Never meet your hero!

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

The German writer J Wolfgang Goethe once quipped, “Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes.” As if to expand upon Goethe’s words, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote, “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”

There is every likelihood that Goethe was viewing societies as collectives, in which self-interest was the primary motivation but where the creation and worship of ‘heroes’ are acts to make people feel virtuous.

Heroes can’t become heroes without an audience. A segment of the society exhibits an individual and explains his or her actions or traits as ‘heroic’. If these receive enough applause, a hero is created. But then no one is really interested in knowing the actual person who has been turned into a hero. Only his mythologised sides are to be viewed.

The mythologising is done to quench a yearning in society — a yearning that cannot be fulfilled because it might be too impractical, utopian, irrational and, therefore, against self-interest. So, the mythologised individual becomes an alter ego of a society conscious of its inherent flaws. Great effort is thus invested in hiding the actual from the gaze of society, so that only the mythologised can be viewed.

One often comes across videos on social media of common everyday people doing virtuous deeds, such as helping an old person cross a busy road, or helping an animal. The helping hands in this regard are exhibited as ‘heroes’, even though they might not even be aware that they are being filmed.

What if they weren’t? What if they remain unaware about the applause that their ‘viral video’ has attracted? Will they stop being helpful without having an audience? They certainly won’t be hailed as heroes. They are often exhibited as heroes by those who want to use them to signal their own appreciative attitude towards ‘goodness’.

This is a harmless ploy. But since self-interest is rampant in almost every society, this can push some people to mould themselves as heroes. There have been cases in which men and women have actually staged certain ‘heroic’ acts, filmed them, and then put them out for all to view. The purpose is to generate praise and accolades for themselves and, when possible, even monetary gains.

But it is also possible that they truly want to be seen as heroes in an unheroic age, despite displaying forged heroism. Then there are those who are so smitten by the romanticised notions of a ‘heroic age’ that they actually plunge into real-life scenarios to quench their intense yearning to be seen as heroes.

For example, a person who voluntarily sticks his neck out for a cause that may lead to his arrest. He knows this. But he also knows that there will be many on social and electronic media who will begin to portray him as a hero. But the applauders often do this to signal their own disposition towards a ‘heroic’ cause.

We apparently live in an unheroic age — an age that philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche or, for that matter, Muhammad Iqbal, detested. Each had their own understanding of a bygone heroic age.

To Nietzsche, the heroic age existed in some pre-modern period in history, when the Germanic people were fearless. To Iqbal, the heroic age was when early Muslims were powered by an unadulterated faith and passion to conquer the world. There are multiple periods in time that are referred to as ‘heroic ages’, depending on one’s favourite ideology or professed faith.

The yearning for heroes and the penchant for creating them to be revered — so that societies can feel better about themselves — is as old as when the first major civilisations began to appear, thousands of years ago. So when they spoke of heroic ages, what period of history were they reminiscing about — the Stone Age?

Humans are naturally pragmatic. From hunter-gatherers, we became scavenger-survivalists. The image may be off-putting but the latter actually requires one to be more rational, clever and pragmatic. This is how we have survived and progressed.

That ancient yearning for a heroic age has remained, though. An age that never was — an age that was always an imagined one. That’s why we even mythologise known histories, because the actual in this regard can be awkward to deal with. But it is possible to unfold.

America’s ‘founding fathers’ were revered for over two centuries as untainted heroes, until some historians decided to demystify them by exploring their lives outside their mythologised imaginings. Many of these heroes turned out to be slave-owners and not very pleasant people.

Mahatma Gandhi, revered as a symbol of tolerance, turned out to also be a man who disliked black South Africans. The founder of Pakistan MA Jinnah is mythologised as a man who supposedly strived to create an ‘Islamic state’, yet the fact is that he was a declared liberal and loved his wine. Martin Luther King Jr, the revered black rights activist, was also a prolific philanderer.

When freed from mythology, the heroes become human — still important men and women, but with various flaws. This is when they become real and more relatable. They become ‘anti-heroes.’

But there is always an urgency in societies to keep the flaws hidden. The flaws can damage the emotions that are invested in revering ‘heroes’, both dead and living. The act of revering provides an opportunity to feel bigger than a scavenger-survivor, even if this requires forged memories and heavily mythologised men and women.

Therefore, hero-worship can also make one blurt out even the most absurd things to keep a popular but distorted memory of a perceived hero intact. For example, this is exactly what one populist former Pakistani prime minister did when he declared that the terrorist Osama bin Laden was a martyr.

