The group visited Gujarat during the Vibrant Gujarat forum, an event, which takes place every two years, is meant to show the foreign investors the Gujarat’s business vector. However, it is also an opportunity for the Chief Minister Narendra Modi to burnish his image as the nation’s most business-oriented and pro-development chief minister. During the festival the image of Modi dominated not just the Vibrant Gujarat forum, but the whole state; billboards across the city showed Mr. Modi’s smiling face welcoming foreigners with open hands. The ubiquitous image of the chief minister became a symbol of not just progress, business, development, security, and investments, but the symbol of the whole state of Gujarat. One says Gujarat and thinks about Modi, or says Modi and thinks about Gujarat – symbolic politics in its essence. One, especially a foreigner, would never link Modi to the communal violence of 2002; the image of progress and development has absorbed any other negative connotations, and festivals have always played a crucial role in this transformation. It is the symbolic politics of these festivals that suggest the argument about the crucial role of foreign investors in the development of the region, and the role of Narendra Modi who facilitates the flow of foreign capital into the state.

However, the Vibrant Gujarat forum was not the only festival that took place in Gujarat during our visit. The famous Uttarayan festival was held at the same time. I would argue that the merge of Vibrant Gujarat and the Kite festival was made on purpose, and this fusion represents the essence of Modi’s symbolic politics. In one of the interviews a successful architect from Tamil-Nadu expressed her surprise with the government attention to the culture life in Gujarat. She said that she had never seen that many festivals in her state. All the festivals in Gujarat, that originated as local projects, have now received an international appeal; like the Uttarayan festival, that is  now called International Kite festival. In the world of symbolic politics the boundaries between the sender of the message (politician) and the receiver (electorate), as well as between high culture and kitsch, local and global became blurred in order to create a mythology around the sender. Modi deliberately rejected the localized narrative of Uttarayan festival, in favor of the new metanarrative of globalization in order to outline his own importance as the most business-oriented and pro-development chief minister. Modi take the lead in organization of the Uttarayan festival and incorporated his image along with the BJP symbols in order to arouse a strong emotional response to the festival, and one more time outline his international oriented state of mind.

With the obsession about the chair of Prime minister, Mr. Modi hijacked the whole state of Gujarat with its cultural traditions, symbols, and rituals in order to generate a powerful message about the “myth of development,” and connect this myth with his own political image.