarm, that the ceremony resembled a “coronation“, with Modi wearing a silver crown given to him by the priests even as his supporters hailed their “Hindu king” on social media. The Times called Modi “the Hindu king of a divided India”. That same year, BJP supporters – and at least one Facebook group that purportedly belonged to a “district unit” of the party – shared a YouTube song that was inspired by the 2017 Bollywood number, ‘Mere rashq-i qamar’. The song is an ode to the beloved whom even the moon envies for her beauty, but it has been used in mostly political memes, with the most notable among them being on former US President Donald Trump and Modi. But this karaoke version of the song, though forgettable in every other way, was notable for one reason: the lyrics. These were an ode to Modi, who was unambiguously called a ‘naresh’, an epithet used in the past for Hindu kings. The song went like this: “Mere Modi naresh, tujh se khush he saara desh, desh kya ye chalaya mazzaa aa gaya…” Loosely translated, these mean: “My emperor Modi, the whole nation is enraptured by the way you are running the country.” The idea of Modi as a Hindu emperor was quite clear in this. Also read: Rights, Duties and the Ramblings of a Nervous Monarch Who Is Weakening IndiaMany such analogies and comparisons have been made over the years. In fact, when Modi won the election in 2014, then Vishwa Hindu Parishad chief Ashok Singhal had said that after 800 years, Delhi was being ruled by a proud Hindu once again: an indirect reference to the defeat of Ajmer king Prithviraj Chauhan at the hands of Ghurid ruler Sultan Muizuddin Muhammad bin Sam at Tarain in 1192. Chauhan is today remembered as a king of Delhi, but it is the 16th-century Afghan general Hemu who is widely believed, and cried over, as the last Hindu king of Delhi. This lament of Hindus losing power to Muslims isn’t restricted to the Hindu Right; this has been part of the general discourse in India for quite a while now, with even popular gameshows like Kaun Banega Crorepati, hosted by megastar Amitabh Bachchan, having questions like ‘Who was the last Hindu king of Delhi?’ Singhal’s view on Modi’s election victory was shared by many others on social media, who celebrated the “rajya-abhishek” of their “Hindu Hriday Samrat”. For a Prime Minister who openly flaunts his fervent religiosity, Modi seems to be at ease with these honorifics, as are the people. In a country where the common people are often referred to as “praja” (or subjects) and not “nagarik” (or citizens), people submitting to authority and not questioning it isn’t very strange. In my 2019 book, Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India, I had said that India is today ruled by a saffron shahenshah, who is the heartthrob of the orthodox and the austere. His strict observance of Hindu rituals; his constant invocations of Hindu kings like Shivaji and Rana Pratap; his openly partisan style of functioning leaves little doubt that he behaves like a king clothed in immense personal power and not like a democratically elected leader. Therefore, Rahul Gandhi’s observation has salience. But he was wrong about India’s multitude of great empires in the past functioning like a “union of states”. That’s not how absolute monarchies functioned in the age of empires. But that’s a debate for some other time. Manimugdha S. Sharma is a journalist pursuing a PhD in History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada; a Fellow at the Institute of Asian Research, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs; and the author of the 2019 book, Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India.
