India has seen wars before. Oil shocks before. Forex crises before. Governments have asked citizens to "tighten their belts" before.
None of that is new. What is new is the spectacle of a State that behaves like a travelling carnival suddenly discovering the virtues of austerity and restraint.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged Indians to avoid unnecessary foreign travel, postpone gold purchases, conserve fuel, work from home where possible, and, in essence, prepare for economic turbulence arising from the Iran war and instability in West Asia. The stated logic is straightforward enough. Oil prices are rising, and shipping lanes around the Strait of Hormuz are under stress.
India imports the overwhelming majority of its crude oil. The rupee faces pressure. Foreign exchange reserves could come under strain if the conflict escalates further. That's fair enough. Except there is one tiny complication. The messenger. Nothing destroys the moral authority of an austerity sermon faster than extravagance rendered in high definition. And unfortunately for this government, extravagance is not an occasional feature of its political style. It is the operating system itself.
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This is a regime perpetually in campaign mode. A government that treats movement like governance and spectacle like policy. A state where every second week appears to require another mega event, another laser-lit projection of muscular nationalism, another choreographed public spectacle complete with drone shots, cinematic background scores and an industrial quantity of self-congratulation.
So, when this very establishment suddenly discovers Gandhian restraint and begins advising ordinary Indians to reconsider a family holiday to Thailand or postpone buying jewellery for a wedding, the reaction is naturally going to oscillate between disbelief and laughter.
One day, the public is told that the economy is roaring toward global supremacy and that India is the world's shining engine of growth. The next day, they are asked to stop buying gold and avoid foreign trips because foreign exchange reserves must be protected from geopolitical shocks. The irony deepened when, immediately after making these appeals, the Prime Minister himself was leaving on a multi-country foreign tour.
Technically, of course, defenders of the government are correct. Diplomatic travel is not comparable to leisure tourism, and state visits are strategic necessities. Bilateral relations matter, trade agreements matter, and geopolitics matters. Nobody disputes any of that. But, all said, in politics, optics matter, symbolism matters, and public psychology matters.
If the leadership wants citizens to internalise sacrifice, it must visibly embody restraint. Otherwise, the message mutates from collective responsibility into elite exemption. And this is where the government's entire communication strategy begins collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. This is not a leadership associated with simplicity in public imagery. This is a leadership associated with relentless projection.
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The air shows. The massive rallies. The roadshows. The near-permanent election atmosphere. The colossal branding exercises. The hyper-curated visual politics. The expensive state spectacles presented with the scale and drama of a streaming platform historical epic. Only days before these conservation appeals, there was the grand aerial spectacle near the Somnath Temple. Fighter jets roaring across the skies. Visual grandeur. Nationalistic theatre. Carefully choreographed symbolism. And then, suddenly, the citizen is informed that perhaps this is not the best time to buy gold jewellery or travel abroad.
The problem here is not merely hypocrisy. Governments everywhere are hypocritical, and that is practically a universal constant. The problem is tonal whiplash. For years, the Indian public has been fed a political narrative of unstoppable ascent. Fifth-largest economy. Fourth-largest economy. Soon, the third-largest economy. India rising. India leading. India overtaking. India becoming the Vishwaguru of everything from semiconductors to spirituality. Chest-thumping nationalism became economic communication. Then, suddenly, the same government begins sounding eerily like an anxious household accountant guarding the last fixed deposit before a medical emergency. Do not travel abroad. Do not buy gold. Use less fuel. Work from home. Consume less. This is not the language of swaggering economic invincibility. It is the language of vulnerability management. And the public notices these contradictions much faster than governments imagine.
What makes this especially ironic is that India's economic exposure in such a crisis is no unforeseen accident. The country's dependence on imported crude oil has been well known for a long time. Its dependence on imported gold is not exactly classified information either.
Every serious economist in India understands the vulnerability posed by oil shocks combined with rupee pressure and widening current account deficits. Which is precisely why the triumphalist propaganda of recent years now appears increasingly detached from material reality. A truly confident economic power does not get rattled into making public conservation appeals because of a single regional geopolitical escalation. It absorbs shocks, reassures markets calmly, and projects stability.
When governments begin publicly advising citizens to alter consumption behaviour to protect forex reserves, it signals concern deeper than routine caution. And perhaps that is the most revealing aspect of this entire episode. Strip away the nationalism, the branding and the television theatrics, and the Indian economy remains acutely dependent on imported energy and deeply vulnerable to external disruptions. The Iran conflict simply exposed those structural anxieties with unusual clarity. The government knows it, the markets know it, and the public increasingly senses it.
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One almost admires the efficiency with which grand civilisational rhetoric can transform into middle-class guilt management. There is also something deeply revealing about how sacrifice is distributed in modern political culture. Whenever crises emerge, ordinary people are immediately asked to consume less, travel less, spend less and adjust expectations downward. Meanwhile, the machinery of political spectacle continues uninterrupted, with VIP convoys, aircraft, branding campaigns, gigantic summits, and media extravaganzas. Only the citizen must become austere.
This asymmetry is precisely why public trust erodes during economic crises. People are usually willing to endure hardship if they believe sacrifice is shared. If the Prime Minister had accompanied these appeals with visible reductions in government extravagance, perhaps the message would have landed differently.
Imagine the symbolic power of temporarily scaling down massive publicity events, reducing nonessential state spectacle or visibly curbing governmental opulence during a period of geopolitical uncertainty. Instead, the optics remained fundamentally unchanged while the public was asked to behave differently. That gap between rhetoric and behaviour is where satire writes itself.
One cannot spend years constructing an image of limitless national power only to suddenly sound like a worried parent calculating fuel expenses during a school run. And yet that is precisely where the discourse now sits. Even the appeal to work from home carried unintended comedy. The same ecosystem that spent years glorifying hyper-mobility, nonstop economic dynamism and post-pandemic normalcy suddenly rediscovered the virtues of remote work because petrol prices and oil imports became inconvenient. It is almost poetic.
Perhaps the most telling part of all this is the government's apparent assumption that the public would absorb these contradictions without noticing them. But people can simultaneously recognise that geopolitical risks are real while still mocking the absurdity of billion-dollar optics accompanying lectures on frugality. Those two reactions are not contradictory, and, in fact, they are perfectly rational.
The Iran conflict is serious, and India's exposure to oil shocks is serious. Pressure on the rupee is serious. The possibility of inflationary spillovers is serious. None of these concerns is imaginary. But seriousness alone does not immunise governments from ridicule. Especially governments that built their political identity around spectacle, grandeur and muscular projection.
And when such a government suddenly asks citizens to avoid buying gold and postpone foreign vacations while continuing its own high-octane political choreography, satire becomes unavoidable. The contradiction is simply too large to ignore. And perhaps that is the real story here. Not merely economic anxiety. But the collision between propaganda and reality. A state that spent years performing invincibility has abruptly begun speaking the language of scarcity. And the public, unsurprisingly, has noticed the wardrobe malfunction.
The author is a National Award winner for Best Narration and an independent political analyst. Views expressed are personal