On my official visits to Visakhapatnam, the short-lived executive capital of Andhra Pradesh during 2022-2024, I often visited Bhogapuram – the site for the up-and-coming international airport. Three things stood out to me: how quickly the land acquisition moved, how smooth it was and how precise the parcels were marked out. Whatever else is said about Alluri Sitarama Raju’s airport at Bhogapuram, its size is appropriate. That the Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao (GMR) Group managed to retain its hold over this project, while the Adani Group absorbed nearly everything else in Indian port infrastructure, is something close to a miracle in itself.The airport is to commence its commercial operations later this August. What troubles me is what happened last week as the ribbon was cut.When folk dance is weaponised for political opticsThat the airport lacks an approach road seems to be the moot point. Tribal youth danced and sang around an open-top vehicle as the national elite processed through. Cameras, trained to focus on the choreography, documented thousands of young bodies moving in practiced sync along with the polity’s slow advance. For these communities, that dance is not a folk decoration on display for visiting dignitaries. At least not on this scale! That dance is a worship, an offering, historically directed at their gods. As that folk form was repurposed here for a ribbon-cutting, the camera, otherwise disciplined, did not distinguish between the two. And, of course, that was intended “undiscipline” meant for manufacturing spectacular visuals, which an audience seated miles away consumes. For an entire day, a heavily orchestrated crowd was mobilised to create an aesthetic and make a case for strong, God-like leadership. Carefully choreographed, the prime minister was crafted as the divine, literally, in the grammar of the performance itself. The vehicle moved the way a temple chariot moves through a crowd on festival day. The youth danced the way devotees dance ahead of a deity (that occasionally claims to be non-biological), not behind a dignitary.Artists perform during the inauguration of Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram, in Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh, August 1, 2026. Photo: PTI/narendramodi.in.The state did not simply invite tribal performers to add colour to an infrastructure launch. It borrowed the entire architecture of devotion, replete with the cultural composition of a yatra (voyage) and the collective ecstasy reserved for the sacred and pointed it at a serving politician. It was the chief minister, not the tribal community, who chose to make the prime minister their deity for a day. Chandrababu Naidu played the chief priest, his acolytes the choir. It was rehearsed, filmed and circulated as proof of organic public adoration: a devotion meant for the divine, staged as though the real were a Rajamouli film. Of course, the power star Pawan Kalyan, the additional deputy chief minister, was confined to a minor role. In other words, the actual cinematic demi-god, played second fiddle as the leadership was made the divine.An airport not doing justice to its titular rebelThere is a bitter irony surrounding the airport’s own name, one that sharpens the central point. Alluri Sitarama Raju, caricatured in Rajamouli’s RRR (2022), was an anti-colonial, revolutionary who led the Rampa Rebellion against colonial extraction in these very hills and who died resisting a state that treated tribal land and labour as raw material for someone else’s development. A century later, his name adorns an airport built on land acquired from tribal and rural communities, inaugurated by dressing his own people’s descendants in ceremonial performance for a different kind of procession. And the object of devotion was not the memory of their own rebel, but the visiting head of government. Alluri, watching, would not see tribute. He would see the extraction underneath it. A pastiche of modern India!Politics performing itself as artWalter Benjamin in his epilogue to ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ warned against the aestheticization of politics, which post-Marxists Louis Althusser, and closer home Madhava Prasad, have built on to produce a grammar for reading spectacles like this one. It is the moment when political power stops submitting itself to debate and starts to stage-manage itself for mass consumption.It is when the machinery of the state borrows the elements from cinema and spectacle to create optics for popular consumption, much like the Nazis and the Fascists did in Europe a century ago. An open-top vehicle, a synchronised crowd, multiple cameras positioned to capture it all, doctor the feed, edit and air it for consumption – this is not incidental pageantry. It is politics performing itself as art, precisely so that no one has to ask what it actually accomplished or for whom, but is instead mobilised to demand a nation that worships them. The only difference after 100 years is that now the visuals are telecast in real time! Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu and and state minister Nara Lokesh during a roadshow ahead of the inauguration of Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram, in Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh. Photo: PTI/narendramodi.in.Theodor Adorno, writing with Max Horkheimer on the culture industry, offers the extension of this argument. Of course, for the cosmopolitan, elite, continental, piano-playing and non-believing Jew; for whom culture always meant the ‘high’ which he symbolised, Adorno argued that the popular had long morphed into the ‘public’ and this culture could be easily folded into the machinery utilised for mass persuasion. Anyway, it stopped belonging to the people who made it and is owned by the public that the power manufactures. A dance that once addressed the divine now addresses power and is telecast for a public. The deity at the centre of the procession in Bhogapuram was never in doubt.The fiscal standing of Andhra Pradesh does not make for comfortable reading as it splurges on a public extravaganza. As of the 2025-2026, the state’s outstanding debt sits near 35% of its Gross State Domestic Product, roughly 13 percentage points above the average for large Indian states. It is more than the 20% ceiling the Fourteenth Finance Commission once recommended as prudent. With a score of 23/100, NITI Aayog’s own Fiscal Health Index for 2026 placed Andhra Pradesh among the most stressed states in the country. The state lags behind its southern sisters by a wide margin and yet spent hundreds of crores for an inaugural performance, on top of the roughly 300 crores it reportedly splurged on this year’s International Yoga Day. And the tribal youth who danced a prime minister into their gods’ place may themselves never afford to walk through that terminal. A six-million-passenger capacity airport, built at a cost of over Rs 4,000 crore, does not translate into six million residents of Vizianagaram district who can afford to fly.Manufactured and withheld consentI say this having spent a decade studying and teaching critical theory and a decade more inside the machinery of administration and diplomacy. I know, from both sides of that divide, how culture is mobilised, aesthetically, not only against the dispossessed, who have the least room to refuse, but against citizens who believe themselves that they are free enough to withhold consent. The dispossessed dance because refusal has never been safe for them. The rest of us watch a prime minister receive the accolades reserved for the gods as the chief minister terms it heritage. And the public terms it worse – inclusion – and moves on to the next headline.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu during the inauguration of Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport at Bhogapuram, in Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh. Photo: PTI.Slavoj Žižek’s recurring argument about capitalism applies here with only slight modification: capitalism’s response to its own crises, he has always pointed out, is more capitalism. Indian youth, from Jantar Mantar to the streets of Vizag, have spent this year protesting a ruling class they see as corrupt and sycophantic. Watching Bhogapuram’s inauguration, I found myself revising Žižek’s formula for our own moment: the answer to a citizenry’s exhaustion with sycophancy is, simply, more sycophancy. Chandrababu Naidu’s double engine government, whatever its fiscal standing be, staged it with cinematography, a freedom fighter’s name borrowed for the terminal and a nation’s oldest devotional grammar lent, for one afternoon, to a sitting head of government.Joe Christopher, Ph.D., worked with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs with the United States Government’s Mission to India for a decade before returning to education. He leverages tech and AI to empower the workforce for the next generation. He is based out of Hyderabad.