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Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project

Fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project and emotions can any day overwhelm the domain of truth writes DILIP MANDAL in The Print



 

During the debate over the motion of thanks to the President’s address in Parliament, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made several good points in his speech. He raised critical issues like the importance of federalism, widespread joblessness, inequality, crony capitalism in India, and unfulfilled development promises. He also talked about the sacrifices made by his family and ancestors. Congress supporters as well as Left and liberal secularists are going gaga over Gandhi’s speech and talking in superlatives. This is fine.

Gandhi’s extempore speech, without the use of a teleprompter, was laced with conviction and courage.

But politics, unlike debating society, is not only about oratory and being convincing and logical or even about telling the truth. More so in India of today, where in Narendra Modi, Gandhi has an opponent whose claim to fame is his glorified ability to strike an emotional chord with the people.

Prime Minister Modi has made and is still making two sets of promises. One set of promises are for the larger audiences, those who are not in the BJP fold. The second set of Modi’s promises are for the BJP’s core voters, the insiders. 

The written manifesto BJP’s isn’t bothered about

Let’s look at first set of promises as per the BJP’s 2014 Lok Sabha election manifesto.

1. Price Rise: Will stop hoarding and black marketing. Special courts to stop hoarding. Price stabilisation fund.

2. Employment: Jobs to 2 crore youth every year.

3. Health: Drinking water for all. AIIMS-like institutions in all states

4. Smart Cities: Will create 100 new smart cities with free wi-fi and world-class facilities

5. Housing: Pucca house for everyone by 2022

6. Infrastructure: Bullet train, freight corridors, Sagar Mala project, upgraded connectivity of Northeast and J&K with the rest of India.

7. Education: Raising public spending on education to 6 per cent of GDP. Establishing national e-library

8. Rural Development: Identifying 100 of the most backward districts and bringing them at par with developed districts

9. E-governance: Broadband connectivity in all villages. Digitalising all government records.

10. Women: 33 per cent reservation for women through constitutional amendment

11. Electoral reform: Electoral reforms to eliminate criminals. Evolve a method of holding Assembly and Lok Sabha elections simultaneously.

The BJP government started work on some of these promises and can also claim deliveries. But even the BJP does not make them poll issues anymore. It is hard to recall the last time any senior BJP leader even talked about these promises in political rallies.

My argument is that the BJP does not identify itself with these issues anymore. They are simply packaging material used for impression management.

So, when Rahul Gandhi talks about BJP’s failures in health, Make in India, education, employment, manufacturing sector or on mitigating inequality, he is hitting the BJP where it doesn’t hurt the party. The BJP is not even claiming to have performed in these fields. Whatever it has done are side shows that even the BJP does not believe in promoting.

So, what are the BJP’s main offerings? It is this question that brings us to the second set of BJP’s promises.

Unwritten promises the BJP is fulfilling

These are the promises that the party makes to its core constituencies, its faithful voters. These promises often don’t end up in the BJP’s election manifesto. The party goes into an unwritten agreement with its core voters, promising that these will be delivered, come what may. These promises are like construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, Uniform Civil Code, abrogation of Article 370, cow protection, ‘saving’ Hindu girls from the so-called “love jihad”, keeping Muslim ‘refugees’ in check, promoting Sanskrit, Yoga and Ayurveda, and so on and so forth.

The BJP has delivered on each of these promises. With the Triple Talaq law, it has delivered half of Uniform Civil Code, which is work in progress for the BJP. Kashi Corridor’s development has made Gyanvapi mosque almost invisible. The BJP has assuaged the sentiments of the Kashmiri Pandits and the Brahmins by dismantling the statehood and assembly of J&K. One can easily argue that these are not the real issues as they have nothing to do with people’s welfare, health, education, job or infrastructure.

But to say so will be an underestimation of India’s political reality. Consider this: there is almost zero possibility of someone in mainland India dying in a terror attack, and yet, the BJP can make fighting terrorism a big issue as we saw in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, when Modi-led BJP campaign played the Pulwama attack to the hilt. Any such attack is by and large a case of intelligence failure, but that argument was lost in the cacophony of counter attack and macho nationalism that Modi, BJP leaders and the media drove incessantly until the end of the election. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, the biggest casualty was the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto. Nobody was interested in putting out a report card, assessing the government’s delivery on the promises it had made to register an unprecedented victory five years before.

You can’t fact-check emotions

In his book Nervous States, British political scientist William Davies argues, “Experts and facts no longer seem capable of settling arguments to the extent that they once did. Objective claims about the economy, society, the human body and nature can no longer be successfully insulated from emotions.” He cites various events in recent history to argue that the 17th century enlightenment ideas of experts and facts are now losing steam, and the institutions that should be beyond the fray of politics of sentiments and emotions are withering away.

In such a scenario, when emotions and feelings have become more overpowering, Rahul Gandhi is trying to become a fact-checker and a hermit who talks about GDP, growth and human development. He might be telling the truth, but will that sufficiently counter the emotional pitching of the BJP? We don’t have any template to answer this question, but fighting fake news with fact check has not been a successful project. If fake news confirms the ideas and emotions of an individual or a group, then it travels far and wide. Fact check, on the other hand, reaches a limited audience as it targets the thinking faculties and misses the feelings and emotions. And emotions will, and do, overwhelm the domain of truth on any given day.

Despite all the praises and claps Rahul Gandhi got for his fiery speech, his task remains quite difficult.

Journalist and editor William Davis has an advice, which can be useful for Rahul Gandhi and for all the rationalists and liberals — “Rather than denigrate the influence of feelings in society today, we need to get better at listening to them and learning from them. Instead of bemoaning the influx of emotions into politics, we should value democracy’s capacity to give voice to fear, pain and anxiety that might otherwise be diverted in far more destructive directions. If we’re to steer through the new epoch, and rediscover something more stable beyond it, we need, above all, to understand it.”

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Bleeding from Shylock’s cut

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

SHYLOCK is the big business, Antonio, the political parties. Let’s throw in Portia, symbolising law and justice, but which mostly eludes Indians currently. The news is heart-warming in the interregnum though. A brilliant woman journalist won a tenacious legal battle with an alleged sex predator of a powerful social echelon. And octogenarian leftist poet Varavara Rao got bail too, albeit for six months.