By doing this, the former PM was signalling his own ‘heroism’ as well — that of a proud fool who saw greatness in a mass murderer to signal his own ‘greatness’ in an unheroic age.

The French philosopher Voltaire viewed this tendency as a chain that one has fallen in love with. Voltaire wrote, “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

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"Democracy is bad for India"

Former Justice Markandey Katju

Opposition parties in India have joined hands and are crying themselves hoarse in condemning Rahul Gandhi’s conviction and expulsion from Parliament as a huge assault on democracy. Many of the ‘liberal’ mediapersons and so called ‘intellectuals’ in India have also joined the chorus condemning the ‘murder’ of Indian democracy.

One sees hardly any other news in the Indian media nowadays.

However, these people proceed on the assumption that democracy is a good thing in India, which needs to be protected. But is this assumption correct ?

I submit that democracy, like freedom, may in some countries and in some circumstances be a good thing, but in others may be a bad thing, and one should not make a fetish or a holy cow out of it.

I submit that in India democracy is a bad thing, which has kept us backward, and therefore poor. Let me explain.

Everyone who has even a little knowledge of Indian realities knows that in India democracy runs largely on the basis of caste and communal vote banks. Casteism and communalism are feudal forces which have to be destroyed if India is to progress, but parliamentary democracy further entrenches them. How then can India progress with democracy ?

Most of our people have backward mindsets, full of casteism, communalism, and superstitions. Democracy means rule of the majority, but the majority of Indians have feudal mindsets. How can rule by them or their representatives take the country forward ? How can building a Ram temple in Ayodhya or cow protection solve India’s massive problems of poverty, unemployment, hunger, price rise, lack of healthcare etc ?

In my opinion to move forward we have to have an enlightened dictatorship led by modern minded leaders, like Mustafa Kemal of Turkey in the 1920s, or the leaders who came to power in Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and rapidly industrialised the country.

The Opposition parties in India, even if they unite or form an alliance in next year’s parliamentary elections, have no vision about how to take the country forward. In fact they have nothing in common except the desire to oust the BJP. Even if they win the elections and come to power, the first thing they will do is to scramble for lucrative portfolios.

Thereafter, too, they will keep jostling and infighting, like the constituents of the Janta Party which came to power in 1977, and eventually broke up over internal infighting in 1979.

And what is there in Rahul Gandhi, apart from being a member of the self-proclaimed India’s ‘royal family’? Has he any ideas how to solve India’s massive problems? He has none. All he knows is how to do stunts like the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Why then should one have any sympathy for him?

Are these rumbles of discontent coming together?

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

A PEOPLE’S movement is underway in Israel against its ultra right-wing government. Prime Minister Netanyahu is trying to subvert the judiciary’s neutrality, with a selfish aim to kill the criminal cases hanging over his head and that of his colleagues. In quite a few democracies, the judiciary is or has been under assault from the right wing for similar reasons. India is witnessing it in unsubtle ways. Pakistan too has seen political interference with the judiciary at least since the hanging of Bhutto. Then Nawaz Sharif and Gen Musharraf, vicious to each other, took turns to undermine the courts. Pakistan, however, has seen mass movements too that have thrown out military dictators and restored democracy even if intermittently. Where’s that old fire in the belly for India?

Describing the unprecedented attack on India’s democracy starkly at a Cambridge University talk is one thing. Few Indian politicians are capable of speaking with conviction without a teleprompter as Rahul Gandhi recently did before an enlightened audience, while also making plenty of sense. But just as he was holding forth — at a talk called ‘Learning to listen in the 21st century’ — two unrelated landmark events were unfolding in Turkiye and Israel. Was he listening to them too?

The events might send any struggling democratic opposition to the drawing board. In Turkiye, a last-minute collapse of the alliance of six disparate parties, preparing to challenge President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s re-election in May, holds a lesson for any less-than-solid political alliance about possible ambush on the eve of an assured victory. Equally instructive was the opposition’s ability to bury its differences promptly, something that eludes India. The Turkish groups have made compromises with each other so that their common goal to defeat Erdogan remains paramount. There are good chances they would succeed, but even if they don’t, it won’t be for want of giving their best to restore Turkiye’s secular democracy.

