Politics in past tense

File photo of Congress supporters on the left and BJP supporters on the right | PTI | @BJP4Telangana

There could be a simpler explanation as to why this week’s ‘National Interest’ does not talk about the state of the economy or the Budget. Like my ignorance of economics. But look at it purely in terms of what has lately been engaging our minds and front pages — besides indeed cricket. It is the controversy over the unveiling of a Savarkar portrait in Parliament. As the BJP and the Congress have made a laughing stock of themselves fighting on the portrait like two siblings in their troubled teens fighting over whether to put Madonna on the wall or Jennifer Lopez, or Beckham or Bergkamp, Sehwag or Tendulkar, the joke is really on us voters.

These weeks mark what could be a turning point in global history. A war is about to break out in Iraq. There is a never-ending global downturn of the kind not seen for decades. Even we have been building up to the most important annual event in our economic reform, the Budget. Meanwhile our parliamentarians, who usually struggle to get a quorum together to pass crucial bills, are fighting over whether or not Savarkar deserves to get his portrait installed in the precincts of Parliament.

It is a tribute to the Congress party’s own ideological bankruptcy, lack of conviction and even tactical confusion that it woke up this late to raise this protest. What makes the whole thing even funnier is that two of its own luminaries as also of the Left had, at an earlier meeting, absent-mindedly given their assent to the Savarkar portrait. It is only now, punch-drunk from Gujarat on the one hand and the charges of indulging in soft Hindutva on the other and not knowing where it stands, that the Congress decided this was an issue worthy of such high attention.

The same Congress that goes along so meekly with the VHP’s anti-cow slaughter drive and whose leaders happily cadge commercial and personal favours from ministers of the NDA government, the same Congress that presents the people of Gujarat the “soft” secular option of a Vaghela to counter the appeal of the self-styled Chhota Sardar is now going all blue in the face because the president is unveiling the portrait of a freedom fighter, howsoever controversial, on whom a commemorative postage stamp was issued by none else than its own former prime minister who banned the RSS, threw its leaders in jail. Who will take such a Congress seriously as a political party?

How does the BJP look in comparison? We Indians are in any case unique in our obsession with the hollowest of all symbols, renaming cities, streets, anti-poverty schemes, schools and colleges, trains. But the BJP and its ideological siblings take the cake — or maybe kalakand, made of pure cow milk in this obsession. They do have a genuine complaint, what else can they do when almost everything in the country has already been named after the Nehrus and the Gandhis? But is the only way the saffron Right can leave its mark in history is by naming and renaming streets and railway stations or installing the statues of the heroes of its own partisan past?

This fixation with statues and portraits is dangerous because it fits so neatly, and so conveniently, into our pattern of irresponsible competitive politics where nobody is held accountable and where nobody needs any intellect. When I am in power I install statues and name streets after my heroes. Of course, when you return to power you can rectify this historical wrong. Uttar Pradesh, which faces a real danger of being renamed Ambedkaristan one of these days, has already shown the way. You can sell hollow emotion to your voters and hope they will never read your manifesto.

There are serious problems with this very Indian idea of taking a partisan view of all our past, from the pre-historic to the freedom movement, of dividing it between yours and mine. Certainly the Congress and the Left played this game in the past. Must the BJP now carry on with this blood feud? It sets the debate at an extremely crude level that embarrasses the nation, undermines our true heroes and their memory. Other democracies have handled this more maturely.

My colleague Raj Kamal Jha, who is currently teaching a semester at Berkeley, points out how in the US the portraits installed on the Capitol Hill are specially commissioned paintings to mark the great milestones of history. The statues are mainly of presidents but each state can contribute one each and whose it should be is decided by a resolution by its lawmakers. The last four statues installed, between 1985 and 2000, were so apolitical you can almost hear your own politicians gasping: an Apollo 13 astronaut, a native American leader who championed his community’s welfare, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and Philo Farnsworth, the electrical engineer whose inventions helped develop television, the baby incubator and the electron microscope. Howsoever contentious your politics, you couldn’t quibble with these.

Why does our politics remain so rooted in the past? Our leaders must suffer from a dangerous inferiority complex or they would not invoke the past, its heroes and villains, all the time to make their case instead of talking of now and hereafter. So the Congress wants your votes for its role in the freedom movement, a reward for the immortal greatness of Nehru and Gandhi.

The BJP, instead, woos you for the greater glory of Lord Rama and Krishna, for its promise to liberate them and to fight — here and now — the injustices of eight centuries of Muslim subjugation. Then Mayawati wants to rule you in Ambedkar’s name, Mulayam Singh in Lohia’s, George Fernandes in Lohia’s too but while at the same time being the flag-bearer of the saffron alliance, Jayalalithaa swears by MGR, and so on. Perhaps the only politician who has made a conscious break from an even more complicated, and recent, hereditary past is Chandrababu Naidu. He asks for votes on the promise of a better future rather than in the memory of his father-in-law. The results, you would say, are encouraging.

This obsession is self-serving as it is self-destructive. If you are so obsessed with the past you cannot really leave it behind. How can you get a move on when everything is an unfinished agenda, a never-ending blood-feud? The one factor that has knocked the centre of gravity out of our national politics is the shifting of the Muslim vote (particularly in Uttar Pradesh) to Mulayam. Why? Only because he fired at the kar sevaks when he was chief minister more than a decade ago. So what if meanwhile his Muslim voters have become more miserable and powerless than at any time in our history. The poorest Muslims in the world are Mulayam’s voters even when he gives them nothing. Similarly, Laloo once brought in “social justice” merely by setting up separate polling booths where Dalits could vote. If his Dalits and other voters have continued to starve meanwhile, why should he bother? He beat the anti-incumbency factor the last time around even with Rabri Devi in front.

A democracy would pay dearly for such rear-view mirror politics. It may have something to do with the age of our leaders — the front benches of most parties in Parliament look like cardiac ICUs — though without the tubes. Many of today’s leaders were born around the time Savarkar wrote his treatise on Hindutva. They can be pardoned for being short of ideas for the future.

But what about the rest, the new generation that will, inevitably, begin to replace them in 2004? If politics is a competitive business it must be to compete for our children’s futures rather than be allowed to settle scores over the past. The voter is tiring of this jaded discourse. Our politicians are still fighting over the legacy of the freedom movement — even Sonia invoked Indira Gandhi in the Himachal campaign — but they overlook that the India of 2004 may be waiting for a new slogan, an agenda and an idea for the future.

Those who fight over Ambedkar, Savarkar or Nehru, those who drool at the thought of Hindu consolidation over Muslim atrocities of the past or a wave of revival of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty forget that meanwhile India is undergoing a generational change. Nearly five crore first-time voters in 2004, for example, would have been born after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Who knows, cynical, self-serving, backward-looking politics may yet succeed in trapping them in the past. But if somebody had the courage and the imagination to offer them a real promise for a better future, he would end up making history rather than merely wasting his life quarrelling over it.