But Rao’s comrades, India’s most brilliant and selfless souls, are cramming the jails. A battery of leftist intellectuals and lawyers along with a merrily self-effacing octogenarian Jesuit priest stand accused of plotting to murder the prime minister in a laughably bizarre plot. Others are facing sedition charges for orchestrating communal violence in Delhi, which their rivals actually waged under police protection.

An American newspaper has revealed how the dubious assassination plot was structured around hacked computers that were used to plant the “evidence” of the purported crime. So, the victories here and there are welcome aberrations — happy aberrations — in a system that stands entrenched against equal rights and dignity for women and which ambushes dissenting citizens at will.

It’s no secret that major political parties receive funds from big business, which becomes a fertile ground for quid pro quo. In fact, it’s a curious rule of thumb that the parties whose leaders are in jail or face charges for alleged graft, are precisely the ones that the corporate lobbies shunned, and, therefore, did not favour with their largesse. It is also likely that the leaders didn’t accept the implied quid pro quo and chose to suffer.

It’s a bit like the movie industry. If one didn’t pick the money from the usurious market the movie is likely never going to find a theatre to screen it. Mayawati and Lalu Yadav are a case in point of politicians who have been made an example of for seeking alternative routes of raising money, tainted money, to fight costly elections, and which they mostly won. Portia will have to be more innovative than leaning on her fabled court craft and throwing in a clever interpretation of law to tilt the argument. Today, she has to weigh the cases as presented.

Chara ghotala or fodder scam is up for public scrutiny and trial by media, a bail-less crime, but an opaque defence deal has to be decided for reasons of national security through sealed envelopes in highest court rooms. This, therefore, is a political battle and has to be fought politically. It is far-fetched to think of defeating a closet patriarchy or a renegade state in a court battle.

In this regard, a key component of Prime Minister Modi’s hare-brained demonetisation move had a clever edge. He mopped up 85 per cent of India’s cash on Nov 8, 2016. The Uttar Pradesh assembly polls began on Feb 11, 2017. By cancelling big currency notes on the eve of a huge election, which Uttar Pradesh always is, he sucked out a vital resource the rivals needed to give him a good fight.

Why don’t Indian parties crowd-fund as some, but only some, sections of the left do? Even in the heartland of capitalism in the United States, Bernie Sanders could come tantalisingly close to becoming president with crowd funding. Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party came to power with the help of this mostly shunned method of raising electoral funds. In the bargain, AAP inspired donors to see themselves as stakeholders in the great endeavour.

We read in the morning paper that India’s main opposition Congress party has run out of money. Elections are due in key states where the party could do well, primarily Assam, with clever handling. It’s a wrong time not to have money. West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Kerala are also up for polls.

Being in penury, or near penury, is, however, a good sign for the Congress party and may not be such a bad idea for India’s democracy either. Remember the tycoons muscling their way through pliable media contacts to claim cabinet berths for their acolytes in the second innings of the Congress-led alliance of Manmohan Singh? The ministry of telecommunications was crucial to the quest. And with all the deals being done to monopolise data and e-commerce today, the stakes were bound to be high. The BJP has emerged as the monopoly beneficiary of corporate donations, not least by tweaking the law to make the transactions opaque. No surprise there.

A great reason for the Congress’s financial crunch is Rahul Gandhi’s decision to make a direct connection between India’s prevailing economic crisis and Mr Modi’s patronage of his crony capitalist friends. Protesting farmers, dissenting intellectuals and assorted environmentalists across the world have seen through the plot. (Whoever can see the plot is an enemy of the state.)

On the flip side of the Congress’s course correction under Gandhi, an interview was published of Punjab’s Congress Chief Minister Amarinder Singh. He is rowing back from the bold demands by the farmers for the repeal of pro-business farm laws. Singh favours suspending the laws for two years instead of annulling them. The India Today magazine did some fact-checking to show that Singh had not met Modi’s friend Mukesh Ambani, as claimed, a day ahead of the nationwide strike by the farmers. The cordial picture of the two was from 2017.

Amarinder’s challenger in Congress is cricketer-turned-politician Navjot Sidhu, a vocal critic of big business. Shylock is hemorrhaging India. Rahul Gandhi is losing his MLAs to corporate-political pelf, the latest casualty being his government in Pondicherry. It’s time he went to the people with the bowl, an agreeable way to involve them in his bold analysis of the country’s crisis. He can start to stitch the wounds, not as a grand leader for which he must win a mandate, but as a caring citizen like those languishing in jails. The Congress will be the richer for it. Good for Portia too.

The road to Ram’s temple: If Congress party believed in real secularism, Ayodhya movement would never have happened

Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river writes Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express


The bhoomi pujan of Ram Temple in Ayodhya will be held on August 5. (Express file photo)

Let me make clear at the outset that I support the building of that temple in Ayodhya whose consecration takes place next week. It should have happened decades ago. It did not because of the pseudo-secularism that the Congress party has long adopted as its creed. The founding principle of this evil creed was that under the safety blanket of ‘secularism’ it was alright to abuse all secular tenets and principles if this helped win elections. It is important here to remind you that this is the second time that a shilanyas is being done of a Ram temple in Ayodhya. The first one was done by Rajiv Gandhi in 1989 when he began his election campaign in Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya.
Not a secular slogan at all, but considered necessary at the time because of his foolish decision to allow Muslims their own personal law based on the Shariat. This decision enraged even secular Hindus, so the promises of a Ram temple and Ram Rajya were made in the hope that Hindus would fall back into the Congress party’s ‘secular’ arms. Rajiv ended up losing the election. But this was a last-ditch attempt to show that although he had pandered to the very worst kind of Islamist Muslims in the Shah Bano matter, he was still a good Hindu. Actually, he was a Parsi because in India it is the father’s religion that counts. Had the Congress party been truly secular, it would have shown the courage to resist the pressure from the Islamists who demanded that they be allowed to use the Shariat as their personal law. Had Rajiv Gandhi stood by the principles of real secularism, he would never have interfered in the Supreme Court’s order that said divorced Muslim women had the same rights as divorced Hindu women.