However, it was the coming out of Israel’s air force pilots to join the swarming protests against the Netanyahu government that is truly remarkable, and unprecedented. These pilots are usually adept at bombing vulnerable neighbourhoods, including Palestinian quarters. But their taking a stand in defence of democracy offers a lesson to every country with a strong military. There were rumblings in India once. Jaya Prak­ash Narayan, the mass leader opposed Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian patch and called for the army and the police to disobey her, an unusual quest but an utterly democratic call when democracy itself is being murdered. The RSS had supported the JP movement. The boot today is on the other foot. Does the Indian opposition have the conviction to follow in JP’s footsteps to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi? Does it at all feel the dire need to make sacrifices and compromises to rescue and heal the wounded nation?

The Israeli government may or may not succeed in neutralising the supreme court, which it has set out to do. But the masses are out on the streets to act when their nation is in peril. And India cannot exist as a nation without democracy. Secular democracy enshrined in its constitution binds it into a whole.

Rahul Gandhi has evolved as a contender for any challenging job that could help save the Indian republic from its approaching destruction. But he should also have a chat with Prof Amartya Sen perhaps who was quoted recently as saying that Mamata Bannerjee would make a good prime minister. Others have their hats in the ring. Gandhi’s talk in the hallowed portals of Cambridge bonded nicely with his 4,000-kilometre walk recently, from the southern tip of India to what is effectively the garrison area of Jammu and Kashmir. No harm if the walk served as a learning curve for the Gandhi scion, but even better if it were a precursor for a mass upsurge as is happening elsewhere, and which has seen successful outcomes in many Latin American and African states.

Rahul Gandhi spoke about the surveillance, which opposition politicians and journalists among others have been illegally put under. His points about deep-seated corruption, that shows up graphically as crony capitalism, are all well taken. Few can match the feat of mass contact across the country that he displayed recently and his declamation at the world’s premier university. The point is that Cambridge University cannot change the oppressive government in India. Only the Indian opposition can. Rahul Gandhi has the credentials to weld mutually suspicious opposition parties into a force to usher in the needed change.

There’s no dearth of issues to unite the people and the parties. To cite one, call out the BJP-backed ruling alliances in north-eastern states where its supporters assert their right to eat beef. And place it along the two Muslim boys incinerated in a jeep near Delhi by alleged cow vigilantes. The criminality and the hypocrisy of it.

The fascist assault on India’s judiciary is an issue waiting to be taken up for nationwide mobilisation. The assault comes at a time when the new chief justice is one with a mind of his own. Judges have stopped accepting official briefs in sealed envelopes as had become the practice, dodging public scrutiny, say, in the controversial warplanes deal with France. The court has set up a probe into the Adani affair, something unthinkable until recently.

The timing of the vicious criticism of the judiciary is noteworthy. The law minister described the judges as unelected individuals, perhaps implying they were answerable to the elected parliament like any other bureaucrat. This is mischievous. The supreme court set new transparent principles in the appointment of election commissioners. It’s a rap on the knuckles of an unholy system. Could anyone call it a fair election in a secular democracy when people are nefariously polarised and the election commission looks the other way? The questions are best answered by opposition parties, preferably in unison.

Does the BJP have an obsession with the freedom movement?

Vir Sanghvi in The Print

Should Rahul Gandhi have been critical of the way things are in today’s India when he spoke in the UK? Does this amount to asking white people to colonise India as some BJP supporters have suggested? Or is he merely following in the footsteps of Narendra Modi who has also not always been complimentary on foreign soil about the situation in India, especially in the years after he first became Prime Minister? Is the BJP making the mistake of believing that attacking Narendra Modi’s governance is the same as attacking India, as Congress supporters claim?

There are no ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers to these questions as we have seen over the last few days as the controversy has raged. My guess is that people who support the government will criticise Rahul while Congress supporters will argue that if he is asked questions about how things are in India, then he should tell the truth and not lie to make Modi look good.

Either way, how you approach this debate is largely determined by what you already believe.

So I am not going to waste your time by recalling the arguments of the last few days all over again. Instead, I am going to ask a different question: is the BJP doing Rahul a favour by making him the centre of a new controversy every week?

Consider the reality of the situation. Ever since he became the Congress’s chief campaigner, Rahul has faced setback after setback. He lost the 2014 election to the BJP and to Modi’s charisma. He tried again in 2019 but was defeated again even in his own constituency of Amethi. During his period as the Congress’s most visible leader, the party has lost state after state. Its top leaders, many of whom were Rahul’s friends, have either left the party or, at the very least, tried to leave. The consensus is that Rahul will not be able to beat Modi at the next election either.

