The week belongs to the demagogue…

Harish Khare

We Indians are congenially unconnected, inward-looking people. We remain so complacently confident about our own ‘old civilisation’ and its resilience that we rarely are able to configure the forces to work at the global level. That explains the official rush at denying the impact of the British vote on India. We are content to sing the song of indifference: “oh, that does not concern us. We have our own firewalls.”

But the consequences of the Thursday vote in Britain to leave the European Union will, sooner or later, find their way to this part of the world, as well. There will be questions about the stability of the European Union, and there will be doubts about the continuity of the entire western alliance that undergirded the post-Second World War order. I think both India and Indians, at home and abroad, would find that the world beyond our borders was becoming increasingly complex and intractable. And, we simply lack the imagination and the intelligence to cope with the outsider. We are too smug with our own institutionalised mediocrity. Just consider. We have been ministered one across the face over the NSG business, but we are pretending as if such rebukes are all in a day’s work. I am inclined to believe that the “23/6” will turn out to be as significant as was “9/11”. The only difference is that whereas 9/11 was a terrorist handiwork, the 23/6 mess will be remembered as the revenge of the demagogue.

Many of us in India are not very familiar with a gentleman called Nigel Farage. He is the leader of something called the UK Independent Party. He was leading the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. Farage the populist and the demagogue made the British voter give him a hearing.  

Just consider the nature of the contest. Apart from the two leading British parties making the case for staying in, a very important segment of American leadership too pitched in. President Obama visited England and with his usual eloquence reminded the British of the benefits of working with the EU. Then, as many as 13 foreign secretaries of state and defence secretaries wrote an open appeal to “stay,” as did eight former Treasury Secretaries. They all talked reasonably, that too in a sober and responsible voice.

On the other side were the Demagogues. And they were not afraid of being irresponsible, narrow nationalist or even racist. And the White and rural England did listen to them and their rant against multiculturalism and against the immigrant. 

Consider this: the Britons would be “concerned if a group of Romanian people suddenly moved in next door.” This is the racist idiom Mr. Nigel Farage routinely and regularly talked. 

Though we in India have had our own brush with the vendors of demagoguery in 2014, the British demagogue’s success is already being noted and internalised by sections of our own polity. Difficult days are ahead. 

WE all know that Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Capitol Complex in Chandigarh to perform a kind of yoga in the company of a very large posse of security officers. What we do not know that the other end of the Capitol Complex, which houses the (Punjab and Haryana) Vidhan Sabhas, was visited by the ghost of Franz Kafka, during the election to the Rajya Sabha on June 11. Since then the Kafka ghost has firmly refused to budge. The absurdity of the “wrong pen” remains unexplained, yet it has resulted in a bizarre, unfair and fraudulent outcome.

We are not talking of the Jammu and Kashmir election of 1987 (when the massive rigging by the Abdullahs triggered the insurgency) but talking of Haryana of 2016. One would have thought that collectively we have become a bit watchful to deter anyone attempting a fraudulent outcome. The sheer chicanery is breathtaking. Even The Economist has been forced to take note of the sleight of hand. 

We all fell for the fiction that it was the Hooda camp that deliberately used the wrong pen to defy the high command.  

The facts just do not fit with theory, but we are all too keen to move on, because we are too embarrassed at this Kafkaesque subversion. It is rather curious that all those who are generally the loudest in injecting moral arguments in political disputes have maintained complete radio silence. Our moral outrage seems to be a selective virtue.

Secrecy of the ballot is meaningless in this instance. It is an open ballot, where a voter (the MLA) is obliged to show his marked ballot to the party’s authorised agent. Yet the paraphernalia of secrecy is maintained. Legalism is prescribed and then the process becomes an end in itself. Twelve votes —all in favour of one candidate — are declared invalid because they have been marked by an ‘unauthorised’ pen; and, yet in a classic Kafkaesque sleight of hand, no official is able to explain how the ‘unauthorised’ pen came to be around. 

I think after this fraud the Election Commission of India would have to take over the conduct of the Rajya Sabha election. Rules would have to be amended. Possibility of collusion between the legislative secretariat staff and a candidate would need to be eliminated. The brazenness of this “election” should shame us all. 

FOR about a year the country was witness to a courageously marvellous fight. On one side were arrayed forces of intolerance, intimidation, violence, assorted Hindutva outfits, all wallowing in the sunshine of protection and patronage of the Modi government; on the other, were individual voices — democratic, liberal and secular — refusing to get intimidated and unwilling to surrender space or superiority to the new sarkari commissars and their conformist demands.

This fight has been in the making for sometime now and was about to become deadly. The goons were feeling emboldened and willing to get rid of inconvenient voices. Narendra Dabholkar. Govind Pansare. MM Kalburgi. Rationalists, secularists, intellectuals. Shot. Killed.

After the initial shock the liberals recollected their wits. Independently, separately, randomly they voiced their protest and resistance to this new cult of intolerance. State honours were returned; akademi awards were surrendered. Individual gestures merged into a roaring collective protest. Suddenly the Indian citizen noticed and the State sort of backed off. A kind of truce got arranged. 

But a democratic society simply cannot forget  —  should not be allowed to forget —  the ever-present danger of authoritarian tendencies and tantrums. It is in the nature of the authoritarian leaders and their cult followers to try to silence voices they find inconvenient.

K Satchidanandan has done a good job putting together what he calls “words of warning and wisdom.” The title of the book – WORDS MATTER — says it all. 

In this collection of ‘writings against silence’ KS has reproduced short, robust and cogent pieces. Pankaj Mishra, Nayantara Sahgal, Ananya Vajpeyi, Romila Thapar, Keki N Daruwalla, Markandey Katju, Shyam Saran. And, of course, a powerful introductory essay by KS himself.

KS reminds us that the very idea of ‘democracy’ is not palatable to a powerful section in Indian society. He writes: “The biggest challenge to our democracy, and perhaps to the very integrity of our social fabric, is political Hindutva. Political Hindutva clearly finds the diversity of India an unwelcome and disturbing presence.” 

And, like every sensitive soul, KS too is appalled at the new, joyful willingness, to abuse: “We see it on social media every day: every criticism, even that made in most rational and decent language, is countered by worst forms of abuse by the self-appointed guardians of the Hindutva ideology to which the majority of Hindus in India do not subscribe.”

Disquietingly enough, this abusive culture is now being explained away as something people should get used to as a new normal, benign sign of a society in transition. Many of us have read some of these essays over the months. Together they make a powerful indictment of the creeping intolerance, as also an invitation to remain vigilant against silently insidious cooption.

LAST Tuesday after he had given his benediction to the Yoga Day celebrations at the Capitol Complex, Dr Pranav Pandya was kind enough to drop in at The Tribune office. I was very curious to meet the man who had the intellectual clarity and the moral courage to decline a Rajya Sabha nomination — that too in this time and age when every saffron-clad yogi is eagerly seeking a Parliament seat. 

I found Dr Pandya a very engaging interlocutor. A trained professional in medical sciences, he has opted for a world of meditation and spiritual quest. More importantly, he and the Gayatri Pariwar are trying to introduce a bit of spirituality in our society but without the mumbo-jumbo of religiosity. I thought the Pariwar’s “Nirmal Ganga Jan Abhiyan” (Clean Ganga project) could be described as a worthwhile initiative in engaged civic responsibility. I felt impressed with Dr Pandya and could sense a nobility and sincerity — even though he declined my offer of coffee. 

Well, anyway, 

Coffee anyone?

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