The Fall

                           In a powerful and moving dialogue between Karna and Kunti, the latter pleads forgiveness for her act of abandoning him soon after he was born for fear of retribution as an unwed mother and for acceptance of her maternal love henceforth as her eldest son. Karna’s honest reply tinged with sadness states that it will not be possible for him to transfer his love for his foster mother who had given him her unstinted love to Kunti whom he now discovers as his biological mother. He says that just as the fallen fruit of the mango tree cannot be once again glued to the tree, it will be impossible for him to be affixed to her. The gravitational pull that brings down the mango cannot be reversed and this scientific truth holds a mirror to the fall that all of us experience at different periods in our lives.

                         The fall of the Congress is indeed a giant fall. Coming close on the heels of the 50^thdeath anniversary of the first Congress Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, - a giant among statesmen, a philosopher-king,-  the collapse of Congress under the Modi onslaught is pathetic and presently seems irreversible. To imagine that it can be glued once again to the tired and vapid Congress slogans of Garibhi Hatao and Custodianship of Secularism invoke pathos if not derision and ridicule very much like Don Quixote’s tilt at the windmills.

                         This is the 21^st century, a period dominated by the media especially by Cinema and TV and glossy newspapers and newsmagazines. The message is in the medium and it percolates to every nook and corner of the nation. The masses are fed on glamour and style that form the core of all media presentation in the name of entertainment and infotainment. The City is shown as the place to fulfill their romanticized fantasy and desire for a better lifestyle , albeit on a lower rung. This has resulted in the large exodus to the city from the countryside. All the programmes that the Congress had started such as MNREGA and Food Security Bill did provide the rural poor food and some form of employment and wages but the allurement of the city and the dream of living the life seen on the big and small screens could not be satisfied by the appeasement of hunger and offer of physical jobs that were far removed from the reel life.

                           For Congress time has stood still at the Nehruvian age. It continued to live in a time warp, not noticing the aspirations both of the middle class and that of the new young generation. The first Congress government of Pt. Nehru, showed an aspirational India wanting the fruits of freedom. The next Congress government  of Indira continued the Nehruvian socialism to focus on poverty alleviation(Gharibi Hatao) and the Congress of Rajiv Gandhi brought the exhilaration of modernization  that was short-lived. But Dr.ManMohan Singh and his retinue of well educated ministers failed to read the yearning of the new India raised on the glamour of showbiz and mobile technology that found expression through the social media. They were completely out of tune with the masses –not because they were not conversant with the new media, but they failed to note that young India was far more media savvy than all their Oxonian and Cambridgian knowledge had equipped them with. Even when indications were given about the strength social media can create during the Anna Hazare Movement and later the Nirbhaya movement, the Congress ministers sat like ostriches burying their heads in files without raising their fingers to twitter or blog. The bitter truth is social media has come to stay with its pretension to ‘a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness’(Karl taro Greenfield in the New York Times). Social media promotes fake social and political literacy and it has become a pandemic. The BJP was quick to see the advantage of the flipside of social media and harnessed it to its best advantage with its daily litany of Congress- mukht Bharat where Congress stood both for party and corruption. The Congress ostriches did nothing to counter the attack nor used the social media to showcase all their achievements even if they did not fully measure up to the aspirations of the new generation.
So the mango has fallen and it cannot be brought back to the tree. But Nature has an answer for all its fallen fruits. The mango has the seed that has the capability to germinate and sprout. It needs fresh hands to dig the soil, to water it and make it germinate very quickly. Instead of being tied to the old guard with no new slogans, the Congress has to take fresh guard and learn to reach out to people, understand their need and work out strategies that can meet a major part of their aspirations. It will be foolish and even naïve to keep nit picking all that the present government has set out to achieve or take over the role of destructive opposition earlier indulged by the BJP. It will be prudent to be realistic in making promises to people that is void of all empty rhetoric. Congress has to re-invent itself while continuing with the inclusive development that Nerhu’s socialism had envisioned.

                             It is of utmost importance to educate people. All talk of empowerment of people has no meaning unless people are educated about their duty and about their role in nation building. The old time slogan of public-private partnership is to be re-engineered to people-state partnership that lays emphasis on people’s contribution and cooperation. What has happened to India-as it had happened in Egypt, Libya and Syria, to name a few – is politicians promising people vocal empowerment without providing them mental power and citizenship development. The result has been disastrous as seen in the failure of AAP’s tryst with people’s power. The slogan of the hour should be  ‘Duty first, rights next’ .

