The Fall and Rise of Icons

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Among the many promises Prime Minister Modi made during the run up to the last general elections in2014 one was to bring a Congress -mukht Bharat. This is one promise he has assiduously followed before and after the elections and has almost succeeded. In the elections, he reduced the Congress to just 44 seats in the lower house (Lok Sabha) of 543. Post elections, the Congress continues to meow with its yet to be depleted majority in the upper house (Rajya Sabha). Modi hopes that it will be just a matter of time before the end of his first term as PM  (and before he begins his second, as he envisions in 2019) to get a full majority in both the houses to enable him to have a freehand  in matters of governance. The PM has prioritized establishing Congress free States as the primary goal to be achieved to push through reforms so that the global economy can be made in India.  Whenever he is in India, he unflaggingly works towards winning State elections that would facilitate entry of his party in large numbers into Rajya Sabha. Either there is a vacuum in the BJP second rung( in fact, the sole occupier of the first rung is the PM)  to bring about the total annihilation of the Congress and other parties who dare to oppose him or it is PM’s no-trust in the capabilities of his ministers that the state elections have been reduced to a straight fight between Modi and the rest.

But how much can one man do even if he has a 56” chest and a stentorian voice that he deftly employs to render in the lowest and the highest pitch  his clarion call to oust Congress at all his election rallies? Further State elections do not take place every second day. PM has to keep his anti-Congress, anti-opposition tirade well cultivated and nurtured even during the election-less days and months by a sustained attack on anything and everything that has even a remote C- connection. PM’s job is certainly unenviable as everyday he has to do a C-section to suck out Congress from Mother India. Hence systematically he attempts to bring down all the icons from the high pedestals they had till now occupied - icons which have been mounted by the Congress.  PM is sufficiently learned in the theory of physics that propounds that a vacuum cannot be artificially produced for if we pump the air from a receiver there still remains the luminiferous ether.  Hence the pulling down of icons will have to be simultaneously replaced by raising new icons so that the pedestals do not remain empty. But the problem is there have not been any icons among the saffronites who had contributed to the freedom struggle as Nehru and Patel had done.

Therefore PM started his first project of constructing the world’s tallest statue for Sardar Patel, lamenting that “Every Indian regrets Sardar Patel did not become the first prime minister. Had he been the first prime minister, the country’s fate and face would have been completely different”, though it is a mystery how he arrived at the statistics that showed every Indian nurses a regret that Patel was not made the first PM. He dexterously spoke about the alleged partisanship between Nehru and Patel as many of the post-independence generation has very little knowledge of these two eminent men and made them believe that the two were adversaries and that Nehru cleverly connived  and pipped Patel at the post. The fact is it was Gandhi who anointed Nehru as the leader to lead the nation.  As Ramchandra Guha, the historian writes: “Patel was himself a lifelong Congressman; indeed, as home minister, it fell to him to ban the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh after the Mahatma’s murder. Second, Nehru and Patel were in fact not rivals but comrades and co-workers. They worked closely together in the Congress from the 1920s to 1947; and even more closely together thereafter, as prime minister and deputy prime minister in the first government of free India.” But by pitting Patel against Nehru, PM laid the foundation for re-writing post-independent history of India and replacing the icon who had been revered all through the last 67 years prior to his  own elevation as the PM.

Pulling down an icon is not easy unless it is followed by pulling down all institutions established in its name and memory. Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) has been replaced by AMRUT and Smart City. Nehru’s visionary idea of establishing a Planning Commission to formulate five year economic plans for the nation has now been renamed Niti Ayog, though PM wanted to scrap it altogether. This scrapping is not so much about introducing a new vision of Economics, but against all the social, economic and political legacy of Nehru. The real reason is pure anti-Nehruvianism. In a diatribe against Nehru, Subramanian Swamy,  (the present voice of the PM and one of the new entrants into the BJP)  said:  “Today, due to what I call as (sic) Nehruism, the nation is at the weakest. India’s adrenalin has almost been drained… Indians have been programmed by Nehruism to be bereft of patriotic feelings and Nehruism is capitulation for personal aggrandisement.”  The Nehru Memorial that was set up to spread Nehru’s ideas and keep alive the awareness of Freedom struggle and the history of Modern India has now been re-planned as a museum of governance, deflecting from the purpose for which it was set up- to house the personalia, memorabilia, mementos and other objects pertaining to Nehru’s life and the Indian freedom movement.

If Nehru got stripped of his iconic status, worse befell his successors who belonged to his dynasty. The new government decided to discontinue the stamps bearing Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress had been guilty of over iconing the Nehru-Gandhi family and as its influence begun to pale, new icons found their way like the resustication of Balasaheb Ambedkar by Mayavati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, of Ram Manohar Lohia by Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Socialst party. But PM and his BJP have outdone them all- not by adding new icons , but by first dismantling the old ones and erecting new ones. There are no new icons in modern times unless it is a Tendulkar or an Amitabh Bachhan or an evergreen DevAnand to name a few non- political stars.  The new Government had to go back in time to idolize Netaji Bose whose fiery patriotism in favour of armed revolution (that did not yield much to the freedom struggle) was in opposition to Gandhiji’s non-violence that Nehru inherited, to elevate Ambedkar from being a Dalit idol to a national hero (though in typical BJP fashion, one part of BJP  follows Ambedkar and opposes reservation based on caste system while for the immediate purpose of winning  the Bihar elections, PM and his mentored ministers speak in favour of the continuance of reservations).It is also a great paradox that PM has appropriated both Gandhi and Ambedkar as the new icons though the two were as different as chalk and cheese. 

