Make in India: Turning national icons into political booty
We are argumentative Indians. We thrive on controversies. We are experts in ensuring a plentiful supply of this essential commodity.
Several of the recent controversies pertain to the pilferage of national icons. The Congress Party felt miffed when Modi threatened to walk away with the Sardar Patel and Subhas Chandra Bose legacy.
The Dalits were upset when the BJP began to upstage Mayawati in freebooting the potent Ambedkar name. Which slice of history gets poached and which icon is pilfered depends on sheer electoral expediency. So, Shaheed Bhagat Singh has become an alluring political booty, given the electoral pickle that Punjab presently is.
What is overlooked in the process is that freebooting in national icons amounts to a public confession. A man with a full complement of natural teeth will not flaunt gilded artificial dentures. No one with agile legs will look for prosthetic limbs. The more sophisticated the prosthetics, the greater the disability it points to. The common man in this country is, fortunately, commonsensical enough to see that compulsions of this sort felt by a political party bare areas of its worrisome bankruptcy. Why would a party, with a proven, well-established track-record in patriotism borrow an icon of patriotism and that too in an unguent electoral context?
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| The same holds good in respect of the growing eagerness of various political parties to annex the Ambedkar legacy. |
"Pretend to a virtue," Shakespeare's Hamlet berates his wanton mother, "if you don't have one." Either something is innate in you or you borrow the same on purpose, like tripe ornaments on ceremonial occasions.
Freebooting is a commoner practise than most people realise. It is at work in most sectors of propaganda and public posturing. It is implied respectably, if you like, in the "Make in India" euphoria. Since we are technologically backward and poor in R&D, we can at least bask in the reflected glory of imported technology and investment. "Make in America" or "Make in Japan" will not be catchy slogans in those countries. The citizens there will resent them as national insults.
For many years the Catholic Church had nothing to do with Mother Teresa. Once the West discovered her and the halo of celebrity status was cast upon her, the Church came along to cast the mantle of sainthood upon her.
In its essence, the step taken belongs to the same socio-psychological logic that underlies the current Bhagat Singh controversy. The parties that are now vying with each other for monopolising the shining Bhagat Singh legacy of sacrificial patriotism are behaving, if anything, worse than the Vatican that arbitrarily wields the imprimatur of sainthood.
The same holds good in respect of the growing eagerness of various political parties to annex the Ambedkar legacy. It is to be expected that greater degrees of heat will be turned on Mayawati - using, inter alia, marginal Dalit leaders like Udit Raj - even as the political scope of the Ambedkar legacy becomes more fully manifest.
The ongoing unrest among Dalit students - currently confined to stray institutions of higher education, but could spread far beyond - is significant precisely for this reason. The arbitrariness of trying to instal Ambedkar in the backyard of an upper caste party, even as Dalit aspirations are suppressed, is too obvious to be lost on any, except the willfully blind.
Newspapers in Kerala were full of pictures of bishops and priests washing the feet of the laity at Maundy Thursday services. Each time I see spectacles of this kind, I sense the freebooting involved. The keenness to showcase ceremonial feet-washing - a moving symbol of the greatness of service - has grown in recent years.
And it has increased in direct proportion to the decline of the spirit of service in the community. The less the culture of the Church has to do, in spirit and in truth, with the way of Jesus - who came "not to be served, but to serve" - the more public attention will be drawn to ceremonial feet-washing as a quaint and cosmetic thing.
This brings us to the raging debate on patriotism. It is an insult to the intelligence of the Indian citizen to tell her that shouting "Bharat Mata ki jai" is the sufficient - or only - proof of patriotism. Bharat Mata (Mother India) cannot be the exclusive demesne of a band of self-styled zealots.
India is not a "sound and light" show. It is a mysterious crucible of hopes, aspirations, struggles and affirmations. It is, as Nehru said, "a dream and a vision," a unity in diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads. How can this be reduced to a slogan? Or a thousand slogans? Will anyone who knows and respects Bharat Mata advocate such shallowness?
As a rule, cosmetic frills gain in importance and become, eventually, the sole markers of authenticity, even as inner realities dry up. As regards the relic of a saint, for example, it is only its surface that matters. That was not so when the saint, to whom the relic corresponds, was alive.
True patriotism should be an inner and lived reality that finds expression in what we are and what we do in public life. Our patriotism should eradicate caste and corruption, hate and disunity, cruelty and destitution from our motherland. Our patriotism should enable us, as it enabled Gandhi, to see all our sisters and brothers as equal children of Bharat Mata. Our patriotism should inspire us, as it did Ambedkar, to fight for equity and equality and for the eradication of all oppressive customs and practises.
Whether freebooting gets legitimised as an electoral sleight of hand depends on us, the citizens of India. We wield carrots and sticks in the form of votes. Don't blame parties in desperation for corrupting public discourse, when it is our own wilful blindness that encourages them to do so.