In The Adventures of Griswald Gnome: A Fairy Tale for Children of all Ages, the magician gnome starts by saying, "I am a Peristaltic Basaltic Cabalist."
"A reformed deformer, searcher for research, a regrind grinder, one who once faltered, but reflated and did rejoin as a joiner. If I might presume, I'm going to lecture you. This statement is my testament: my supreme objective is to preserve the perverse," he goes on.
The BJP has presumed it is going to lecture the nation and the statement of its testament, mercifully, is a terse 100 odd words headlined, "India Shining". It is easy to see that the repetition of cliches is being used as a substitute for reality. But that is nothing new.
The interesting part is that a few years ago, when the BJP came into power, the statement that was its testament then was "Mera Bharat Mahan".
You don't have to be a semiologist to know that such/these "texts" are always created in and through their enactment in some socio-political situation and system. As such, it makes little sense to see these statements as a bounded and autonomous object. In order to understand or interpreted it has to be put in its context.
It will not be wrong to see these statements as political artifacts, which have been produced in and through some culturally and recognisable socio-political structure.
It is a product of the social semiotic processes that involves more kinds of meaning than those of the referring and predicating sort. There is, a two-way and dialectical relationship between the two levels of analysis -- between text and socio-political situation as well as activity.
What is the relation of the text to the social activity-structure in and through which the text was produced? It is this question that has interesting implication for the social, political and cultural transition that the BJP as a political party has made in the last five years. It also conceals the "national" context within which BJP believes it is operating now.
If the social-interactional dimension of language is brought into play, and "maxims of semiotic interpretation" are pressed into service to explain what the text is doing "in context", does a move from Mera Bharat Mahan to India Shining represent some amalgam of social, economic and political meaning?
Can it be used to see the transition of BJP as a political party over the last few years? What does it speak of the perception that the spin-doctors of BJP have of the nation's elite and the masses and the distribution between them?
First the very obvious face kind of difference; in the first campaign, the focus was on "Bharat" not "India". Bharat as a concept is inward looking; steeped in the mythology and very much drawn from the past in its imagery. It is also not a secular concept. As against this, "India", conceptually, is urban, modern, and pretty much a global term.
The second part of the Mera Bharat campaign was about the historically inherited greatness of India as a civilisation and a nation. It was a glorification of the past; never mind the present. If anything, the present was a degeneration caused largely by following the western mode of thought.
The subtext of the entire message was that cultural imperialism was the undoing of the nation and resulted in its non-performing ethics. The pride, in the present situation, was to be a part of the nation that was great in its concept, values and structure; not in its performance.
Contrast this with the present day theme. "Bharat" has given way to "India". The past has given way to the present. The rural has given way to the urban. The inherited values have been replaced by performance. The nation may not be great. But who cares as long as we are shining! The glitter is more important than the greatness. These are the new semiotics.
At a more subtle level, Mera Bharat, which in spite of making the nationhood, Bharat, a "male" (it has traditionally been "Bharat mata") was emotive in form and content; India shining is material in conceptualisation and execution.
The former was designed to make you feel like doing something for restoration of the past glory, the latter is meant to make you want to get a share of the shine. The constructs are different and reflect an attitudinal shift in the political mindset of the BJP.
It is interesting that the current theme is invoking a particular narrative and all its associations by just showing us a single image that represents of one moment in the narrative, a "snapshot" that invokes the whole story.
Yet it represents a process. It is a semiotic action text that is dynamic and processual, rather than synoptic and object-like.
It is the text, which unfolds in the real-time production of some socio-political situation. The earlier campaign was not a process; it is comparative static picture that tried to freeze the context in time and space.