Given this background, does he deserve so much attention? As the BJP itself has told us, he is not fit to be a leader; in fact, it has said much worse things about him, not all of which can be repeated here. So, if he is such a useless person, then why is the BJP so obsessed with him? Why does it use up so much energy in attacking him?

 
BJP, a party of obsessions

You could argue that despite the Congress’s dismal electoral performance over the years, one reason why Rahul has such a high profile and still acts as though he is the pre-eminent opposition leader is that the BJP takes him so seriously. No other opposition leader is subject to the kind of scrutiny the BJP subjects Rahul to.

In the early days of the BJP’s Rahul obsession, I used to think that the single-minded focus on the Congress leader was strategic. Perhaps, the BJP wanted to shine a spotlight on him to show Narendra Modi in a better light. But that time has long passed. Nobody regards Rahul as the man who will topple Modi in the next election. So why does anything he says rattle the BJP so much?

My conclusion is that the BJP, despite its shrewd grasp of strategy, is becoming more and more a party of obsessions. Take the BJP’s obsession with Nehru. Once upon a time it may have made sense to rubbish Nehru to discredit his descendants. But that ploy has run its course. Even those who support Rahul today do not do so because his great grandfather, who died nearly 60 years ago, was a great guy.

The BJP’s obsession with Nehru now extends to criticising the freedom struggle. It is entirely valid to say that we have made too much of Nehru and ignored other freedom fighters. But is it necessary to insult MK Gandhi and to praise his murderer Nathuram Godse as Sangh Parivar members have done?

Certainly, it does not help the BJP electorally. The attacks are launched not for sound strategic reasons but because a section of the Parivar has its own bizarre obsessions.

Beyond a point, it only makes sense to go on about the freedom struggle if the BJP believes that the Congress massively benefits from its history as the party of Nehru and Gandhi. But does it really? Does anybody believe that this version of the Congress is the party that Gandhi once mentored? I doubt if the Congress gets any votes on that basis.

There is a logic to going on about the freedom struggle if the BJP believes that its leaders have been insufficiently recognised for their role in fighting the British. But this is not the case. The BJP was only founded in 1980. The Jana Sangh, its predecessor, was only established in 1951. Nobody can reasonably expect either party to have been part of the freedom movement because neither existed before India became independent.

This should be fine. Most parties in today’s India were not around before India became independent. They don’t try and rewrite the history of a struggle they were not around for or abuse those who were. Why then does the BJP care so much?

Why BJP does what it does

Yet such is the BJP’s obsession with creating alternative icons that it strains credulity by hijacking historical figures. Yes, Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru had differences. But then so did Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani. That does not mean that Advani did not subscribe to the BJP’s ideology. So it is with Patel who even banned the RSS. And so it is with Bhagat Singh who was a left-leaning (communist even) atheist who had nothing in common with the ideology the BJP now espouses. And yes, Subhas Chandra Bose did fall out with Nehru and Gandhi but he was hardly a Hindutva supporter. He named a brigade in the Indian National Army (INA) after Nehru and after the war it was Nehru who defended INA veterans from persecution by the British.

Even the case of VD Savarkar is complicated. Yes, he was a patriot and freedom fighter who suffered for his views. But to hold up Savarkar as your own icon against Gandhi, you have to explain away too many things: his apologies to the British, his differences with the RSS, his support of beef-eating, etc.

So here’s my point: why does the BJP even bother? People who vote for the BJP support it because they admire Narendra Modi, respect his achievements and perhaps because they believe in a vision of a Hindu India. Nobody votes for the BJP because of anything that occurred in the freedom struggle. Or because the party now glorifies Bose or Bhagat Singh.

The only explanation possible is that on some issues – Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants, the freedom struggle and Gandhi in particular – the BJP goes beyond strategy and gives in to an obsession. It is an uncharacteristic lapse for a party that is otherwise so pragmatic and worldly-wise.

But it works, I suspect, to Rahul Gandhi’s benefit because it keeps him forever in the news and at the centre of the public debate.

