Iconic Mistakes
One of the wisest quotes , drilled into us from our childhood is “When you make a mistake, there are only three
things you should ever do about it- admit it, learn from it and don’t repeat
it.” Let us be honest. How many of us can claim with all humility that s/he
has never made a mistake in life? How many of us have had the courage to own our mistake
and regret it? How many of us vowed (to oneself and not to the world outside)
that such a mistake will not be repeated?
The answer unfortunately will be none. We are not wingless angels on
earth. We cannot be human beings if we don’t make mistakes. Without sounding
trite or uniquely original, we can affirm the truth that life is a binary
programme-a pre-compiled, pre-linked
program that is ready
to run under a given
operating system whose functioning is
beyond the ken of our knowledge and reason. Light and darkness, day and night,
sun and moon, winter and summer, heat and cold… life goes through the binary
motions with a precision that we can never match through our actions. The same
binary is in operation in being human and making mistakes. Just as day cannot
be without night, light cannot be without darkness, similarly being human
cannot be without committing mistakes.
Albert Einstein says “A person who never
made a mistake, never tried anything new.” So it is only the doers who commit
mistake. The doer is the one who acts and in the course of that action, there
is every possibility of something going wrong. Action is co-existent with
mistakes. This is true of all people, but more so of those who are in politics
and specially in the helm of governance. Today every leader despite
his/her contribution is pilloried and shown as having feet of clay. It is a sad
fact of life that we love to rivet on the feet and look for the clay image than
on the head and look for the golden image. We love to gossip about people’s faults-
especially people with reputation- and feel vicarious pleasure to bring them
down their pedestal. Maybe it gives us a psychological consolation that they
too are like us, low down whom we can meet almost eye to eye. The media is
happy to have sound bytes from either side of the opposition about past goody turned
present baddy. The bringing down of a hero and the rising up of another in
his/her place is the new snake and ladder game played by politicians. By this
reckoning, we find Nehru sliding down the snake, unable to match Sardar Patel
moving up the ladder. Historyhas truthful details of the two great statesmen,
steering the nation together in its early days of independence despite having a
difference of views on a few major issues. The correspondence between the two
leaders show the mutual respect and regard they had, far different from the
uncivil discourse of political leaders of today. The Congress after Nehru is accused of
showing disrespect to Sardar Patel by not observing his birth/death
anniversaries. Why only Sardar Patel? Why not Abul Kalam Azad? Why not Rajaji? Why not Rafi Ahmed Kidwai? Why not C.D. Deshmukh, John Mathai, Shanmugam Chetty,
V.K Menon etc, all cabinet ministers of Nehru? Were they not freedom fighters?
Did they not contribute or was their contribution negligible? The truth is there was no rivalry among them
as they worked as a team to bring up a nation soon after independence. Even today all policies, decisions and actions
of the government are attributed to only one person, the Prime Minister. The attack on Congress and the Gandhi family
has certainly a ring of truth as all schemes post Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi have been named after them.
The legacy of Sardar Patel was limited to his statue in the Parliament House
and to naming a major road in Lutyen’s Delhi. But to appropriate Sardar by the
new rulers is more to bring down a great statesman like Nehru who had enjoyed
the best of relations with Sardar Patel. The two could differ on issues but had
mutual respected for each other’s point of view.
Today denigration of Nehru is a sad
reflection of political and ideological
intolerance. Nehru’s Kashmir policy, his misplaced trust on China, his
socialist pattern of society that was necessary at that time for lifting
millions of poor people from abject poverty are questioned, fifty three years
after his demise and he is criticized for his ‘alleged’ mistakes. If Kashmir is burning today, it
is because of Nehru’s fault. If China’s trespass into Indian territory is now happening, it is Nehru’s fault. So also Mrs.
Gandhi is seen as a demon who proclaimed emergency. Her victory over Pakistan,
her liberation of Bangladesh, her magnanimity in releasing 90,000 Pakistan
soldiers after the war, her acceptance of her folly of enforcing emergency are
not remembered . She is one in a million who admitted her mistake, revoked
emergency and paid the price for imposing emergency by losing elections. Her
coming back to power affirms the truth that no leader remains mistake proof and is generously forgiven. But to harp on the mistake is
the inability to overcome personal dislike and bias against the person. When we
act, we make mistakes somewhere at some point. That does not mean the person
who made a mistake must pay for it for the rest of his/her life. Sometimes even
good people make bad choices. It does not mean s/he is bad. It is just the
person is only human. We have to accept that sometimes we make bad decisions,
but as it is said, “making mistakes is better than faking perfection.”
It is time that we get out of personal
biases and prejudices and be a trifle more polite and courteous as it existed
at the time of Nehru and Patel. The Tamil proverb says it all “It is easy to
bring down the nest than build it.” We are too quick and immature to pull down
people from their rightful place in history for cheap thrill and sensationalism.
Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, Ambedkar… the list is exhaustive who had
assiduously built a nation to free it from the birth pangs. During the course
of governance, there had been mistakes which today in hindsight we perceive.
Nehru realized his naivety in trusting China, Mrs.Gandhi realized her folly of
violating the democratic fibre of the nation, even Dr.Manmohan Singh must have
felt the mistake of allowing his coalition partners too much of license to
indulge in scam activities. To pillory
icons and bring them down is to give into animal excitement and irrational
sensationalism. The pejorative phrase “Policy Paralysis” will be the only result
as leaders will refuse to take action because every action is likely to become
suspect as it holds a hidden unethical possibility. The opposition today and
the opposition of the past may have to curb their instinctive urge to see
ghosts where there are none or to impute corruption to genuine policy mistakes
and learn not to expect that every task is to be done with perfection. Let us
remember the wise saying of Bernard Shaw: “ A life spent making mistakes is not
only more honourable but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing.”
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