The cult of the strongman

RECENT events had me thinking about Giulio Alberoni, who lived in the 18th century and who Wikipedia describes as an Italian cardinal and statesman.

To be honest, I had forgotten his name; I was reading Ramchandra Guha’s take on the Narendra Modi extravaganza at the Motera Stadium (and this conversation with Karan Thapar) when I tripped over a distant memory of some guy who had literally kissed arse to advance his own career. A few moments with a search engine and I found the story, which is originally sourced to the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, and has since been mined and reproduced in several essays and books. Here it is:

Louis Joseph, the Duke de Vendome, was a highly-rated French general who was one of the top commanders during the War of Spanish Succession. He was also unbelievably arrogant — one of his ‘idiosyncrasies’ being to take his portable toilet into the room where he usually held court, and to park himself bare-arsed on the potty while receiving official visits.

One day, a bishop deputed by Francesco Farnese, then Duke of Parma, came to meet Vendome to discuss some official business. The general was, as usual, on his potty; while the ducal ambassador was speaking he rose, turned his back to the bishop, and wiped his arse.

The disgusted bishop walked out and told the duke that he would never go to meet Vendome again, no matter how urgent the matter. The duke asked him to find a substitute; the bishop nominated Giulio Alberoni, who had through assiduous use of flattery and the other arts of sycophancy risen from the position of bellringer in a local church to a position in the household of the bishop.

Alberoni duly went to meet Vendome, who as per usual was on his potty. During the meeting, Vendome got up, turned his back to Alberoni, and ostentatiously wiped his arse. At which Alberoni exclaimed: ‘O culo d’angelo‘ (Oh, the arse of an angel), ran forward, and reportedly kissed Vendome’s arse.

Unsurprisingly, Vendome gave Alberoni a place on his staff as secretary. Alberoni helped push the claims of Philip V to the French throne; he became a Count and a royal favorite at court (History does not say whether he had to kiss Philip’s arse as well, but it does record that over the years he rose to a greater position of eminence than the bishop who had given him his initial assignment).

How many Alberonis can you count in, say, the Union Cabinet?

CHANGING the subject completely (Not!), the recent events at the Motera Stadium, where the Gujarat Cricket Association organized a cringe-inducing celebration of ’75 years of cricket friendship with Australia’, the climax of which was BCCI secretary Jay Shah presenting Narendra Modi with a picture of Narendra Modi, is the gift that goes on giving. I’d chronicled some of it in an earlier post; since then, Gideon Haigh apparently went on a treasure hunt and unearthed the vehicle in which the two prime ministers had been driven on a “lap of honour”, and the members of the Australian press had a ball. Like, so:

Geoff Lemon, in The Guardian, is the latest to pour vitriol — deservedly — on the bizarre event. Sample passage:

For a leader who refuses to do interviews or press conferences, governing by video broadcast and by public appearance is the alternative. Kirribilli does not offer the star power of the White House, but Albanese’s visit is still an opportunity to show Modi as a statesman, a taster ahead of the G20 summit to be held in New Delhi in September. Indian airports are full of posters advertising this, some of them describing India as “the mother of democracy”. The Ancient Greeks might file a copyright claim.

Geoff Lemon, The Guardian

I get the need for propaganda; I get why a party with nothing substantial to show for nine years in power and counting pulls out all the stops to peg its appeal on one man and why, therefore, that man has to be elevated from the status of soi disant ‘pradhan sewak’ to the latest and greatest entry in the pantheon of deities. (While on which, for someone who apparently has a visceral hatred of Nehru, it’s amazing how much he steals from India’s first prime minister — it was Nehru, during his first I-Day speech, who called himself the ‘pratham sewak’ of the country.)

So yeah, I get propaganda. And I get the regime’s modus operandi, which is straight out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook. The Nazi Minister for Propaganda, in his bullet-pointed masterplan, includes the following: (a) Ensure the constant visibility of the leader; and (b) Use rallies, slogans, symbols and icons (to which, add ‘inaugurations’ — as I write this, Modi is in Karnataka inaugurating a Mysuru-Bangalore highway, a section of which was already in use these last several months and other sections of which are still under construction).

The founding fathers of the RSS made no secret of their admiration for Hitler and the Nazi ideology; however, any reference to Nazis in the current context makes the BJP faithful see red. Why, though, when they so blatantly copy the Nazi propaganda playbook?

For example, take Modi’s deliberate avoidance of all open media interactions, and his refusal to utter a word about any of the real problems that plague the country. China? Not a yip. Adani? Mum’s the word. The economy, rising unemployment, skyrocketing cost of living, the country’s rapid fall in almost every single global index? Zip.

