Face the Facts

THE FACE OF THE STATE:

How One Man’s Image Became the Machinery of Modern Indian Democracy

There was a time when the Indian government announced a scheme. Today, the government often announces the man who announced the scheme.

Open a newspaper and there he is. Watch television and there he is. Look at a government billboard, railway station, or welfare programme advertisement and the familiar face appears again: Narendra Modi, looking directly at the citizen—sometimes smiling, sometimes solemn, sometimes pointing toward the future. Once is information. Repeatedly, it becomes publicity. After a while, it becomes presence.

When the Prime Minister’s face appears so frequently that citizens encounter the person before the policy, an important question arises: is the government communicating with citizens, or is the leader communicating through the government? There is a deeper question: does this reflect megalomania, political effectiveness, genuine public affection—or a mutual feed in which leader and public continually reinforce one another?

The distinction matters because the money involved is public money. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha in March 2025, the Union government reported that the Central Bureau of Communication had spent ₹3,064.65 crore on advertisements and publicity between 2019-20 and 2023-24. Earlier parliamentary data put expenditure at approximately ₹5,900 crore between 2014-15 and 2022-23. [1][2]

But a photograph possesses a value that does not appear in accounting books: the value of repetition. Politics has long understood that people remember faces better than administrative nomenclature. A citizen may forget which ministry runs a programme or what its budget is. The face attached to it is harder to forget.

The Architecture of Recognition

For Modi, the strategic advantages are obvious. A government as vast and complex as India’s—with hundreds of ministries, thousands of schemes, millions of beneficiaries—can appear as an incomprehensible abstraction. A leader can transform that abstraction into a person. The road becomes Modi’s road. The housing scheme becomes Modi’s guarantee. The welfare payment becomes Modi’s achievement.

This strategy is especially powerful in a nation as large and diverse as India. The same face can travel from a village in Bihar to a metro station in Delhi, from a ration shop to a television screen, from a smartphone to a newspaper. The leader becomes the logo of the state itself.

Modi has grasped what modern politics recognizes everywhere: visibility creates familiarity, familiarity creates recognition, and recognition—when repeated sufficiently—acquires the appearance of inevitability. The politician seen every day begins to look less like a politician and more like part of the landscape. That is a formidable electoral asset, one that may prove more valuable than traditional party infrastructure.

But is this megalomania or mastery? A leader may be omnipresent not because he is detached from reality, but because he understands it. In mass democracy, where millions encounter the state through fragmented institutions, a recognizable face makes government legible. The face may be political simplification rather than merely personal vanity. The same image can express either a leader who wants to be everywhere, or a leader who knows that being everywhere is how modern politics works.

Recognition Versus Manufactured Affection

Modi’s supporters often do not experience his image as propaganda. They experience it as recognition—proof that someone powerful sees them and has undertaken responsibility for their welfare. This is especially powerful in welfare politics, where the traditional relationship between citizen and state is mediated through indifferent or corrupt bureaucrats.

When government welfare arrives with the Prime Minister’s face, it becomes intimate. The citizen thinks not of the Ministry of Housing or complex financing mechanisms, but: “The Prime Minister has given me this.”

That perception may be administratively inaccurate. But politically it is real. Politics is built on felt relationships as much as facts.

Yet the same process manufactures affection. Repetition creates familiarity. Familiarity can be mistaken for intimacy, and intimacy converted into loyalty. Loyalty is then cited as proof that the original repetition was justified. This creates a circular feed: the leader’s image produces recognition, recognition is interpreted as affection, affection justifies more visibility, more visibility produces deeper recognition. The result is a mutual feed between political communication and public emotion where manufactured presence becomes indistinguishable from authentic affection.

The Cost of Omnipresence

The danger is that the photograph eventually stops looking like an advertisement and starts looking like authority itself. In a functioning democracy, the state belongs to everyone. That is why the Supreme Court intervened in Common Cause v. Union of India (2015), directing that government advertising should be politically neutral, avoid glorifying political personalities, and not promote the party in power. The Court warned against using public funds for political advantage. [3]

In 2016, it expanded permitted categories but the principle remained: there is a difference between identification and glorification. A photograph can tell citizens who is responsible for a programme. A photograph repeated hundreds of times can begin telling them who is responsible for everything. That is where democratic communication becomes political mythology.

