The lynched soul of Indian politics

Shiv Visvanathan 

Indian politics and politicians have been making little sense of late. The earlier generation mixed tradition and modernity with ease, allowing for both dialogue and dialectic. The current lot appears like split personalities, images of a deeply dualistic culture, rather than icons of cultural hybridity. What was reassuring earlier was that myth and history and, contrasts like urban-rural, personal-public could be reconciled to create a higher unity that was convincing. The power of Bollywood testified to this, creating successful doubles like Ram aur Shyam, Seeta aur Geeta. Of late, even Bollywood has not been able to resolve contradictions and politics too seems sterile. In fact, when you watch Rajinikanth and Kamal Hassan, you realise that even Tamil cinema has lost the power to combine film and politics in an alchemical way.  

Today, the BJP as a party seems weakest in combining myth, reality and contradiction. Its efforts to bridge ancient and modern science have been disastrous. In fact, the idea of a consistent or creative politician seems rare. Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation, appears to be the latest casualty. When Sinha appeared on the political scene, he was seen almost as an immaculate conception. An undergraduate from IIT Delhi, a Harvard MBA and a McKinsey alumnus, Sinha appeared to incarnate the middle-class professional dream. In addition, he had an impeccable pedigree. Urbane, sophisticated, low key, he was a desi version of an Ivy League man, in speckless pyjama-kurta, a scion in waiting.

One felt BJP was unlikely to find such an ideal person. One expected him to form a political duo with Arun Jaitley, while Arvind Subramanian and Raghuram Rajan played the bureaucratic backup. This quartet sounded the perfect governance team, a miniature Camelot in the making. They appeared rational, professional, cosmopolitan and in control. Sadly, the casualty rate was high. The two economists have left and Sinha’s stars seem to be dimming. 

The recent episodes around his reactions to the mob lynchings illustrate this. One has to see it as a media spectacle, as newspapers juxtapose the photographs of two leaders accused of committing the same sin — of welcoming people accused of mob lynching. One of them is Giriraj Kishore, a rabid communalist, but the other is our understated Jayant Sinha. Their reactions and the literal twinning as politicians convey a message that pedigree and education, all trip over the requirements of populism. Sinha looks like a weaker version of Kishore.

Politics sadly brings out the difference between being correct and tied to a value frame, between populism and old-fashioned ethics. Sadly, today’s politicians seem to enact the current dualisms that haunt Indian life and politics. There is first a clash between the family and constituency interests and the demands of the public good. Sinha, like most BJP politicians, prefers constituency to country. When seven people accused of lynching a meat trader were released, they flew like homing pigeons to his house where they were garlanded.

Sinha felt that the tussle was not between the good and the bad, between public good and private interests, but between being correct and incorrect. He felt that they were loyalists, who had been released on bail. Since, the case was in process, they should be welcomed. It was right for a parliamentarian to do so. Yet, the symbolism projected by the act seems different. Imagine a photograph of Jayant Sinha garlanding eight lynchers. At one level, it sounds improbable. He is tacitly approving of their act, treating them not as rabid vigilantes, but like boy-scouts from his constituency. Sinha tweeted that they had not been convicted and added that fast-track courts lack credibility. Yet one has to ask, even if they were not perpetrators, they were willing spectators, an enthusiastic chorus to the lynching. Should Sinha encourage such an act, editorialising it away in a tweet later? Sinha seems captive between loyalty to his constituency and rule of law. Unlike earlier politicians, who could hybridise them, Sinha lays bare the dualism. He does not possibly know the difference between a Lions Club function and a lynch mob. 

Oddly, as one watches him, one senses that ironically and tragically, politicians like Sinha are openly, publicly becoming caricature of themselves. Earlier an RK Laxman, a Sudhir Dhar would make their caricatures. Our new lot does not require this as they go public as cartoons. Sinha insists on playing his own double. The elite Harvard don is the populist, the rational manager and the patron of lynching. His act celebrates the mob rather than the rights of citizenship.  One does not have to sanitise such politicians, they become satires of their original premise. 

Sinha finds his escape route between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. He claims in his tweets to be honoring the due process. He insists he is on the side of law and order. The truth becomes trivial, the context empty. It is almost as if the impending demands of the dictatorial process are more important than the larger dream of justice.  

In fact, in typical filmi style, Yashwant Sinha, the father, comes out as a larger-than-life moral figure, while Jayant looks lifeless in his correctness, almost stereotypically suggesting that ‘Hazaribagh’ has destroyed the ‘Harvard’ of values in him. 

The scenario is clear. Loyalty in India generally seems to be to a particular community or a constituency. The wider vision of norms, value frames dry up. Sadly, there is little of the operatic tension visible in Sinha’s listless act. There is no cameo role of contradictions, which could have summoned the sense of a morality play. He becomes a robotic reciter of old lines, a tool of populism pretending to adhere to the rule of law. 

Unfortunately, Sinha shows no awareness that he is caught in a morality play. He is still the Mckinsey manager playing consultant, rather than an actor in a political drama. It seems to matter little to him whether he is advising a badly managed firm or the remnants of a lynch mob. It is sad to see that a man who was among the best lacks conviction. Instead of enacting agency or ethics in a moral drama, he plays a dismal puppet on a populist string. 

As a wag put it, it is as if Amit Shah has become a substitute for conscience as Giriraj Kishore and Jayant Sinha become variants on a theme. The party has spoken. It is election time when the goodwill of a constituency surmounts any act of conscience. BJP, as a party, seems to have lost its ethical reflexiveness. As 2019 is fetishised, grossness of majoritarian democracy becomes clearer. Mob lynching and electoral voting become two ways of retaining power. The tragedy is more than obvious. 

— The writer is an academic associated with the Compost Heap