Politics of caricature at play

Shiv Visvanathan

Advertisement

NEWSPAPERS and politicians love non-events — dull, linear, every-day, stiflingly empirical. A non-event has wonderful possibilities; any meaning can be read into it. The excitement increases and the hysteria mounts as the meaninglessness becomes more apparent. The recent meeting between former President Pranab Mukherjee and RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat created a furore, with Congress leaders like Anand Sharma and Randeep Surjewala tweeting their excitement. Events like this are tweet friendly. 

Newspapers gave much space to the event with carefully framed photographs of Bhagwat and Mukherjee. What could have been dismissed in freelance went on for three days, over three pages. It is then that one understands the wisdom of Indian politics. It is only when the Congress and the BJP meet in this way that the absurd drama comes through. Reports in the news are mere Rorschach inkblot test; messages one must read and re-read to gauge the full power of their impact. One misses characters like OV Vijayan, the cartoonist, with his bike, or RK Laxman’s common man. One can see the common man looking perplexed at Mukherjee and Bhagwat standing at the birthplace of RSS founder Keshav Hegdewar. 

The papers claim that the former President is the ‘mirror of truth’ to the Sangh. One wonders what kind of a mirror it was. Did it reverse images and costumes, showing Bhagwat in Lutyens’ Delhi and Mukherjee in Nagpur? Did conviviality emphasise  similarity, telling India that often there is little to choose between these two parties? Watching them stand like affable birds, one often wonders of the substitutability of our politicians. What is presented like a three-stooge slapstick can acquire a vitriolic bite in a Vijayan cartoon. 

I can see Vijayan draw two pictures of Mukherjee addressing the shakha and Bhagwat the NCERT conference, both receiving ovation for the same speech. The audience claps for the same words like nationalism and secularism. For example, as Ashok Malik, the current President’s secretary, said: President Kovind stopped Iftar parties for secular reasons. As the RSS and the Congress talk of the secular as a common term, one wonders what history was about. If both were secular, or claim to be, why did Partition happen? But then, one realises that Bhagwat and the Modi regime live in a sinister Alice in Wonderland, where they decide what words will mean and say. Only with the RSS, and it sounds more like Kafka, do words like diversity and plurality get brutalised into uniformity. One is reminded of Rajnath Singh talking about Kashmir and saying dialogue can only be with ‘right-minded people’. Language is in complete disarray as politics unfolds in India. 

Before language and dialogue get too sinister, Mukherjee’s daughter pops up playing out our favourite literary creation — the argumentative Indian. Sharmishta Mukherjee opines that hers is a democratic and argumentative family and this is a lesson that she learnt from her father. One does not have to read this image but one realises that in India, the family redeems politics in many ways, and this is why the Congress is proud to say that it is one big happy family. The argumentative family becomes the new selling point for the Congress. 

One then hears LK Advani quietly and respectfully say that Mukherjee’s speech is a noble exposition of the ideals of Indian nationalism. I sensed a touch of envy as I felt he was remembering the hostility his praise of Jinnah was treated with by the RSS a few years ago. 

The RSS moved to dismiss photoshopped images of Mukherjee, content that its photoshopped view of history will survive the narratives of Congress. The reader can only try to spoof it. 

One realises that no politician can survive without a PA and a PRO. The PROs were happy because they discovered that an innocuous event had suddenly claimed media attention. But one can imagine the PA try to save his skin and inform some media sources that the ex-President had read the wrong speech. The gossip goes that he was supposed to read one on rankings where he had suggested that shakhas, like IITs, should be graded in terms of excellence and competence. I confess that satire makes more sense than Mukherjee’s version of tutorial college history. 

In fact, Laxman’s common man is bound to ask: if the speeches of Mukherjee and RSS meet with such agreement, what is the disagreement between the two parties? The RSS almost uses Mukherjee to project itself as another Congress. The party which has always suffered with Congress-envy seems desperate to inherit the history of the Congress. I can see Vijayan redrawing the RSS camps as Gandhian ashrams pretending that Partition did not happen. One has also to ask as these events get photoshopped, what happens to the RSS’s obsession with history? I can see another cartoonist picturing Bhagwat, reciting a modified version of Lincoln’s speech: ‘One can fool some of the people some of the time but in India one can fool an Indian all the time’. Our tolerance for nonsense is amazing. Bhagwat’s comments about unity, dialogue and history have no sense of memory in the last hundred years. It also makes one wonder if the Congress has any sense of its own history, or even tried, as one watched the ease with which rival parties appropriated it. The affability of the promise of dialogue is welcome. Parties should treat each other as rivals, not enemies, yet this attempt to mimic histories and ideologies is surreal. Mukherjee allows Bhagwat to treat him as an affable double, thinks he is lost for a while, but pretending now they are parts of the same organic process. I can understand the RSS feeling orphaned without Gandhi, Azad or Nehru. Golwalkar and Upadhyay were dwarfs next to these stalwarts. But to swallow Congress history like Jonah’s whale is a bit unbelievable even for India. It is comic and sinister that the RSS is behaving like a lost part of the original Congress. 

Part of this originates from the destruction of language where words like secular and plural have lost their meaning. While talking of plurality, the RSS has put words in uniform. Its idea of dialogue is somewhat like Henry Ford’s idea of consumerism: ‘The consumer can have any car he likes as long as it is black.’ India can have any ideology or religion it wants as long as it is Hindutva. Mukherjee, instead of overplaying the conviviality of nationalism, should have emphasised the dialogue of differences. He should have conveyed that it is the RSS that belongs to the Tussauds of history. The Press, too, contributes to this with pictures of Bhagwat and Mukherjee in an affable reunion. The demands of politics are different, especially when differences can be life-giving. One thing is clear: the RSS has the ability to mount anything as a circus and then present the circus as sanity. The Congress over the next few years has to learn to play a more acute game of politics and Congress politicians must understand that affability adds little to politics without a touch of prudence. Politics has to go beyond respectable tweets at this stage. 

The writer, a sociologist, is a member of the Compost Heap