That is straight out of a well-documented Hitler tactic. Having elevated himself to the status of a deity, Hitler identified himself with his “miracles” (which, by the way, was a word regularly employed by the Goebbels propaganda machine to describe his successes). Thus, he strutted on stage during the spectacular reception organized in his honor in Berlin after the fall of France; but in the aftermath of Stalingrad, he kept himself well away from the public eye.

Or consider the ‘One Nation One Whatever’ slogans that have been proliferating of late — remember ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer? (Modi’s media managers have, in one of those rare moments of restraint, refrained from adding ‘One Leader’ to the many slogans beginning with ‘One Nation’, realizing that it goes without saying.)

Consider, also, Modi’s fondness for the cameras, and the innumerable pictures of him that pepper both mainstream and social media. Again, Hitler — who personally approved all paintings and photographs of his which made it to the public domain. In 1936, over 2.5 million copies of an album titled Adolf Hitler: Pictures of the Life of the Fuhrer were published, containing images of Hitler and tributes written by Nazi leaders (There was also The Hitler No One Knows, a collection of photographs of Hitler in his “private moments”, which reminds me of Modi with his mom, Modi meditating in a cave that contained only a palette bed and a photographer, Modi feeding peacocks…).

(In a precursor to the “interactivity” that is the holy grail in today’s social media age, those who bought the Life in Pictures album could add to it by collecting and pasting the Hitler images that were given away on every purchase of a packet of cigarettes — mercifully, Modi’s propaganda team appears to not have read that chapter yet).

Heck, the BJP even borrowed the Nazi idea of deifying the leader through motion pictures. Here, if you can stomach it, watch Leni Riefenstahl’s remarkable film that showcases the 1934 Nuremberg rally and then watch the Omung Kumar-helmed Vivek Oberoi movie titled, with a total absence of subtlety, PM Narendra Modi. (Oh, and the latest addition to a packed Evernote folder titled ‘sycophants’ is this entry from today)

What the Nazi party sold then, what the BJP is selling today, is a cult centered around an individual whose main characteristic is infallibility (Modi ne kiya hai toh sahi hoga). Hermann Goring, in a speech in 1941, said “We National Socialists declare with complete conviction that for us, the Fuhrer is infallible in all political and other matters that affect the people’s national and social interests.”

I used the word “cult” deliberately, because what we are witnessing is the creation of a cult centered around the myth of an infallible leader, a demigod. And that is no accident, but yet another page borrowed from the Nazi playbook. Speaking to party propagandists in 1926, Goebbels drove the message home about the need to create a messiah: “You will never find millions of people who will give their lives for an economic program. But millions of people are willing to die for a gospel – and our movement is increasingly becoming such a gospel.”

I’m indebted for some of these anecdotes to the book Bending Spines: The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and The German Democratic Republic, by Randall L Bytwerk. Alongside Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works and Edward Bernays’s Propaganda, Bytwerk’s book is a must-read if you want to understand what is happening in, and to, this country and its people.

And we are all willing (or, at best, unwitting) partners in this exercise. Bytwerk in his book draws on the earlier work of French philosopher, sociologist and professor Jacques Ellul, who made an extensive study of propaganda and who defined it thus:

Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization.

Jacques Ellul in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

Ellul made the point that propaganda is not only manifest in the obvious devices — rallies, posters, etc — but also in a wider social context that includes education and the arts. And this, he argues, would not be possible without the consent of the consumer, the propagandee.

The propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provides the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely leads himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without this previous, implicit consent, without this need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread. There is not just a wicket propagandist at work who sets up means to ensnare the innocent citizen. Rather, there is a citizen who craves propaganda from the bottom of his being and a propagandist who responds to this craving. In other words, propaganda fills needs both for the propagandists and the propagandees.

Jacques Ellul, quoted by Randall Bytwerk

Think back to late 2013-early 2014. Remember how we all moaned about how “weak” Dr Manmohan Singh was, how India in its hour of destiny needed a “strong leader” who could lead the country to its rightful place on the world stage? The fault, dear Brutus…

Tailpiece: For the second time in a row, this is not the post I originally intended to write (that one is on the upcoming Karnataka elections, and I’ll get to that sometime this coming week). The prompt for this one came while I was going through my collection of clippings, and saw two clips in fairly close proximity to one another.

The first is an analysis of the suspension of the FCRA license for the think-tank Centre for Policy Research. (By the way, for a party that keeps banging on about the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, the BJP is no slouch when it comes to using the tools Gandhi had forged — the FCRA came into being in 1976, as the then prime minister’s response to her apprehensions that the “foreign hand” was interfering in India’s internal affairs).

And the second clip is about a new think-tank that has suddenly sprung up from out of the blue. It is called The Centre for Narendra Modi Studies — and its website is well worth spending some time on. Its ‘About’ page begins with this promising gambit:

The sun gives light to the world without soliciting. The moon illuminates the lily without asking. No one asks, still the clouds produce rain. Similarly, a sage-hearted man is always ready to help others without show-off.