The danger lies in allowing this mutual feed to become invisible. If citizens believe the leader’s face is simply the natural face of the state, they stop noticing the political work being done by the image. The boundary between state communication and political promotion becomes dangerously thin.

The Leader Becomes Larger Than the Machinery

There exists a paradox: the more government success is personalized to the leader, the more government failure is personalized to him as well. If every successful road, tap, and welfare payment carries Modi’s face, citizens can reasonably attach failures to the same face. A leader who takes maximum credit for success cannot permanently outsource blame for failure.

Omnipresence creates political vulnerability. When bureaucracy, ministers and departments disappear behind personality, there is only the face. And when there is only the face, there is nowhere for responsibility to hide.

Personalization can make government more effective politically by creating a clear chain of recognition. Citizens know whom to associate with a programme. But it can also weaken accountability. If the leader becomes the sole source of every success, institutions become invisible. Citizens may stop asking how decisions were made, who implemented them, what they cost and whether they worked.

The Problem of Succession

Governments are temporary. States are permanent. A government advertisement should advertise something that survives the government—a right, service, welfare entitlement, road or school. The politician is temporary. The institution is not.

Excessive personalization creates historical distortion. It makes a government appear created by one person rather than by hundreds of thousands of civil servants, engineers, teachers, doctors and taxpayers whose actual work achieved whatever improvements were made.

It also creates a serious problem of succession. If citizens associate the state too closely with one leader, what happens when that leader inevitably departs? Can another leader inherit the machinery without inheriting the same emotional authority? Does the party become dependent on reproducing the face rather than renewing institutions?

A healthy democracy should survive the disappearance of a leader from the frame. A personalised democracy may discover that the frame has become more important than the institution inside it.

The Face Works, But at What Cost?

It would be naive to pretend that visual personalization does not work. People vote for people. Democracy is an election between human beings embodying competing visions and promises. Modi’s electoral success is substantially built upon his ability to transform himself into visual shorthand for his government—a symbol voters remember and feel connected to.

His face is not merely decoration. It is infrastructure upon which other political structures are built.

But multiple actors reinforce this system simultaneously: the leader offers visibility and personal commitment; the public offers loyalty and votes; the party converts that into electoral power; the state supplies platforms and money; media amplifies the image. Each strengthens the others until the system becomes self-sustaining.

The question is not whether the face matters. The question is whether there can be too much infrastructure—whether the face can become larger than the system itself.

The Test That Remains

Perhaps the most interesting test of Modi’s political maturity is not whether his face can remain everywhere. It is whether his government can communicate effectively when it is not. It is whether institutions can command loyalty and deliver services without constantly referencing the leader’s image.

The ultimate confidence of a democracy is not that the ruler must constantly be seen. It is that the state will continue to function after the ruler has disappeared from the frame—that institutions will persist, that the next leader can inherit a state that does not require personal dominance to function, that citizens can trust their government through impersonal authority rather than charisma.

A photograph lasts a second. A government is supposed to last longer. A state is supposed to outlast a leader. A democracy is supposed to survive when the face is no longer there.

That test—whether a state can function after Modi has departed, whether citizens can trust institutions rather than a person, whether democracy can persist—will ultimately determine whether omnipresence has been temporary strategy or a deeper transformation of how Indian democracy functions.

The answer will emerge only in the moment it matters most: when Modi is no longer Prime Minister and citizens must discover whether the state they have learned to see as synonymous with one man can adapt to being led by someone else.

SOURCES

[1] Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question No. 3028, “Expenditure on Advertisements,” answered 19 March 2025, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

[2] The Hindu, “Centre spent ₹5,911 crore on publicity in nine years,” 2023, reporting parliamentary data on expenditure by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity and the Bureau of Outreach and Communication.