How India's 'Modi jacket' craze tears at fabric of history.

Pedro_P

Item of clothing worn by the PM has become wildly popular, but many argue Nehru wore it first.

They wore it well: the jacket of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru (L) and of current leader Narenda Modi (R). Composite: (L) Rühe/ullstein bild (R) Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times/Getty Images
▼ Sales are soaring at Khadi, a department store in central Delhi that stocks clothing hand-spun in Indian villages. In September, the brand debuted a line of jackets inspired by an unlikely trendsetter: India’s 68-year old prime minister, Narendra Modi.
The “Modi jacket” is sleeveless, extends down below the belt and rises at the neck to form a stand-up collar. Khadi staff say they are selling at least 100 every day,. Modi’s supporters call it proof of the prime minister’s popular appeal. Critics call the jacket a fraud.
“It’s not a Modi jacket,” says Ashok Swain, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, who frequently makes his displeasure with the prime minister known on Twitter. “It’s the same style that Jawaharlal Nehru made popular. It’s exactly the same. Modi just changed the colour.”
Modi is unique among Indian leaders for his devotion to Hindu nationalism, a movement that has vied for more than a century to reshape the idea of India. Where Nehru, the country’s first and most influential prime minister, saw a blended nation of idiosyncratic religious and cultural beliefs, Modi sees a Hindu nation, stifled for too long by Delhi’s secular elites.
Battles over the prominence of Nehru have raged in India these past five years. Modi’s party has announced it is building a museum to “ all prime ministers” at a site previously reserved for Nehru’s memorial and library. They have burnished the legacies of other founding leaders such as Sardar Patel – the subject of the largest statue in  the world, unveiled by Modi in October. Two years ago, a government panel in Rajasthan almost erased Nehrufrom Indian textbooks altogether.
Now the Nehru-cum-Modi jacket has found itself drafted into the wider fight over Indian history and identity.
South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, unknowingly waded into the dispute a few weeks ago, when he tweeted a picture of himself wearing a “Modi vest” the Indian leader had sent him.
“It’s really nice of our PM to send these but could he not have sent them without changing the name?”  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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dushazmi

All is media created buzz.

Srinivas1939

It is not as if the present PM has set out to raise the bar on sartorial elegance but the era of the shabbily dressed pan chewing brand of politicians seems to be over.Whether it would lead to a new brand of politics is anyone's guess.

soothsayer

I could not agree less. A change indeed from the days of the betel gutka chewing lot

Rhett_Bassard

To the Modi naysayers, I would propose a trade: an orange-haired leader for a pink-vested one