If the Congress party believed in real secularism, the Ayodhya movement would never have happened. It was after it started mixing religious fundamentalism with politics that the Bharatiya Janata Party realised that this was a game that they could play much better. So it was that in 1990 Lal Krishna Advani converted a Toyota truck into ‘Ram’s chariot’ and set off from Somnath for Ayodhya with the demand that a temple be built where Ram was said to have been born. Millions of Hindus believe that this Ayodhya is the same as the Ayodhya of antiquity, and that where Babur built his mosque is the exact spot where Ram was born. So, there should never have been a dispute at all and instead of a demolition the mosque could have been respectfully moved, stone by stone, onto the other bank of the river Saryu. But, this would have deprived many political leaders of electoral gains, so it was not allowed to happen.


Political leaders were not the only culprits. Religious leaders were just as bad, and it needs to be said that Muslim religious and political leaders, who took such an implacable stand against the Ram temple, did more to harm their community than anyone else. They were obdurate, unyielding and unreasonable and many still are. The same Muslim leaders who insist that they will continue to fight for restoration of the Babri Masjid at the very spot where it once stood said not one word when the magnificent Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul was converted into a mosque just last week.

Asaduddin Owaisi has objected publicly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi going to Ayodhya to attend the shilanyas. He argues that it would be against the secular principles of the Constitution for him to attend a consecration that is specific to one religion. What intrigued me about the certainty with which he argued his case in TV debates was that he seemed to forget that Islam puts secularism in the same basket as apostates, heretics and heathens. It is only Indic religions that do not make any distinction between believers and unbelievers and only Indic religions like Buddhism and Jainism that are fundamentally atheistic.

When Congress leaders behave as if secularism was their personal gift to India, they forget that it was not an idea needed in India because the king was always not just secular but above caste. And, there has never been a Shankracharya who had his own army like the Pope once did. As a result of so much muddled thinking and a political culture that allows anything to be done for the sake of winning elections, we have now come to a pass when in these Hindutva times the supporters of Narendra Modi openly spread hatred against Islam and Muslims. The distinction between Pakistani and Muslim has been slowly erased in the past six years and the word ‘Paki’ has become a term of abuse. It is an ugly time but if our political leaders still have in them a modicum of honesty let them make the Ram temple in Ayodhya a symbol of healing.

Let Muslims join in building the temple and when it is ready let both communities come together to build a mosque on the other bank of the Saryu river. India needs a process of healing now almost more than it ever has before. Let it begin in Ayodhya next week and let the Prime Minister show us that he truly believes in his own slogan ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’.

It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit

Many who were quick to support Black Lives Matter protests are fading away as it becomes clear what real change demands writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Black Lives Matter mural in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock


It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.

Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?

We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.

Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.

We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.

But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.

The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.

But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.

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Pranab Mukherjee's visit to RSS HQ explained

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

TWO lobbies were clearly worried by a photograph that was clicked during the swearing-in celebrations of the Karnataka anti-BJP coalition. It showed Congress leader Sonia Gandhi locked in a rare embrace with Dalit leader Mayawati. The picture had other leaders who were opposed to the Modi-led BJP government basking in the glory of the Karnataka victory, but the hugging of the two women was a defining moment. Insidious advisers to the Congress leadership had stalled their coming together in the past.

Among the understated reasons was the stark reality that some of the Gandhi family’s upper-caste advisers also happened to be conduits for the mercantile lobbies based in Mumbai. The photograph threatened both, the tycoons and their caste protégés adorning the upper houses of legislatures, where those who cannot win the Lok Sabha or assembly polls are given a cosy perch, not just in Congress.

There is a brouhaha about former president and former Congress minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters. It’s surprising why no one has linked the visit with the Karnataka photo. Mukherjee is an educated Brahmin, flaunting the requisite links with Mumbai businesses, which could be a temptation for the RSS leadership to sound him out.

It is possible of course that the nudge for the meeting came from the mercantile club in Mumbai. It has acquired the habit of late of playing kingmakers. Remember how hard they had lobbied with the RSS to make Narendra Modi the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate? 

They finance other parties too, not the least the Congress party. But there is a silent caveat here. The Congress that forms the government or heads a coalition should not offer the prime minister’s job to a Gandhi, and we have had two such non-Gandhi Congress prime ministers to press the point.

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There is a history to this reasoning and the Gandhi family has been pitchforked as the villains, or the heroes, depending on where you are vis-à-vis crony capitalism. Jawaharlal Nehru had no love lost for the mercantile leaders whom Gandhiji otherwise saw as the trustees of a free India. Nehru put their biggest icon in jail for fraud. (R.K. Dalmia’s close friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah may have been an added allergen.)

Then came Indira Gandhi. She nationalised the cabal’s ‘usurious’ banks and also locked up several of them under the draconian Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, the law she passed just before the 1975-77 emergency.

Mr Mukherjee recently chronicled his political innings from 1980 onwards. That marked the post-emergency return for Indira Gandhi who was looking vulnerable after her traditional left supporters deserted her over the emergency. Mr Mukherjee’s proximity to the Mumbai tycoons is well documented in books that predictably did not make it to bookshops. He became a darling of the media as her finance minister, the same media that is celebrating his visit to the RSS headquarters although he said perfectly liberal, pro-constitution things there. When Mrs Gandhi was killed, Mr Mukherjee reportedly saw himself as her natural successor, a thought resented by her family friends.

Rajiv Gandhi arrived to throw the ‘moneybags off the backs of the Congress workers’. He sent Mukherjee into political oblivion. The tycoons, however, swung into action. Every inch of media space they owned was harnessed to tarnish the young prime minister with financial scams. His death brought the cabal and Mukherjee back into the heart of Indian politics, both firmly embraced by Narasimha Rao.

One more twist followed. When Rao lost the elections in 1996, he handed over the Congress presidency to Sitaram Kesri, a canny grass-roots Congressman. The change was accepted by the Gandhis who saw in Kesri a better chance of getting to the bottom of Rajiv’s murder mystery than Rao had delivered. Also Kesri shored up two prime ministers with the help of communists.