From The Centre for Narendra Modi Studies website

You don’t need to be told who the “sage-hearted man” is, right? Read on, if you have a strong stomach. Then go through the publications. Don’t bother with sections such as New India and Nation First — those pages are blank. The database and the Namo Kendra, though — go see for yourself, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

Also noted — that the Delhi police recently denied permission to hold a seminar on fascism

I’ll leave you with a link, and a chart below (I found this in my Evernote folder, but I seem to have not noted down the attribution, sorry) which you will find useful as a lens to view contemporary headlines thru.

Reading List

No long post till Monday. In the interim, a running list of good reads salvaged from the net, which I will keep updating over the weekend. First up, Sharda Ugra on the smoke-and-mirrors show at the Motera stadium in Ahmedabad (it was “Motera” to cricket fans when it was actually the Vallabhbhai Patel stadium, and I see no reason to change now).

You know the Ahmedabad summer has turned brutal when mirages begin to pop up on city roads. Horizons shimmer seductively, tricking the mind and the eye, sending them stumbling around trying to separate illusion from what is real. Somewhat like what was built around the first day of the India v Australia Test at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Thursday. It’s not peak summer yet, but the Gujarat Cricket Association (GCA) and the Star Sports network worked diligently to ensure that a series of mirages danced before our eyes around this Test.

Sharda Ugra for The Mojo Story

As the protests against the new law escalated, members of Narendra Modi’s party did nothing to calm tensions. On 3 January, a member of the government warned Muslims that Hindus made up 80% of India’s population, while they were only 20%. Two weeks after that, government minister Anurag Thakur roused crowds at an election rally in Delhi with the slogan: “
Shoot the traitors.” And on 23 February, the day before Ahmed heard the chanting men passing his house, Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader from east Delhi, told police that if they failed to remove anti-CAA protesters from Jafrabad, a neighbourhood not far from Bhagirathi Vihar, he and his supporters would take to the streets and do it themselves. Standing next to Mishra, 
like a bodyguard, was the deputy commissioner of police for north-east Delhi. To observers familiar with India’s grim history of communal violence, it was clear what would come next.

Rahul Bhatia for The Guardian

The Delhi riots, which followed in the wake of the anti-CAA riots, is an episode the current regime would like to put behind it — mainly because the multitude of cases filed by the Delhi police against students and activists (while ignoring the hate speech that triggered violence) is unraveling in the courts. Against that background, read Rahul Bhatia’s beautifully reported piece, linked above, on the travails of a Muslim who became a witness against the alleged perpetrators of the violence.

Item: Former Australian PM Tony Abbott balances out Gideon Haigh’s scathing piece in The Australian the other day, with this panegyric to Modi. Was waiting for this, actually, ever since I heard that when Haigh’s piece was published, the upper reaches of The Australian’s management went into a tizzy and began discussing damage control measures.

Speaking of Gideon Haigh, the writer seems hell-bent on ensuring that he is black-listed when it comes to visas to visit India, going forward. (I’d mailed him this thought a few days back; his response was “I was surprised they gave me a visa this time”).

Here is a clip from his piece on the first day of the fourth Test:

In the presence of Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese, the day did not start out that way. Modi Stadium, the world’s largest cricket ground, is very much in Modi’s spirit: stern, joyless, heavy on the saffron.

Like the measurements of Modi’s Putinesque chest, reports of its capacity vary. Is it 110,000? Is it 130,000? In India’s Hindu triumphalist press it’s probably a million, and anyone saying otherwise is guilty of treason. The views are excellent, except in the press box, distant and obstructed — the view from which Modi looks best too.

The ground was about half-full at 8.37am as festivities began, with Ravi Shastri booming greeting from the microphone he arguably hardly needs. As the teams had been confined to the nets for their warm-ups so the prime ministers could be entertained by dancers and felicitated by minions, the cricket presently went out of focus.

Gideon Haigh, in The Australian

More as we go along…

Nothing succeeds like excess

On 1 March 2021, ISRO launched the nanosatellite PSLV-C51 from Sriharikota.

Its payload included 18 Indian satellites and one — Amazonia-1 — from Brazil. Of the 17 Indian satellites, one — Satish Dhawan SAT or SDSAT — was built by Space Kidz India, a Chennai-based startup that aims to promote the study of space science among students. It had some special features.

SDSAT had some unique features. A digital copy of the Bhagawad Gita in an SD card was part of the payload. The names of ISRO chairman Dr K Sivan and scientific secretary Dr R Umamaheshwaran were engraved on the bottom panel.

And — this is where it gets really special — a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was engraved on the top panel, with his name engraved below the image for anyone out there in outer space who may not otherwise recognize the visage of the Vishwaguru.