         It is unfortunate that in a moment of euphoria that has brought a man of humble origin to the highest position in government, there has come a tendency to disparage intellectuals and educated classes and claim the superiority and wisdom of mass leaders without bookish and academic education. This bodes ill for the future of the nation as the world is galloping along new technological inventions, sociological transformations, new ideologies and psychological changes.  We need a generation of thinkers who can lead the nation to keep pace with an emerging world order. No development is complete without the development of the mind and the spirit.

                       Can Congress reinvent itself? Can the mango seed sprout again? Can Congress commit itself to accept the fall of the mango only to sprout and grow and yield more and richer fruits?  It can if it nurtures young plants and fresh soil without foolishly attempting to fix the fallen fruit to the old tree. The need for Congress to revive and reboot itself is important because it has to be ready to provide people an exhilarating alternative in the years to come when the present euphoria will wane and people’s aspirations seek a new force to prop them up.

Modi, the Man of the masses or the Deity of the hollowmen

                                 Modi, the Man of the masses or the Deity of the hollowmen

The coronation day has come. A mega event that will make IPL opening ceremony a pale shadow in comparison is on display today at the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt. There had been fourteen Prime Ministers before the present PM-designate. All of them have been sworn in the Central Hall of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The 15^th Prime Minister’s swearing-in-ceremony is different and it is to be in the open forecourt to accommodate 4000 invitees.  As leaders across the South Asian region are converging to participate in this grand function, unprecedented security measures have been put in place.

No one dare ask why all this fuss over a ceremony that is a regular event of Indian democracy that takes place periodically once in five years (or sometimes less than that period). Why this hype today  about showcasing Indian democracy as though all the previous elections did not project a robust democracy? Why are we beating our trumpet when the whole world has applauded our election commission’s efforts to ensure a fair and violence free poll? Is this pomp and show meant to highlight a new historic occasion that has eliminated the first PM’s Congress party and given a Congress-mukht Bharat? Maybe the BJP and its PM- designate feel that it is a second independence movement to free India this time from Congress colonizers. The euphoria of winning 300+ seats in the recently concluded elections is not a unique or an isolated one as in the past Congress has had a hatrick of humungous wins. Not even the win in the first general elections in 1951-52 was hailed in the way the current victory is celebrated as the triumph of democracy.  Does that mean the nation all these years –including the Vajpayee years- had experienced autocracy and witnessed the defeat of democracy? Why this hullabaloo today as ‘the beginning of a new era’ which is how the media headlines the occasion?

I write this not in anger nor in sadness but with trembling anxiety lest what is trumpeted today as the run of democracy may lead to oligarchy where a political system is governed by a few people. The new PM Narendra Modi has ben blessed with adequate  numbers to prop him to rule without any fetters. The opposition has been blown to smithereens and there will be no opposition worth the name to oppose him in his attempt to govern the way he chooses to. He may make his governance seem artless and ingenuous but his acolytes who want everything to be Modi-fied may push him to do just the opposite to keep with their slogan-‘make everything new’. In a magnificent poem The Hollowmen,  T.S.Eliot describes how a shadow paralyzes all our activites so that we are unable to act, create, respond or even exist:

                                                 Between the idea
                                                 And the reality
                                                 Between the motion
                                                 And the act
                                                 Falls the Shadow
                                                       .  .   ,

                                                       Between the conception
                                                       And the creation
                                                       Between the emotion
                                                       And the response
                                                       Falls the Shadow
                                                        .           .          .

                                                         Between the desire
                                                         And the spasm
                                                         Between the potency
                                                          And the existence
                                                          Between the essence
                                                          And the descent
                                                          Falls the Shadow

Eliot cautions men from becoming hollowmen citing the story of the Heart of Darkness about a colonial Englishman who goes power-hungry in Africa and how things only go downhill from there and how  a group of scarecrow-like individuals who  are hollowmen  contribute to a serious case of moral paralysis.

Modi is the Man of the Moment. He has been invested with insuperable power that makes him almost the God’s chosen man. But if media which had benefitted from him before the elections in its hunger for more benefits tries to deify him, it will put pressure on Modi to cast off that halo and remain people’s man who had been given him their reasoned mandate. May God save Modi from this pretentious bunch of acolytes and bootlickers and help him in the great role that Destiny has accorded him.