I remember asking him at a news conference why he had taken the unusual step to ally with Dalit leader Mayawati in 1998. Did he see her as an asset as a woman leader, or was she a potential Dalit ally? Kesri exploded with joy. Both, he yelled. We don’t know which of the Congress rivals locked him up in the bathroom subsequently and handed the leadership to a still reluctant Sonia Gandhi, who had evidently not yet recovered from the shock of her husband’s assassination. Mukherjee was part of the group, or perhaps its leader, that went after Kesri in what can only be described as a palace coup. Kesri saw himself as a Gandhi loyalist and didn’t know what hit him. He died from the shock.

It is said that the Mumbai club has applied a financial squeeze on the Congress party for flirting with state leaders they do not control. This could be a blessing in disguise for the party. It could bring the Gandhis close to crucial leaders like Mayawati, Arvind Kejriwal, Lalu Yadav and Mamata Banerjee who have to fend for themselves financially.

If, like Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi goes for crowd funding instead of leaning on crony tycoons for support, he might become a richer, cleaner leader. But before that, he must do with the current potential ‘Congress Syndicate’ what Emperor Akbar did with his regent Bairam Khan or Nehru did with his detractors clothed as advisers. They could be sent to work with the masses under a new Kamraj Plan to borrow from the Congress history.

Above all, it was Mayawati’s sacrifice and not ambition that has reaped rewards for a rejuvenated opposition. Rather than aim to become prime minister, Rahul Gandhi would do well to watch out for deserters, no matter how educated they are, while embracing the game-changing picture from Karnataka.

Farook And The Art of Selectivity

Anand Ranganathan in News Laundry








You believe what you see, but unfortunately what you see is written by those who see what they believe.

A recent article by columnist Sadanand Dhume is proof if ever it was needed, that Objectivity is a metallic object that must be left behind before the writer passes through the op-ed threshold. All good now. Next!

Biases don’t beep.

The present article is not a rebuttal but, rather, an attempt to understand, using Dhume’s column, our fascination – both as writers and readers – with selectivity. To be sure, Dhume has written what needs to be read. He has highlighted the gross fraud perpetrated by the present Bharatiya Janata Party government, on freedom of speech, on the right to life, on the rule of law, and, to an exaggerated extent, on what all of us think India should be or become.

So where has he erred? To put it simply, here: Dhume has hidden more than he has revealed. He has indulged in selectivity, an attribute none other than BR Ambedkar warned us of 75 years ago. Explaining why selectivity is damaging, he wrote:

"The social evils which characterize the Hindu Society, have been well known. The publication of 'Mother India' by Miss Mayo gave these evils the widest publicity. But while 'Mother India' served the purpose of exposing the evils and calling their authors at the bar of the world to answer for their sins, it created the unfortunate impression throughout the world that while the Hindus were grovelling in the mud of these social evils and were conservative, the Muslims in India were free from them, and as compared to the Hindus, were a progressive people. That, such an impression should prevail, is surprising to those who know the Muslim Society in India at close quarters."

Ambedkar detested the evil orthodoxy of the Hindu society, exposed the casteist and bigoted nature of many ancient Hindu texts, spoke authoritatively on Hinduism, brought to light its numerous ills, left its fold to become a Buddhist; and yet, here was the same man warning us of being selective against Hinduism and Hindu society. Such was his greatness and unshakable belief to 'Do the Right Thing'.

It is astonishing how prescient, and relevant, Ambedkar’s words are even today; not at all astonishing that we discard them with the chirpy tediousness of a CISF body-frisker. Subjectivity brings us eyeballs; Objectivity brings us calm and rational thinking. Precisely the reason why hunched-over emotional beings hunting for fist-sized stones to pelt prefer the former.

Dhume writes with the immediacy of a columnist who understands, like all good columnists do, that his writings would the day after be used to wrap kachoris by the neighbourhood halwai. He is what one would call a modern writer – aware, alert, and receptive to criticism; a social media animal who tries to learn from his trolls and critics, knowing well the worth of this engagement as a self-correcting measure. A Twitter handle laden with followers bends.

Occasionally, though, Dhume gives in to a closed set of arty dunderheads who stand in the middle of summer braving scalding loo to admire the coming of age of a frangipani in a TV studio carpark. These would be the seers who think the world sucks on their analysis and interpretation like an emaciated leech. They drench the newspaper centrespreads and seal the primetime debates at will. Their word makes no sense but it is final. Subjectivity and selectivity are their calling cards. Dhume's last column suggests he was in their company.

Dhume claims personal liberties are shrinking under the present government, coming to this generalised conclusion from his wholly justified condemnation of the religious zealots who go by the moniker, Gau Rakshaks. These criminals are seemingly running amok, doubtless comforted by an overseeing government that is, outwardly at least, non-violently fanatical about saving cows. The almost complete lack of law enforcement resulting from fear of political masters, coupled with the cushion the overseers provide through their obsession with saving the Gau, is precisely the deadly combination the extremists cherish and take comfort in. This author had written previously on their barbarity and criminality. Many other have, too.

The Gau Rakshak menace is not a recent phenomena but one that is increasingly in the news. That said, an objective reading is the need of the hour, especially when it comes to sweeping psychoanalysis.

While Dhume rightly criticises the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for zealously promoting the idea of a cow-slaughter ban, he should have mentioned that in doing so, these organisations are only following the ardent views of none other than Mahatma Gandhi and Vinobha Bhave, who incidentally went on a fast unto death unless his call for a pan-India cow slaughter ban was acceded to. Dhume should also have mentioned that the ban on cow slaughter was first implemented, and rigorously imposed in most Indian states, by the Congress party, so much so that as recently as 2015 Harish Rawat, a sitting Congress Chief Minister of Uttarakhand thundered. “Anyone who kills cows, no matter which community he belongs to is India's biggest enemy and has no right to live in the country.”

That is correct. India's biggest enemy. Not Pakistan or China but a cow-slaughterer.

The fools of the BJP are following the fools of the Congress, only more stridently because this is what fools do. To miss this facet of our daily political drudgery is to give the impression that things are happening for the first time, that the phrase déjà vu is Martian gobbledygook and not something invented by earthlings.