“This,” an SKI statement at the time read, “is to show solidarity and gratitude for his (Modi’s) Aatmanirbhar initiative and space privatization.”

A few days prior, on February 24, the then President of India Ram Nath Kovind presided over the renaming of the refurbished Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium (more commonly referred to as the Motera Stadium) in Ahmedabad, which would henceforth be known as the Narendra Modi Stadium.

The Modi Stadium today witnessed India’s PM Modi and Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese taking a “lap of honor” — for what accomplishment, we have not been told — in a specially decorated vehicle before the start of the fourth and final Test of the ongoing series. Video embedded below, because why should I be the only one to squirm at the sight of those stumps and cricket bats? (Seriously, though, who designs the backdrops for Modi events — Vivek Agnihotri’s set designer?)

"Lap of honour" in a chariot by the visiting Australian PM Anthony Albanese and Indian PM Narendra Modi – at the Narendra Modi Stadium. pic.twitter.com/rHEQXuZXwp

— Seema Chishti (@seemay) March 9, 2023

And then came this: A beaming Narendra Modi receiving a picture of Narendra Modi from a beaming BCCI secretary Jay Shah at a function organized in Narendra Modi Stadium. (According to the BCCI, Shah gave Modi the “artwork” to “celebrate 75 years of friendship with Australia through cricket”. I swear you can’t make this shit up!)

When I pointed this out to my camera-shy wife earlier this morning, she tried devil’s advocacy. “Modi wouldn’t have asked for this, no?” she said, arguing the case that this was the over-the-top work of a more than ordinarily zealous sycophant.

Maybe. Then again, maybe not — prime ministerial events are planned down to the last detail and all appropriate approvals are obtained ahead of time, and that is particularly true of this prime minister. And I do mean every last detail. Remember this?:

An empty ambulance waited for 4 min for Modi's convoy so he can do the typical ambulance stunt again.

But this time Congress workers were ready to capture & expose the stunt 🔥 pic.twitter.com/lzi8b4y7Bh

— Ankit Mayank (@mr_mayank) December 1, 2022

So, no, I don’t think this was Jay Shah being overly obsequious. But even if that were the case, my wife’s argument misses the point while making the point: sycophants do what they know will please their authoritarian overlord.

So having suggested just the other day that Modi suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, am I now diagnosing him as an authoritarian?

Given the times we live in, there is a book that should be mandatory reading: How Democracies Die, by Harvard professors Steven Levistky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2019, the book argues that democracies don’t always get extinguished by coups; that in modern times, a democracy is more likely to die the death of the thousand cuts, beginning with the election of an authoritarian leader who goes on to abuse governmental power and to use the instruments of the state to totally decimate the opposition.

In the first chapter, the authors refer to German-born political scientist Juan Linz, who as Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale made a name for his seminal work on authoritarian political regimes.

Linz in his book The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes proposed a litmus test to identify authoritarians but never got down to actually creating that test. Levitsky and Ziblatt fill that gap and, in their book, provide a chart to help identify authoritarian behavior. Here it is:

Keep the chart handy as you trawl your go-to news sources, and decide for yourself how many of these boxes the Modi-led government ticks, or not.

PostScript: This is not the column I intended to write today, but it will do while I do some digging to unearth the dots I mean to connect. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with two reads. The first is by Shankarshan Thakur, and fits the ‘nothing succeeds like excess’ theme of this post. Here is a clip:

Modi is the master of populist subterfuge; we often behave like a slavish confederacy of dunces. He has amplified a routine turn at a multilateral table into a thing of rare recognition and reward and we have allowed ourselves to turn even headier in Modi worship. The official theme of India’s presidency year is: ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’. The way we are meant to read it is: ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future, One Leader — Vishwaguru Modiji’. Onward to 2024 on a new global high! Who cares that the G20 is a torn and tattered entity in India’s presidency year? What matters is who chairs those tatters. Internationally, G20 lies torpedoed by differences; domestically, it has been turned into a cracker of a campaign slogan for Modi and we are in the throes of celebration.

Shankarshan Thakur in The Telegraph

The other is a piece in The Australian by premier cricket writer Gideon Haigh (unfortunately, behind a paywall) titled Why Are We Tolerating The Intolerant? Clips:

India’s Gujarat being a dry state, you won’t be able to avail yourself of a beer at the fourth Test in Ahmedabad. But if you like your cricket with a side serve of fascistic ostentation, the climax of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Ahmedabad will be right up your alley.

…

Passing through the atrium of Modi Stadium, one gazes up at giant images of Modi and Shah, in their familiar double act as narcissist and enabler. They are quite the partnership, and this Test, and this stadium, play to their strengths in staging spectacles of power.