The still, sad song of Congress, the modern Prufrock

                                           The still, sad song of Congress, the modern Prufrock     

One hears the Congress is presently engaged in deep introspection after getting drowned in Namosunami.  Introspection is a passive activity that relates to the quiet examination of one's own thoughts, impressions, and feelings, for long periods. No harm since Congress has a long period of exile from the seat of power – at least for five years and maybe for ten years if Modi’s words that ‘ he will not be a  one term PM,’ prove  to be prophetically true.  It is hardly a week since the banishment has officially started for the party and it can well afford the luxury to be in moments of deep contemplation. It is not an arduous task for a party that had shown stupendous silence during the pre-poll days to continue that silence  in the post poll days leaving the word stage to the PM designate who never suffers from paucity of words. But does the Congress expect to get enlightenment at the end of its introspection like the Buddha , wake up and understand the reason behind people’s rejection of the 125 year old GOP and liberate itself from this banishment which seems to be in for a long haul. Hopefully Congress should remember what the Ecclesiastes says:

There is a time for everything

And a Season for every activity under the suns

a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

 a time to weep and a time to laugh,
 a time to mourn and a time to dance,
 a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
 a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
 a time to search and a time to give up,
 a time to keep and a time to throw away,
 a time to tear and a time to mend,
 a time to be silent and a time to speak,
 a time to love and a time to hate,
 a time for war and a time for peace.

Modi had been a one man demolition army that trampled over all other parties. Even his own BJP had been silenced to submission. During the election campaign his roar was powerful than that of the lions in the Gir forest to drown every other voice.  The only thing he asked his anglicized partymen to do was to use the twitter to canvass his case. The people voted for Modi and not for the BJP because he was the only face they could see, the only voice they could hear and the only one who towered as a Brobdingnagian reducing everyone of his opponents including those from his party to a Lilliputian. He changed the political campaign and made it similar to the US presidential campaign and with his masterful oratory, mimicry, mockery and outrageous disregard of factual truths, he triumphantly strode like a colossus all over India decimating all those who dared to oppose him. He contemptuously dismissed the criticism of the pipsqueaks who dared to point out his lack of knowledge of history and geography. After all in his opinion what mattered was ultimate victory at the hustings and not geographical details and historical truths. He is a consummate theatre artist who could effortlessly ease himself into different roles and show a variety of emotions such as self pity, martyred feeling, tearful dramatics, sarcasm and spite and make his audience vicariously experience all of them.  

Can Congress or for that matter any other party rise like phoenix from the ashes? Not in the near future( at least not in the next five years). Grovelling in the dust raised by Modi’s march from Ahmedabad to Delhi via Varanasi, the party has to discover a worthy opponent who can beat Modi in his game of theatrics. It has to find one who has what it takes to be a Modi fighter. The defeated Congress party had one too many intellectuals from Oxbridge and Harvard with exemplary academic credentials, excellence , privilege and exclusiveness. But they failed to put across their work to the people in a language that was simple and comprehensible. Their handicap was lack of knowledge of Hindi. The masses in particular in the Hindi belt wanted to hear someone who can talk their language. But a la Amitabh Bachhan they appeared cut off from the masses as they talked English, walked English and laughed English. Modi on the other hand, talked Hindi, walked Hindi and laughed Hindi. His ability to turn a tea vendor remark and a ‘neechilog’ remark(that had no reference whatsoever to his caste credentials)  on its head and  make his disadvantaged pedigree to his advantage cut a chord with the masses. No wonder all the gargantuan efforts of the Congress to provide food and cash security to the masses could not stand before the emotional pitch that Modi raised.

Will Modi deliver commensurate with his peroration? Will he shed his diatribe and theatricality for statesmanship and civilized language? Will he soar like the seagull of Jonathan Livingstone or fly like Icarus too close to the sun on wax wings and get singed? Will the huge mandate make him humble or conceited? Time alone will tell.  Congress party’s attempt at introspection is as inaudible as the love song of Alfred Prufrock that was never sung. With apologies to Eliot, here are the lines of its sad song that Congress must be mumbling through its moments of introspection.

                               There will be time, there will be time

                               To prepare a face to meet the faces that oppose us;

                               There will be time to learn to match your words with ours,

                               There will be time for you and time for us,

                               And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

                               And for a hundred visions and revisions,

                               Before the inking on the forefingers begins.

Finding My Voice

Amidst the euphoria surrounding the arrival of the new ‘Desh Rakhvala, there have been three brilliant articles – two of them in the Hindu and the third one in the Times of India. The first one ( as it appeared before the other two) deals with urgent reforms needed in the Congress,  the second proffers  sound advice to the PM-designate and the third sees  Cultural Revenge on Liberal  humanists in this stupendous victory of Modi. All three speak not much about the BJP victory as the victory of the new Indian Lincoln whose march to 7 RCR  is similar to the great American’s march to the white House from the log cabin.

These articles have helped me to recover from stupefaction over the drubbing Congress got in the recently concluded elections. A party with a 125 year legacy is now shrunk to just 44 seats in the 543 Lok Sabha.  I had decided to hang my pen( rather  my laptop)and  abjure my passionate canvassing for a leader worthy of India , for a Philosopher-King, for a  cultured, educated , decent, dynamic statesman  who speaks the language of intellect and not emotion, who shuns demagoguery on his race to power and who practices decency and probity in his personal and professional life.