Dhume then talks of a deeper malaise, suggesting that under the present government, personal liberties are shrinking. Again, while Dhume rightly criticises the BJP for contributing to this, what undoubtedly is a malaise, he is silent on the fact that most of our personal liberties have been shrunk already, and to the extent they don't fit our bloated bodies anymore.

Tellingly, much of the shrinking has been carried out by the Congress. One doesn't need to go as far back as Nehru, who jailed the famous poet Majrooh for composing a song lampooning him, and amended the Article 19 (1) to steal more of the freedom away from the speech; one only needs to look at Congress' recent history. From banning films to censoring them heavily, from banning books that offended dynasty sycophants, from bringingin the draconian 66A; from making it mandatory for people to stand up in cinema halls during the playing of the national anthem; from coming up with the aesthetically revolting idea of erecting world’s tallest flag-posts; from demanding an apology from the magazine that published the Danish cartoons – this from the Prime Minister of India, on the floor of the house; from staying silent when 8,000 activists were booked under the draconian sedition law by the Tamil Nadu police; from partaking in every possible chance our great democracy afforded to stifle free speech and expression; from ignoring every possible chance to repeal evil laws on sedition and free speech, the present government’s predecessors have been there, done that. The list of crimes and silences is endless. But Dhume doesn’t mention even a single intransigence. He fails to bemoan the fact that, far from providing liberties some breathing room, the Congress made things even more claustrophobic. Again, he is right in criticising the BJP, but he is wrong in giving his audience an impression that all this is happening for the first time, and that the BJP is responsible for it.

Dhume is not the first to have done this and he won’t be the last. In such a scenario, one may be entitled to ask: Are subjectivity and selectivity really all that harmful? Was Ambedkar wrong? What damage, after all, could selective outrage inflict on the reader and the running discourse?

Well, it can be devastating. Recall the early months of the Modi government and the media blitzkrieg over Church-attacks; the banner headlines screaming enough is enough, let Christians live in peace; the op-eds warning of creeping fascism and growing intolerance. What came of it? This, that three weeks of relentless boil and outrage later, the nation came to know that these attacks were nothing more than burglaries or accidents, that the perpetrators of the most heinous crime of sexual assault on a Bengal nun, one that quickly snowballedinto ‘Hindus are coming to get us, even the pious and the elderly won’t be spared’, were not Hindus; that as many churches were “attacked” under the UPA as they were under the present NDA.

We can outrage only on the news that we receive; and that which we don’t, it glides through the system unseen.

Under President Obama, during his first term in office, there occurred 1.1 million hate-crimes. 263,540 violent hate crimes were reported in 2012, just one year – 30 violent hate-crimes every hour. Of every day. 365 days. How many of these came to the reader’s notice? How many times was the Obama administration hauled over blazing coals for this? How many op-eds accused him of twiddling his thumbs while 30 minorities were attacked every hour of every day of every year?

Under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, during his second term in office, there occurred 172,837 crimes against the Dalits. 2,073 rapes against Dalits were reported in 2013, just one year – a 31 per cent jump over the 2012 number. Five Dalit women were raped every single day in 2013.

The eye decides; the eye selects; the eye omits. Creeping fascism and growing intolerance become house lizards at will, scampering for cover under the shoe rack, leaving not even their writhing tails behind.

One may ask: why is it important to divulge previous occurrences – is that not Whataboutery? Why does a reader need to know that churches were also being “attacked” and robbed under the UPA, that 30 violent hate-crimes were happening every hour under Obama, that five Dalits were being sexually assaulted every day under Manmohan Singh? Why? Because outraging on any new occurrence with incomplete information is like fencing the adversary blind-folded; your every jab is in anger and desperation.

The solution to any problem is inextricably linked with its identification first as endemic or spontaneous. Rest is clickbait.

India is intolerant. Intolerant towards gays, towards Dalits, towards minorities (and majorities that become regional minorities), towards just and conscientious laws, towards free speech, towards freedom of expression. India has always been intolerant because we have laws, and Constitutional amendments, that protect Intolerance. The problem is endemic; it is not going to go away when the BJP goes away. But to realise this one has to forsake belief in one’s preferred ideology, preferred historians, preferred newspaper; preferred news channel; one has to forsake belief in selectivity. Easier said.

When it suits us, we become a nation of selective cacophony and silence.

The Left is silent when SFI goons go on a rampage; the Right is silent when ABVP goons indulge in the same. The Left is silent over one kind of bounty; the Right is silent over the other. The Left is silent when Muslims demand punishment for Kamlesh Tewari; The Right is silent when Hindus demand punishment for Prashant Bhushan. The Left is silent when a Muslim interprets Islam and his shop is burnt to the ground; the Right is silent when a film director interprets history and his set is burnt to the ground. The Left is silent when Yatra app is down-voted; the Right is silent when Snapdeal app is down-voted. The Left is silent when the communists rewrite our textbooks; the Right is silent when the nationalists rewrite our textbooks. The Left is silent when communists murder RSS workers; the Right is silent when RSS workers murder communists.

When it comes to selectivity, the Left and the Right are two sides of the same coin – emotional, impulsive, hypocritical, entrenched.

For the uninitiated, it takes some time to realise that this here is a game being played. The Great Indian Intolerance Chess Clock. Every single time there is intolerance that shames the Right, there follows intolerance that shames the Left. And vice versa. The Left outrages on one kind of intolerance, and the Right does the same for the opposite kind. The Left spots an atrocity that would shame the Right and slaps the intolerance chess clock; the Right spots an atrocity that would shame the Left and does the exact same after a while.

If I can shame you more than you can shame me, I believe that I can reduce my shame, disregard it even.

This constant jabbing at the other, while blind-folded, is what keeps the fire burning. Indian media discourse is this chalice runneth over with hundreds of stories that suit any one particular narrative. Take a sip, pass the cup along.

That selectivity can be immensely damaging to a nation's psyche is not quite apparent at first glance. This is because highlighting an atrocity devoid of its previous histories is in itself an important undertaking. To draw the reader's attention over any atrocity is essential in a democracy, to outrage over it equally so. No rational person can deny that even in isolation – i.e. devoid of previous history or knowledge an atrocity must be condemned and acted upon.