The pair have also honed the time-honored repertoire of political strongmen everywhere: intimidation of rivals, subversion of institutions, falsifications of history, manufacture of conspiracies, and the pretence that criticism of their rule is a wound to national pride…

Needless to say, Modi takes the same attitude to the media as Tommy Docherty: “There’s a place for the press but they haven’t dug it yet.”

I’m not sure I should have quoted from a just-published piece at such length, but this is a piece I wish everyone could read. In it, Haigh asks a simple question: Why is Australia pandering to the ego of a narcisstic authoritarian? (The simple answer is, of course, trade — where the balance is heavily weighted in favour of Australia. But then, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the champions of freedom and democracy in the West turn a blind eye to Modi’s more reprehensible actions because it suits their self-interest — Haigh, I suspect, was asking the question rhetorically.

Gideon Haigh, in The Australian

Right, see you back here in a couple of days.

PPS: Shortly after I posted this, I noticed that several folks have shared screenshots of Haigh’s full article on Twitter. So, here:

Gideon Haigh's article prompted by the Ahmedabad Test, in three images.
Sorry, Gideon, for not respecting the Australian's paywall. But this deserves to be widely read.@EssexWomble @TagoMago86 @bristlingtree @AasimKh11452462 @drpsalil @baatonkebhoot pic.twitter.com/ZqMCj2b5wT

— Dilip D'Souza (@DeathEndsFun) March 9, 2023

Match ka mujrim

In my Morning Context column this month, I wrote about India’s semifinal exit at the Women’s World T20 championship and the narratives that proliferated in the wake of that defeat.

Harmanpreet Kaur (who was hospitalised with fever the evening before, and who played on a diet of paracetamol) was too casual in taking the second run. The fielders were crap — misfields gave away 20 or so runs; Meg Lanning was dropped shortly after she opened her account… Our lower order batters didn’t keep their nerve once Kaur got out…

Fair points, all of them — except that they count the trees while missing the forest. And alongside it runs a parallel narrative: that the WPL, which began on March 4, is the solution to all these ills; that the domestic league will produce so much talent that we will soon draw level with, and overtake, serial champions Australia.

I’ve been arguing for a while that the Indian women have the potential to be world-beaters — but the WPL is in and of itself not the solution the sport needs, any more than the IPL was for the men. There have been seven editions of the World T20 championships since the IPL started back in 2008 — and the Indian men haven’t one a single one of them. QED).

The crux of my piece is this: “In the past decade, the Indian women’s team has churned through as many as six different coaches, some of them holding office more than once. Anju Jain (2011-2013); Tushar Arothe (2013-2014); Purnima Rao (2014-2017); Arothe again (2017-2018); Ramesh Powar (2018); WV Raman (2018-2021); Powar again (2021-2022) and, taking office just a little over a month before the World T20, Hrishikesh Kanitkar, who as batting coach doubled up as head coach because the BCCI couldn’t be bothered to appoint one.”

It’s a fairly simple argument, really — it is not high-profile domestic tournaments that will help you build a team, but steady, focussed, year-round effort not just by the players but also by the board.

Here is the piece (It’s behind a paywall, apologies to those of you who are not subscribers).

While on that, I’d written about the WPL in the previous edition of the column as well, focussing on the opportunities waiting for a smart board to take advantage of. And there is also this excellent Sharda Ugra piece in the Hindustan Times, where she talks of how the women’s team has gone from being a curiosity to be patronised to earning a growing fan base in its own right.

Also read this Forbes piece on how the WPL can build value over the coming years.

Hindtuva’s Trojan Horse

Rahul Gandhi recently went to Cambridge — and the right-wing ecosystem went apeshit.

Come to think about it, he doesn’t have to do much to produce that result. Grow a beard, hug his mother, kiss his sister, eat a meal in a dhaba — it is all grist for the likes of ‘Minister for Rahul Gandhi’ Smriti Irani and other luminaries to go nuts-r-us. (And nuts is the operative word — sample this, and this). But even by the standards of this ecosystem, the recent blow-up was pure bananas.

The case against him is, apparently, that in course of a talk in Cambridge he referred to India as a union of states. It’s not the first time he has said this — it is one of the talking points he regularly employs to push back against the BJP’s tendency to flip a middle finger at the concept of federalism and to push its One Nation One Bullshit (okay I made that last part up) agenda.

According to the right wing, though, Rahul Gandhi’s statement is yet another example of his ignorance, exacerbated by the fact that he was badmouthing the country while on foreign soil. I generally weed out these threads when they begin to sprout, but my eye was caught by an exchange on Twitter between journalist Ravi Nair and a retired Major General of the Indian army.

It’s not that a senior army official, who passed out of the NDA on the back of an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, seems blissfully unaware that literally the first line of that document reads: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. (In the Major General’s defence, he only promised to protect the Constitution, he did not promise to read it.)