The results were devastating for me, a liberal humanist by education and training, who recognizes the value of a human being as an individual and his right to liberty and happiness.  Modi did not fit into my idea of a leader; neither did Rahul nor Kejriwall. I began to lose faith in our democracy as it had failed to find  a person who could be worthy of the founding fathers of  free India- the noble triumvirate of Gandhi-Nehru- Patel. The results stunned me- not that I did not anticipate a Modi Victory nor a return of the NDA to form the government at the Centre- but the rout of the Congress in sync with Modi’s primary goal of establishing a ‘Congress mukht Bharat’.

The article Cultural Revenge by Santosh Desai, appearing three days after the pronouncement of the results is a brilliant analysis of Modi’s triumph over liberal humanism which often seeks  to erase all discriminations against marginalized people and minorities by highlighting the social divisiveness in the context of  class, religion and gender. Liberal humanists champion the cause of the poor and the weak, seeking an inclusive society and cultivating humanity. Modi’s approach in contrast had been to continue with the cultural mainstream and not bring any earthshaking structural changes in society while promising progress to all within that constituency. This had a great appeal to all sections of society as it provided the comfort of ‘social continuity with an ongoing evolutionary change’.  While the analysis is true to the last detail, it certainly raises questions about the validity of liberal humanism that some of us - sneeringly and contemptuously looked down upon as vapid intellectuals-believe in. Liberal humanism encourages critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). It is also aligned with secularism and espouses  ‘reason, ethics, and social and economic justice, and makes a plea  for science to replace dogma and the supernatural as the basis of morality and decision-making’(Nicolas Walter).But unfortunately, it is today wrongly perceived as a concept of negation of all social structures and religious faiths that form the basis of cultural mainstream. In this hour of Modi’s  triumph, Santosh Desai’s article has  given me the strength   to voice my views on liberal humanism and its responsibility to human governance which  is inclusionary and does not exclude any person by reason of his faith, religion, caste and class.

The boldness to break free of my self- imposed withdrawal and silence was further inspired by GopalKrishna Gandhi’s open letter to Mr.Modi.  In it he voices forth the fears of 69% of the  population who did not vote for Modi’s  BJP even though with just 31% vote share the party had gained humungous majority in the new Parliament.  Mr.Gandhi( truly belonging to the family of the Mahatma) requests Modi to eschew the language of uniformism when speaking to a republic of pluralism,  and give up the vocabulary of “oneness” to an imagination of many-nesses that is special to our nation of such vast diversity. In a statesmanlike address, he advises Modi  to ‘requite the applause of your support-base but, equally, redeem the trust of those who have not supported you … and ‘be Maharana Pratap in your struggle as you conceive it, but be an Akbar in your repose. Be a Savarkar in your heart, if you must, but be an Ambedkar in your mind. Be an RSS-trained believer in Hindutva in your DNA, if you need to be, but be the Wazir-e-Azam of Hindostan that the 69 per cent who did not vote for you, would want you to be.’

 The third article- though it was the first among these three to find a place in the newspaper is by Abhishek Singhvi who talks about the possible reforms that Congress should undertake to regain its lost position. Though I do not wish to enumerate on all those suggestions such as full use of talents available in both the old and the young members of the Congress-that is, merging age with experience, to remain vigilant and wary of rainbow coalition and steer clear of the opportunistic alliances , to encourage the growth of strong leadership at the state level and grass root level etc, I wish to add the most important reform- to give up the party’s crutches on one family. If any of the family member displays qualities of leadership to resuscitate the party, s/he or should be welcomed. Anyone who aspires to be a leader should rise up on her/his merit and not on primogenital rights. This will save the party from charges of dynasty rule and incompetence to boot. If Rahul has failed to deliver on three occasions- in Bihar, UP and in the national elections, to insulate him from attack is going in for another self goal. If Priyanka can show verve and sparkle and has the intelligence to identify and work towards the demands of the new aspirational India, without compromising on inclusive humanism, the party can support her claims to be the leader. Otherwise the party can no longer take umbrage under a banyan tree that does not allow any fresh growth under its shade.

I am emboldened to write this taking cue from three well analyzed pieces of writing. With all modesty, I assert that I am nowhere near the wisdom of GopalKrishna Gandhi, the intellectualism of Santosh Desai and the searing honesty of Abhishek Sighvi.  I write because I feel impelled to write and voice forth my concern  for the survival of Liberal humanism, of the unity and integrity of the nation and of Congress –if not for any other reason, at least for providing good opposition without which democracy will die a slow and certain death.