But it is not enough to pull down Nehru from his iconic status, but to show him out to be a sly, mean trickster, a con-man, a charlatan –name what you will. The big announcement of declassifying Netaji files was enough to show Nehru as an idol with clay feet, but worse it was meant to show him as a person without character. Gandhi for whom the BJP has suddenly found a new surge of veneration ( after a member of its parent organization RSS had assassinated him)had written about the petty attempts of men to invent new icons by humiliating the old ones: “It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”  The revival of interest in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s sudden death is a veiled innuendo about the dynasty’s(read Nehru’s) attempt to perpetuate his dynasty’s hold on the PM’s chair. Whether Nehru a true liberal and democrat ever thought of dynastic rule or not, the drift of the indirect and malicious insinuation could not go unnoticed.

Every day new icons are suddenly brought to focus to fill the empty space after the fall of the earlier icons. There is a frenetic search to unearth new icons from its cadre though none can  match the likes of Gandhi, Patel and Nehru  who worked for the development and welfare of the country together despite differences in their thinking and attitude. It is in their nobility and generosity to accommodate and unify diverse views that they succeeded in their single minded objective to free India from the British rule. They were true democrats venerated for their liberality of spirit and temperament, of their magnanimity and large-heartedness. Our generation is slowly veering towards intolerance and bigotry. The values of liberality, open-mindedness and acceptance of the ‘other’ who differs from one’s views have become values of the past.

This raises a pertinent question as to why we need icons? This question gains greater relevance as the modern age neither values  the heroes of the past nor are there any heroes  in the present  of the stature of  Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, -to name a few of our freedom fighters.  We do not have a Tagore or an Aurobindo who were our literary and spiritual icons.  Congress was fortunate to have discovered genuine heroes of those days who had contributed to the freedom struggle. While Gandhi towered over every other Indian as an icon of equality, freedom and love- the values we need all the time forever, Nehru was an iconic politician, statesman and idealist, who was the architect of Modern India  and who propelled India towards the advancement of science and technology by setting up IITs and institutes of Science for research. It is a fallacy to suggest that Congress made an icon out of Nehru; he was an icon in the eyes of his people because he had contributed not only to the freedom struggle but subsequently to the concretization of a secular, pluralistic, modern India. But the foolish and partisan overplaying of the Nehru-Gandhi family by Congress in the post-Nehru era, to the total neglect of anyone who was outside the dynasty (that includes Patel) has its backlash today in the uprooting of the great icons of the past and planting of fresh icons in an age when hero worship is limited to an orchestrated euphoria over individual excellence in the fields of sports, fashion, pop music, cinema or the small screen.  Will the fresh icons stand the test of time and will they have the sustaining power to match the temporary adulation of a few celebrities of the present times?

 The question once more veers round the relevance of icons in the present century. This hinges on the basic question- who is an icon? The term has been overused to refer to anyone who displays virtuosity in any field that is lacking in the vast majority of common people. Unlike in the past where an icon represented a lasting and enduring symbol of qualities of the mind and the heart,  of a person whose sphere of influence and inspiration raised every ordinary man and woman  to a higher plane of thought and action,  of path breakers and torch bearers who left their indelible footprints on the sands of time, the present day icons have a limited shelf life. A Dhoni stays as a cricketting icon till the time he lofts the World cup and he is forgotten the moment the cup is lofted by another. Barring an Amitabh Bachchan or a Lata Mangeshkar or a Rehman or a Tendulkar  who have straddled time with their virtuosity in their respective fields of cinema, music and cricket, the others cannot claim to the status of an icon , to be venerated by people of all times and ages. The sphere of influence of these icons is certainly unlimited and it gives momentary excitement to millions of people who lead a pedestrian life, satiating their hunger for excellence that is denied to them. But these modern day icons may inspire a few, but not the whole society to raise themselves from their mediocrity to a loftier plane of existence. When bracketted with the earlier icons, we find that the values they preached and practiced made millions of people follow in their footsteps. History teaches the value of such icons who inspired a large number of people to make the world a better place to live.  When we forget these icons, when we try to pull them down, when we substitute them with new icons –some of whom would have limited influence –then we let go of the history of Man and his civilization. We need icons now more than at any other time but this cannot be done by disbanding the old and replacing them with new ones. A simultaneous assimilation of old and new icons that inspire a large number of people can reverse the listlessness and apathy  of the modern generation that feels a sense of barrenness in the absence  of enduring and life inspiring heroes in its midst..