It is not that the ex-army official did not know that the Constitution defines India as a Union of States — it is that an officer of that seniority, from an outfit that is, or used to be, completely apolitical, was playing the part of a two-rupee troll on Twitter.

In other recent news, an avowed BJP supporter known for communally-charged comments was shoe-horned into the post of Additional Judge of the Madras High Court.

The Shinde-Fadnavis government in Maharashtra appointed Rashmi Shukla to the post of DG, SSB. Here is why it is an issue.

Elsewhere a judge of the Allahabad High Court, in an actual judgment, quoted extensively from various Hindu myths and legends and deemed that anyone who kills a cow or allows others to kill them “is deemed to rot in hell”. He even specified the duration of that incarceration — “as many years as there are hairs upon his body” (an incentive, if you needed one, to go in for the sort of full-body wax so popular among our Bollywood stars).

WAY back in 1998 I was on the road, covering various aspects of the election campaign of that year. I ended up in Baramati the day before campaigning was to end and sought an interview. It was early morning; Pawar was about to set out on a round of the surrounding villages before ending his campaign with a rally in Baramati town. He was in one of his expansive moods that day — instead of the half-hour sit-down interview I’d angled for, he asked me to join him in his Pajero and do the rounds with him.

It was one of those rare occasions when you find an articulate, informed politician in a mood to discuss anything and everything, with no restrictions (Here is part 1 of that interview, and part 2).

During that campaign, he had repeatedly called out the RSS, not Pakistan, as India’s biggest enemy. The subject came up during our chat; that segment is reproduced here in full:

Talking of mistakes, a very senior BJP leader said that the Congress made a big one when it didn’t allow the Vajpayee government to survive the vote of confidence… Why?

Pawar: The argument I heard was that if the Congress had abstained, the Vajpayee government would have survived the vote of confidence. But being in a minority, it would not have been able to achieve anything at all, and in time it would have fallen. And with its fall, the stability plank would have been lost to the party for ever….

The BJP should never be allowed to rule, it is too dangerous. For instance, Advani was a minister during the Janata government — and in his short tenure, he managed to fill his ministry with RSS people, and that gave us a headache when we came back to power.

The BJP and the RSS practise the politics of infiltration. I’ll give you an example. Before the fall of the Babri Masjid, Bhairon Singh Shekawat and I were negotiating with the Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Ram Janambhoomi people, for three days we had intense negotiations. We reached a stage where, in one more day or maybe two, we could have come to an agreement. But at that time, the senior RSS person involved in the discussions said he had to leave for three days.

I asked him why, I argued with him, told him nothing could be more important, but he was adamant. So finally I asked him where he was going, and he said Hyderabad, to attend the seminar of the Indian History Congress. I was quite shocked that he thought a seminar was more important that this.

That is when he explained. The IHC controls the way Indian history is written and studied, it approves syllabus and textbooks, it has total control. And the key weapon of the RSS is education, its goal is to rewrite Indian history to suit its agenda. In fact, the RSS is already doing it — the portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as anti-Muslim is only one example, they talk of how Afzal Khan tried to trick him and how Shivaji killed Afzal Khan, that is the story the kids read about, but conveniently, no one menions that Shivaji’s chief army commander was a Muslim, that he personally constructed three mosques for Muslims… one of my candidates in the state is a direct descendant of Shivaji Maharaj, and his family still pays money for the upkeep of these mosques, but this is never mentioned. Shivaji maintained that all communities and religions should live in harmony, but look how that is being distorted today!

Sorry, but how does all this tie up with the IHC?

Pawar: To be a member, you have to do post-graduation, and Masters, in Indian history. So over the years, the RSS has been systematically selecting students, instructing them to study history, and getting them into the IHC. At last count the RSS-oriented students are 46 per cent of the society. Another five per cent, and the RSS will control it, and then it will write Indian history to suit its own ends. That body is like that, it plans ahead, and works systematically to achieve its goals. In fact, I must say that though the RSS and the BJP are my political enemies, I admire this quality in them, they plan for the future and they work steadily towards a goal.

THAT interview took place 25 years ago. Look around you today, at the systematic efforts to erase parts of Indian history that the right wing finds inconvenient; at the ongoing attempts to rehabilitate Savarkar’s image; at the serial renaming of roads and buildings (a week ago, the BJP renewed its demand that Lucknow be renamed; one of its poll promises for the upcoming assembly elections in Telangana is to rename entire districts); late last year the Union Education Minister, no less, said that from 26 January 2023, students will learn the “corrected” version of history…)

(Update: Found this, just now. An MLA of the Shinde Sena in Maharashtra says he is writing to the PM asking for the removal of Aurangzeb’s grave from Aurangabad. How do I insert a face-palm emoji in this thing?)

