156 "Presenting" the Past
This "symbolic capital," as Pierre Bourdieu calls it, is nothing but "a
transformed and thereby disguised form of physical 'economic' capital,"
and it produces its proper effect inasmuch as it conceals the fact that it
originates in material forms of capital that are also the source of its effects.
In other words, the tight regulation of exchange in specially demarcated
objects not only sanctions but also constitutes privilege by establishing
some referential coordinates of value that are natural and legitimate.^34
As modern nations are imagined through a variety of representational
practices, symbols do play a large role in that exercise. The signifying
symbols and strategies may vary from case to case depending on contin-
gencies such as space, time, motivations, and so forth. In the Hindutva
cosmology, however, the political legitimation has been achieved through
religious symbols by playing up familiar images of the people and their
popular associations with traditional mythology and legends. The visual
idioms are adopted predominantly through (hi)storytelling, problematiz-
ing historical structures, taking out processions, and so forth. It would be
quite instructive to see how the BJP-led government utilized a few potent
symbols such as the liberation of Hindu gods from the historic Muslim
infamy, creating a uniform civil code for both Hindus and minorities, and
so forth for their political sustenance, with no substantive progressive
political agenda. After all, it is in this political space of past-present inter-
section where the preferred future is constructed and the present is made
to look like the past and the impending future.
THE BJP-LED GOVERNMENT'S PERFORMANCE
If voted to power, Atal Behari Vajpayee had promised in 1991 that the
BJP would serve kheer (dessert) and not the usual khichri sarkar (spicy
mixed government) of the others.^35 However, when voted to power in
1998, one of the first things that the kheer government did was to explode
nuclear weapons, the favorite Rambaan (panacea) of the Hindutva
forces, allegedly in the interests of the country's samraksha (security).
Having contributed almost nothing to the shaping or the execution of
the nuclear program of the country, the BJP-led government merely con-
firmed what had been known to the world ever since the 1974 nuclear
test. The samraksha logic quickly boiled down to Uncle Sam-raksha (pro-
tection) when the Vajpayee government bent over backward to please
Washington, D.C., and to get into their notorious nuclear club. In fact,
India came to lose much of the sense of security that had prevailed for
the past few decades. Moreover, the country that had always been looked
up to in the international arena for its heritage of nonviolence, nonalign-
ment, panchshila, appropriate technology, and alternative development
paradigms suffered spurious charges, sanctions, aid cutoff, loan defer-
ment, and so forth.