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The Nehru-Gandhis and the Congress Presidency

Saeed Naqvi in The Dawn

THE media is riveted to the news that the Congress party will elect a new president in October, one who will not be from the Nehru-Gandhi family. So what will that do for the party or even for the country? Usually, insightful friends see in the jostling a pantomime sponsored by corporate chiefs whose names the Gandhis have dared to call out. The ‘rebellion’ within the Congress led by some who never won a Lok Sabha election, is an element in the script. When business captains met in Gujarat ahead of the 2014 elections to name Narendra Modi as their prime ministerial candidate, the move had a main purpose: to ensure the removal of the Gandhis from the opposition frame. The Gandhis on their part never wanted to be in politics. Now, they have an interest: to keep certain party men from capturing the party.

So, elect a new president by all means. However, a truer groundbreaking quest would be to perhaps figure out what really does India’s oldest party plan to do that would make it worthy of being the only party with a pan-India base. Statistics can be a misleading ploy but who can’t deny the hard facts the strangely stacked numbers reveal? The BJP won all of 37 per cent votes nationwide in the last general elections. The Congress got only slightly more than 19pc votes that translated to fewer than 10pc of the Lok Sabha’s seats for the first time.

But statistics are like a babbling toddler. You have to patiently understand the babble to divide the angst or the joy as the case may be. The cold facts are that the Congress was routed in 1977 and removed from power with a tally of 34pc votes, just 3pc fewer than the BJP’s current numbers. And with 34pc, the Congress was routed. However, and this is crucial, what the BJP hasn’t succeeded in doing is to have an imprint with a vote share spread in almost every Indian state. The Congress holds the position despite being in power only in Rajasthan today. Spare a thought for the needed change, if only the Congress puts its act together, not necessarily as the Lone Ranger of Hollywood movies but more like the Samurais of Kurosawa, rallying the entire opposition, resolutely and selflessly. The BJP rubs in the point that the Congress has only two seats in Uttar Pradesh, true. But the BJP had two seats in parliament once, and that was not long ago as Indian politics goes.

Focus is key. The torture the other day of a physically frail Sonia Gandhi being summoned by the government’s revenue sleuths to their offices was despicable. The BJP thrives on being mean with critics and opposition parties. When BJP’s senior leader L.K. Advani was grilled, however, over charges of dubiously transacted election funds wealth, which implied money laundering, the Congress ensured that all questions were asked at Advani’s residence. It was not his privilege, just a courtesy to a senior opposition leader. 

However, what was disconcerting other than Sonia trudging to the revenue officers thrice in a row was to see the party ‘in action’ over the matter. Every senior leader was dying to court arrest. They who never came out when mobs killed innocent Indians, or when wrong Indians were sent to jail. Protest the leader’s perverse grilling by all means. But spare a thought also for the time the same leaders were missing from view when a woman was gang-raped in Gujarat of 2002 and her rapists were set free with a nod from the highest court. Masses would have joined the Congress had it protested then as it did Ms Gandhi’s personal trauma. Who was advising the Gandhis to squander the precious chance to redeem their pledge for a national movement when citizens were being assaulted by the state? Is the new president going to lead the charge?

Whatever has happened to the second freedom movement, anyway? Had the leaders spoken out of turn? Was the thought too unwieldy for their brand of slothful politics? In that case it’s so ironical.

Gandhi critics cite the party’s recent habit of perpetually losing elections. They seem less concerned that where the party did win the states with allies, it found its satraps deserting the party to join or help the BJP in toppling the Congress and its allies. Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and more recently Maharashtra come to mind as states the BJP did not win but rules. Is changing the party president the answer?

It could be crucial, therefore, that while ushering in a new party chief, Congress leaders also define what they meant when they called for a second independence movement. Focus on that instead of undermining the critical importance of the Gandhis, not necessarily as leaders but as a uniting force at this critical juncture of politics ahead of the 2024 polls.

Let’s be clear. The family was thrust into politics by a string of dark events, beginning with Indira Gandhi’s assassination. It’s a lie that her son coveted the job as her successor. There’s no evidence to support the claim. The minions may have created the pressure rightly or wrongly that he alone could save India from the instability triggered by Indira Gandhi’s policies, chiefly towards Punjab, and then by her gruesome death. However, Sonia Gandhi is on record as threatening to leave her husband if he became prime minister. She feared, presciently as it turned out, that he too would be killed. Now that Rahul is setting out on a ‘Unite the nation march’ next month — after having refused the party president’s job yet again — he could be preparing India for the resumption of mass politics that had gone missing from the Congress worldview. He is taking a very necessary risk at a very violent moment in Indian history. Is this ambition?

"India is not in a good place"