Over the last few years and particularly since 2019, I’ve thought back to that interview, and Pawar’s take on the RSS policy of infiltration, on many occasions in light of unfolding events.

My family, dating back to the time of my grandfather and his father, used to be politically active. Time, and death, have accounted for most of my father’s generation and of the one before it, but several of those political links still remain active.

Relatively recently, I met one such family contact while on a personal visit to Kasargode, and the subject of the RSS came up during an extensive chat. I asked about the RSS infiltrating and controlling Indian history, and my contact laughed.

“History?”, he said. “That is the tip of a very large iceberg; it is just the part you can see. For decades now, the RSS has funded and shepherded bright, ideologically committed young men and women through school and college and pushed them into the ranks of the police, the judicial system, the IAS, the IFS, even the army. Their goal is simple and effective — control the institutions, and then it no longer matters what party is in power.”

(Incidentally, Rahul Gandhi said something on similar lines during a recent press interaction on the sidelines of his Cambridge lecture: “The opposition in India is no longer fighting a political party. We’re now fighting the institutional structure of India. We have to compete against the BJP-RSS which has captured all our independent institutions.”)

Think now of that hyperventilating army official, of Victoria Gowri’s ascent to the Madras High Court, the Allahabad High Court judge whose ruling is based not on law and the Constitution but on myth and legend, of the not-so-subtle rehabilitation of IPS officer Rashmi Shukla, of the many false cases being filed by the police across the country, and of the myriad similar instances that briefly make headlines and are as quickly forgotten, and you realise how prescient Pawar was when he said the RSS is the single biggest threat to the unity and integrity of this country.

PostScript: Going forward, I’ll also use this space to link to interesting articles and books I come across. For now, this beautiful essay by the prolific author and columnist Amitava Kumar: Many Words For Heat, Many Words For Hate.

Incidentally Amitava’s opening, about the many words used in our regional languages to describe heat, reminded me of a piece my friend Arati Kumar-Rao had once done, about the desert dwellers of Rajasthan and the many names they have for cloud formations.

Pawan Khera and the politics of narcissism

When Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera in a press conference referred to Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi as ‘Gautamdas’ before ostentatiously correcting himself, it was not a “slip of the tongue” as his lawyer claimed during a Supreme Court hearing, nor was Khera’s apology an expression of genuine regret.

It was a piece of political theatre, what the US press during fevered presidential election campaigns refers to as a ‘zinger’ – a moment that induces nervous laughter in the audience and provides a ‘byte’ for television channels and social media outlets; it was an opportunistic arrow aimed at the vertiginous, hubristic descent of Modi’s favorite businessman from recent stratospheric heights.

Pawan Khera’s essay in ‘mis-speak’ was an attempt to bring back into the public discourse recent disclosures about the opaque nature of Gautam Adani’s business ventures and the questions arising therefrom – questions that had been raised, and immediately redacted, from the proceedings of the recent session of Parliament, conveniently saving Modi from having to respond to specifics.

Khera’s comment was many things. What it was not, was a crime. Which is why the spectacle of paramilitary forces, armed to the teeth and standing in serried ranks on the tarmac of Delhi’s airport to arrest him, smacked of over-reach even for a regime and a leader that has industrialized over-reach.

Multiple FIRs have charged Khera under Section 153A (promoting enmity between various groups), Section 505 (making statements conducive to public mischief), 153B(1) (making assertions prejudicial to national integration), 295A (deliberate acts meant to outrage religious feelings), 500 (defamation) and 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace).

The Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and comprising Justices PS Narasimha and MR Shah, while providing Khera with interim relief from arrest, said inter alia, “We also accept that, taken on their face value, the spoken words do not lead to the sections invoked in the FIR” (emphasis mine).

It didn’t need the Supreme Court to state the bleeding obvious. Commonsense should tell you that Khera’s words don’t provoke enmity between various groups (unless ‘Modi sycophants’ is a recognized group), that linking Modi to Adani does not prejudice national integration (Modi is not a nation), that the comment does not outrage religious feelings (Modi is not a religion), and so on.

As for ‘defamation’ and ‘intentional insult’, that is a bit rich coming from, or on behalf of, a man who has made the intentional insult his political stock-in-trade. Modi has famously referred to the then leader of the Opposition as ‘Congress ka vidhwa’ and as a ‘Jersey cow’; slightingly referred to the then partner of an Opposition MP as a ’50 crore girlfriend’; publicly accused his predecessor of colluding with agents of a foreign power in a plot to assassinate him, before running away from the inevitable uproar in Parliament and fielding (the late) Arun Jaitley to tender an apology of sorts; and during an election campaign in the relatively recent past repeatedly used the ‘Didiiii…. O Didiii’ catcall commonly employed by Kolkata’s roadside thugs to harass passing women.