Why, then, did Ambedkar worry about selectivity? Why was he not satisfied with the selective outing of Hindu evils? It is because he was looking for solutions, and reforms – not just for one problem, not just for one community, but for the nation as a whole. He worried that conscientious Hindus shamed by their religion's evils would try and reform, but that conscientious Muslims not shamed by their religion's evils wouldn't. Reform is possible only when mistakes are identified, spoken of, written about, and the conscientious shamed. Shaming is good, shaming is essential, shaming is catharsis, but what good is shaming if it deepens further the chasms in our society, reforms only one community, is selective.

The writer Aatish Taseer has written an impassioned essay on the lynching of the Muslim Pehlu Khan at the hands of the Gau Rakshaks. It is an important read; it shames us as it should any conscientious Indian. Taseer talks of the murder of a Muslim at the hands of Hindu extremists; the outrage is real and affecting. At the end, Taseer holds India complicit in the murder: "...a whole nation, through its silence, is complicit," he writes.

If one has to hold the whole nation, including Taseer himself, complicit in the murder of a Muslim, why, then, would have asked Ambedkar, should that man not also be Farook, the Muslim lynched by Muslim extremists?

Farook, who, you ask. Farook, who, asks India. Farook, who, asks even Taseer.

Farook, a Muslim-turned-atheist, was lynched by Muslim extremists around the same time as Pehlu was by Hindu extremists. Pehlu is remembered, as he must be; but Farook is forgotten. Why? Why has Farook been forgotten? Is it because he was lynched by Muslims and not Hindus?

Who decides who is to be remembered and who forgotten? Who learns, who is shamed, who believes, who sees?

We do. Our selectivity does.

Holding India complicit for the murder of Pehlu will shame us into making sure such atrocities never happen again. But not holding India complicit for the murder of Farook, not shaming us for this atrocity, means that many more Farooks would meet the same fate. This, in summation, was what Ambedkar had warned us of.

But where is Objectivity; where do I find it?

Listen, Red. Far away there is an oak tree beneath whose tired, protruding roots is a biscuit tin containing a note that says, Don't just worship Ambedkar, follow him. Slither out that sewer pipe using your elbows and stand up on your legs and look up to face the heavens and let that rain wash away all the shit and the filth and give you the strength to find that tin. Find that tin, Red. It is your only hope.

Ramachandra Guha: Defining Indian Nationalism versus Jingoism

‘Reflections on Gandhi’: George Orwell’s assessment of Mahatma Gandhi after his assassination

By George Orwell

Wikimedia Commons



Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity – by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power – and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?

To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favour, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.

At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not. The things that one associated with him – home-spun cloth, “soul forces” and vegetarianism – were unappealing, and his medievalist programme was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence – which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever – he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted.

The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.

But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion.

Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded.

Again, he seems to have been quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as EM Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavourably, and was probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority.

Colour feeling when he first met it in its worst form in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was fighting what was in effect a colour war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself unpopular as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack European friends.

Written in short lengths for newspaper serialisation, the autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. 

He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not much to confess.

As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of Gandhi’s possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be purchased for about £5, and Gandhi’s sins, at least his fleshly sins, would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without “doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper – that is about the whole collection. Almost from childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense of direction.

His first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of vegetarianism. Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organiser, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions.

His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive . Whether he was also a loveable man, and whether his teachings can have much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are founded, I have never felt fully certain.

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it.

Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realise that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that god exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from.

It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which – though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail – he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either god or humanity. First of all, no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but seems to have felt this to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one’s strength.

Secondly, if possible, no sexual intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition, it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And finally – this is the cardinal point – for the seeker after goodness there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing.

This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love god, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi – with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction – always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth.

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which – I think – most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between god and man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen man.

Gandhi’s attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha, first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in the truth”.

In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of 1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not – indeed, since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national independence, he could not – take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialise in avoiding awkward questions.

In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of evasions, usually of the “you’re another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on record in Mr Louis Fischer’s Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr Fischer, Gandhi’s view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide, which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”

After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway, and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr Fischer, but Gandhi was merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it might cost several million deaths.

At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government.

The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.

Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent resistance can be effective against one’s own government, or against an occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally?

Gandhi’s various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilisation can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi’s virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper articles. One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking.

I have never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.


It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always been foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after all been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another.

On the other hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, an event which very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far was this due to Gandhi’s personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without hatred, disinfected the political air?

That one even thinks of asking such questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

The curse of the ‘strong leader’

Tabish Khair in The Hindu




A strong leadership may be fine, but only if the leaders do not end up turning their political parties into ghosts



One feels for Rahul Gandhi. He has to cope with not one but two ‘strong leaders’: Narendra Modi and his own grandmother, Indira Gandhi.

Rahul Gandhi is haunted by the ghost of a once worker-cadre-based party, the Congress, which ‘strong leader’ Mrs. Gandhi transformed into a family-run, one-boss organisation. Rahul Gandhi’s failure in Uttar Pradesh, Assam, etc. has little to do with his own abilities or inabilities; it has to do with a common feeling among Indians that the Congress needs to be led by a charismatic leader whose surname is not and has never been ‘Gandhi’ or ‘Nehru’.

Indians are not unique in this: given the nexus of politicians and finance capital and the transformation of politics into a kind of initiated profession, where connections matter far too much, the ordinary voter is suspicious of leaders whose prominence seems to be a family- or peer group-inheritance. So suspicious that the voter can even prefer a person with no solution over a better and more deserving candidate, as we witnessed in the U.S. last year, simply because the former is seen as not being an insider.

When Congress lost coherence

Even the ill-gotten millions of an ‘outsider’ candidate no longer disqualify him, as long as his opponent is seen as part of the political establishment. Riches, the voter (mistakenly) believes, can come to him too, but political inheritance — of the sort associated with Hillary Clinton and Rahul Gandhi — cannot. And in this latter supposition the voter is not mistaken. This gets worse, as is the case with the Congress now, thanks to a process initiated by Mrs. Gandhi, when the party seems hardly to exist apart from its top leadership.