The above examples are merely a playlist of his greatest hits, not the entire catalogue.

The adjective ‘fascist’ has been thrown around in the wake of the Khera kerfuffle. The dictionary defines ‘fascist’ as someone who supports or promotes a system of governance led by a dictator who rules by forcefully, and often violently, suppressing criticism and opposition, controlling all industry and commerce, and promoting nationalism and often racism. Prima facie, the cap seems to fit the incumbent prime minister as neatly as the many silly hats he wears during his various election campaigns.

But chasing a thought, I went to the site of the Mayo Clinic to read up on a psychological problem commonly diagnosed as ‘Narcissistic Personality Disorder’. The textbook definition: NPD is a mental health condition in which people have an unreasonably high sense of their own importance. They need and seek attention and want people to admire them… But behind this mask of extreme confidence, they are not sure of their self-worth and are easily upset by the slightest criticism.

The Mayo clinic provides a laundry list of symptoms of varying degrees of severity. As below:

• Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
• Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, the clinic’s crib sheet says, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

• Become impatient or angry when they don’t receive special recognition or treatment.
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
• Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail. (As, for instance, open press conferences – this bit in parenthesis mine)
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

The cap, I thought, has a bespoke fit to it. But recent experience with a bad viral infection, exacerbated by diagnosis-by-internet, has made me a bit wary. My GP, exasperated when I finally went to him about a week after I first evidenced the symptoms, was scathing: “Google did not clear the MBBS exam!”

So I chatted up a psychiatrist I know. His response to my query was: “Want to see a narcissistic personality? Go look in the mirror.”

His point is that there is a narcissist in each one of us, that we will show signs of some or all of the symptoms listed above, and that this is not a problem per se. Personality disorders of some kind or other are common. Most times, we don’t even realise we have issues; in some relatively virulent cases, the problem becomes apparent to those in our immediate circle, with whom we interact on a regular basis. A belief that we know best, that those giving us advice or suggestions are not as well-informed as we are, coupled with a corresponding intolerance of criticism could for instance manifest in the workplace, and our colleagues will likely brush off all but the most extreme cases with “He is difficult to work with” (In extreme cases, it becomes an HR problem).

The real problem is when narcissism, in its malignant form, is allied to unbridled authority. An unreasonable sense of your own superiority and a corresponding intolerance of any form of criticism is not dangerous in and of itself, but when it is allied to the ability to harness the entire powers of the State – its investigative agencies, its police and paramilitary, its judiciary, its diplomatic missions, even its exchequer (after all, those cardboard cut-outs, choreographed photo-ops and full-page advertisements touting illusory accomplishments have to be paid for) – in the service of one person’s ego that you have a problem that can – and will – metastasize and threaten the fabric of a flawed but still functioning secular democracy itself.

The Pawan Khera fracas is not the first, or only, symptom of this danger; it is merely one more line item in a growing list. We live in a time when the economy is in the doldrums; when flashpoints serially ignite in various states and among various constituencies; when the honeymoon is officially over and the international community has begun to take an increasingly critical view of events on the ground; when scams and scandals of various stripes proliferate and skeletons believed to be buried deep have begun tumbling out of sundry closets – all this, in a year pockmarked with elections to nine state assemblies as runway to the general elections of 2024.

The air of inevitability, that automatic assumption of TINA – there is no alternative – has begun to erode around the edges. William Shakespeare was the first to articulate what happens when this happens — when an outward expression of overweening superiority goes hand in hand with a deep-seated internal sense of insecurity. Remember?:

Those he commands move only in command,

Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title

Hang Loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

When Modi, having adroitly gotten all awkward questions about his relationship with a beleaguered billionaire redacted from the parliamentary records, thumped his chest and, to the accompaniment of fevered desk-thumping by his sycophantic partymen, said “Desh dekh raha hai, ek akela kitno par baari pad raha hai”, he spoke truer than he perhaps intended to.

PostScript: Of all the bizarre sights I’ve seen in recent times, none more jaw-dropping than this: As Modi’s speech in Parliament reached its chest-thumping peroration and his voice rose by several dozen decibels as he rounded into the ‘ek akela’ bit, all elected MPs of his party – filling out the treasury benches in response to a party whip mandating their presence – rose en masse and enthusiastically thumped their desks in appreciation.

Appreciation of what, though? Of being told, to their face, that they are all irrelevant and that there is only one man who matters – Modi himself?

(The writer is not a qualified medical practitioner or even Aayush-certified, and the column above does not purport to be a clinical diagnosis)

NB: This column was written for a website — which, after an initial expression of enthusiastic acceptance, had second thoughts and decided that it could not publish the column as written. So I decided to post it in my own space — and I also realized that it is time I got back to writing in my space. So, stand by.