No doubt, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru did fight to shape the Congress, but they encouraged much difference too. This showed in the wide variety of pan-national leaders the Congress threw up in that period: Sarojini Naidu, Vallabhbhai Patel, Abul Kalam Azad, Rajendra Prasad, Lal Bahadur Shastri, etc.

It is with the ‘strong leader’ personality cult that Mrs. Gandhi encouraged in the 1970s that the Congress began to lose both its internal coherence and a repertoire of equivalent national-level leaders. At the level of party structure, this led to the gradual evaporation of committed Congress workers at district and village levels and their replacement with careerists and strategists rushing off to party headquarters at the drop of a Gandhi cap. Today, the Congress is far less a worker-cadre-based party than the BJP. This ghostly Congress party — reduced to a family name that most voters are tired of hearing — is Rahul Gandhi’s bane. Despite this, it is not the Congress today but the BJP that seems to be following Mrs. Gandhi’s doubtful legacy: the curse of the ‘strong leader’ which reduces a political party to a ghostly affair in later years.

Conservatives united

I have never dismissed the BJP as a genuine party within a democratic India, as I have considered it a party with various tendencies — not that dissimilar from the Congress of yore — united by a few core commonalities. What passes for the BJP is a collocation of conservatives of various kinds, pro-market ideologists, nationalists, cultural revivalists, religious chauvinists, and reactionaries. All of them are united by a general belief in an India structured along ‘Hindu’ rather than secular lines, even though their understanding of ‘Hindu’ is not identical. Again, as the Congress was before the 1970s, the BJP is essentially a grass-roots party united by a cadre which includes, and is dominated (for better or for worse), by cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The BJP allows more upward mobility for its workers than the Congress today.

This, then, is the BJP as it has been until now. While lacking the azadi-inspired breadth of the Gandhi-Nehruvian Congress, it has nevertheless thrown up major leaders of national visibility such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, many of whom, like Narendra Modi himself, rose from the ranks.

All this might be changing in the BJP today, as it slowly becomes a personality-based ‘strong leader’ party. It is not a coincidence that the only Congress leader that supporters of Mr. Modi sometimes praise is Mrs. Gandhi: ‘Modi’s India’ may not be that far apart from ‘Indira is India.’

There is a pattern — reminiscent of the Congress in the 1970s — of concentrating party power in the top echelons and appointing ministers and Chief Ministers (most recently in Uttar Pradesh) who seem incapable of gaining a national stature. Strong leaders may be fine, but only if they do not end up turning their parties into ghosts.

Why bhakti in politics is bad for democracy

Ramachandra Guha in The Hindustan Times


Back in 2005, a knowledgeable Gujarati journalist wrote of how ‘Narendra Modi thinks a detergent named development will wash away the memory of 2002’. While focusing on new infrastructure and industrial projects in his state, the then chief minister of Gujarat launched what the journalist called ‘a massive self-publicity drive’, publishing calendars, booklets and posters where his own photograph appeared prominently alongside words and statistics speaking of Gujarat’s achievements under his leadership. ‘Modi has made sure that in Gujarat no one can escape noticing him,’ remarked the journalist.

Since May 2014, this self-publicity drive has been extended to the nation as a whole. In fact, the process began before the general elections, when, through social media and his speeches, Narendra Modi successfully projected himself as the sole and singular alternative to a (visibly) corrupt UPA regime. The BJP, a party previously opposed to ‘vyakti puja’, succumbed to the power of Modi’s personality. Since his swearing-in as Prime Minister, the government has done what the party did before it: totally subordinated itself to the will, and occasionally the whim, of a single individual.

Hero-worship is not uncommon in India. Indeed, we tend to excessively venerate high achievers in many fields. Consider the extraordinarily large and devoted fan following of Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar. These fans see their icons as flawless in a way fans in other countries do not. In America, Bob Dylan has many admirers but also more than a few critics. The same is true of the British tennis player Andy Murray. But in public discourse in India, criticism of Sachin and Lata is extremely rare. When offered, it tends to be met with vituperative abuse, not by rational or reasoned rebuttal.

The hero-worship of sportspeople is merely silly. But the hero-worship of politicians is inimical to democracy. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu were epicentres of progressive social reform, whose activists promoted caste and gender equality, rational thinking, and individual rights. Yet in more recent years, Maharashra has seen the cult of Bal Thackeray, Tamil Nadu the cult of J Jayalalithaa. In each case, the power of the State was (in Jayalalithaa’s case still is) put in service of this personality cult, with harassment and intimidation of critics being common.

However, at a nation-wide level the cult of Narendra Modi has had only one predecessor — that of Indira Gandhi. Thus now, as then, ruling party politicians demand that citizens see the Prime Minister as embodying not just the party or the government, but the nation itself. Millions of devotees on social media (as well as quite a few journalists) have succumbed to the most extreme form of hero-worship. More worryingly, one senior cabinet minister has called Narendra Modi a Messiah. A chief minister has insinuated that anyone who criticises the Prime Minister’s policies is anti-national. Meanwhile, as in Indira Gandhi’s time, the government’s publicity wing, as well as AIR and Doordarshan, works overtime to broadcast the Prime Minister’s image and achievements.

While viewing the promotion of this cult of Narendra Modi, I have been reminded of two texts by long-dead thinker-politicians, both (sadly) still relevant. The first is an essay published by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1937 under the pen-name of ‘Chanakya’. Here Nehru, referring to himself in the third person (as Modi often does now), remarked: ‘Jawaharlal cannot become a fascist. Yet he has all the makings of a dictator in him — a vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient.’

Nehru was here issuing a warning to himself. Twelve years later, in his remarkable last speech to the Constituent Assembly, BR Ambedkar issued a warning to all Indians, when, invoking John Stuart Mill, he asked them not ‘to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions’. There was ‘nothing wrong’, said Ambedkar, ‘in being grateful to great men who have rendered life-long services to the country. But there are limits to gratefulness.’ He worried that in India, ‘Bhakti or what may be called the path of devotion or hero-worship, plays a part in its politics unequalled in magnitude by the part it plays in the politics of any other country in the world. Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.’

These remarks uncannily anticipated the cult of Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. As I have written in these columns before, Indian democracy is now too robust to be destroyed by a single individual. But it can still be severely damaged. That is why this personality cult of Narendra Modi must be challenged (and checked) before it goes much further.

Later this week we shall observe the 60th anniversary of BR Ambedkar’s death. Some well-meaning (and brave) member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle should bring Ambedkar’s speech of 1949 to his attention. And perhaps Nehru’s pseudonymous article of 1937 too.

Subramanian Swamy: A cat among the pigeons

Lakshmi Iyer in The Times of India

Modi's Arab steed? Or Congress' Trojan horse? Subramanian Swamy's entry into the Rajya Sabha has Lutyens' Delhi aflutter with theories.

For someone who has straddled the Indian political scene for over four decades, Dr Subramanian Swamy has always been an important figure in Lutyens' Delhi. A mover and a shaker, he has dominated events and determined their outcome through dogged courtroom battles. Yet his nomination to the Rajya Sabha last month by the Modi Government is seen as something that will alter power equations, not just across the Parliament but within the BJP itself. Swamy's entry into a Congress-dominated Rajya Sabha is being seen as a natural step forward after his resounding success in the National Herald litigation in December 2015, when he managed to force both Sonia and Rahul Gandhi to secure bail in his case against the Congress-controlled newspaper in a Delhi court.

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BJP managers point out that Swamy had to be in the RS just to rile the Gandhis and disturb Congress benches to push government business. In fact opposition leader, Ghulam Nabi Azad, described him as a "new gift of the BJP to us". However, with his new-found status, the one-time Harvard professor is the most sought-after VVIP in political circles. As ex-Delhi BJP MLA, Vijay Jolly of the Delhi Study Group, who is organising a public felicitation for Swamy on May16 at the Constitution Club, offers, "Envoys from 25 countries — such as China, US, Taiwan, Vietnam — have all confirmed participation just to hear Swamy speak. Swamy's appointment diary is apparently full for next two months."

The BJP leader's entry into the Parliament is making waves, not just outside Raisina Hills but even among MPs. "Now everyone is taking a keen interest in the Rajya Sabha proceedings, more so than the Lok Sabha," said a first-term BJP MP from Rajasthan. Online viewership of RSTV reportedly went up by 900 per cent when Swamy spoke on the Agusta (aka Choppergate) scam. Even within the Parliament, there was tremendous curiosity to hear him firsthand, with members rushing back to the House from the Central Hall.

Yet within the BJP, Swamy is held in awe and the party is exploring ways to cope with him. For someone who has wielded tremendous power before — he has been a Union Minister and run a Government (Chandrashekhar, 1990-91), been part of one (Narasimha Rao, 1991-96) and remorselessly destroyed another just after a year in office (Vajpayee Government, 1998-1999), the party is walking on eggshells when it comes to Swamy.

For some BJP/Sangh leaders, Swamy has been made an MP by the Modi Government only to break the myth that this Government has done nothing about the Gandhis. "It wants to fight the image. There was a need to send a message to the cadres," said a Sangh leader. Officially, the Sangh denied it had any role to play in the RS berth for Swamy. "It is better you ask the Government," said RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya.

Off the record, however, Sangh sources acknowledged that Swamy had been close to late VHP leader Ashok Singhal. "He has vigourously pursued Hindu causes such as Ram Setu, Ayodhya, and the Sangh top brass will always be proud of him," said Rajiv Tuli of Delhi RSS.

Significantly, Union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari — someone close to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat — hosted a dinner in honour of Swamy soon after he became MP. It is quite possible that Swamy could be used by the Government to build legal support for the Ram temple at Ayodhya at a later juncture.

Bringing Swamy into the House has brought a lot of pep and vigour into the rank and file of the BJP. It has also boosted the image of the PM. It was felt that Modi was not keen to take on the Gandhis directly, but now, he is being seen as a man of action.

A signal to Jaitley

To a section within the BJP, Swamy's RS entry has come as a surprise. Many believe that the new MP could be a signal from the RSS/party leadership to undermine the Leader of the House, Arun Jaitley. BJP sources admit Swamy's problem with Jaitley runs deep. Old-timers recall that he had targeted the FM during NDA-I too — between 1998 and 2004. Swamy's latest ruse against the Finance Minister is denying him a New Delhi Lok Sabha seat in 2014 — that too after consulting Modi about it. Jaitley ensured that the seat went to his friend Meenakshi Lekhi instead. BJP sources say the PM won't compromise with Jaitley's authority. "There is no possibility of letting down Jaitley, though it will require management skills to maintain an equivalence between Jaitley and Swamy," said a BJP leader.

RSS sources admit that in the past two years Swamy was in a limbo. "It is better to have Swamy on your side than against you," said a RSS sympathiser. On the face of it, Congress leaders dismiss the idea that by bringing in Swamy, the PM has played a master stroke — he got a Gandhi family-baiter into the House — to put a lot of pressure on the opposition. It was Swamy's petition in the National Herald case that has made the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and Rahul appear in a trial court in December 2015 to secure bail.

"Frankly, we are not worried about Swamy. It does not matter to us. In fact, his presence in the treasury benches should worry the BJP more. His becoming MP has more to do with Leader of the House, Arun Jaitley, than the Congress — it is purely an internal matter of the BJP," said senior Congress MP Satyavrat Chaturvedi.

The Digvijay of BJP

He went on to describe Swamy as the "Digvijay Singh of the BJP — a master at self-goals". Why should we worry about him — whose utterances were expunged for three consecutive days?" He goes on to add, "Swamy was expelled from the Rajya Sabha for misconduct. So why should the Congress be scared of Swamy? It is odd that a Congress leader should cite his record during the Emergency. He was expelled from the RS in 1976 during the Emergency for fleeing the country on an impounded passport. A Jan Sangh member then, he's remembered for making an appearance in the Parliament for a day in August 1975 and subsequently slipping out of the country to launch a campaign against Emergency abroad."

Congress sources admit Swamy's entry can't be taken lightly. "With Swamy on the other side, we will need both Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram to face up to him," said a Congress MP, pointing out how Swamy defeated Abhishek Singhvi's arguments in the Agusta debate. In the upcoming months, if political parties are to pick legal luminaries to fight their political battle, Rajya Sabha could soon resemble proceedings in the Supreme Court.