The worst Indian
By Amulya Ganguli
Hindustan Times
22 August, 2003
The BBC has just ended telecasting a series on 'Great Britons'
to choose the greatest person born in the island. If we had to
made a similar choice, the quest will have to begin with Buddha
and Asoka and end with Gandhi and Nehru. If we begin in the
16th century, as the BBC has done by starting with Queen
Elizabeth I and Shakespeare (the Brits have such a short history!),
our choice will fall on Akbar even if it makes Praveen Togadia
(and V.S. Naipaul) run around with trishuls, mouthing imprecations.
It may be more worthwhile, therefore, to choose the worst, rather
than the best, Indian. If the pre-Independence period is
considered, Jinnah-the 'evil genius', as Gandhi called him -
will undoubtedly head the list. And in the immediate
post-Independence period, Nathuram Godse is bound to be
nominated as the person at the bottom of the pit.
Coming closer to the present times, the two men whose names
are likely to come up are sanjay Gandhi and George Fernandes.
The former made the first serious attempt in modern Indian
history to undermine the democratic system. He was the
'Baby Doc' of Indian politics who would have turned India
into a banana republic, if he could. It was Indira Gandhi's
'mistake' of calling the elections in 1977 which saved
the country.
Let it be remembered that she didn't call the elections because
she was a democrat at heart. She opted for them because the
censored world in which she lived had convinced her that
the Emergency - 'Anusashan parva' in Vinobha Bhave's
words - was greatly appreciated because of the 'discipline'
it had imposed on the country. Thank God for her mistake.
Fernandes attained fame during the Emergency. His claim to
be a socialist firebrand, which was substantiated during
the 1974 railway strike, gained further credibility when
he was implicated in the Baroda dynamite case. Later, it
befitted his combative reputation when he won the 1077
election from behind the prison bars. There was further
confirmation of his socialist image when, as minister in
the Morarji Desai government, he banished Coca-Cola and
IBM from India.
Then the decline began. The first inkling of his opportunism
was when he changed his allegiance from the government to
the opposing side. His explanation to Madhu Dandavate, a
socialist colleague, for the switch of loyalty was that he
had "stopped thinking". Another explanation is a brain
surgery after which, Fernandes conceded, "people joke that
my alliance with the BJP is due to the injury in which my
brain had moved by about one-and-a-half inches". To the
far Right?
There is, of course, more to his fickle politics. It is, in
the main, due to the mess of pottage in the form of a
ministership to which he now holds on for dear life. So
much so that he couldn't stand the strain of being separated
from it after the Tehelka scam and wheedled his way back
to the ministry. Fernandes, therefore, represents the
Indian Politician in his worst form - ready to switch
sides as long as he is assured of the perks of a
ministerial position.
Fernandes would have been a runaway winner of the tag of
the worst Indian in recent years but for the emergence of a
far more sinister character - Narendra Modi, described by
Shiv Sena MP Pritish Nandy as the BJP's 'pet monster'.
And Ashis Nandy, the social scientist, calls him a
'textbook case of a fascist".
No one deserves these appellations more than the Gujarat
chief minister, who was described as the 'hero of hatred'
by the India Today magazine during last year's riots in
the state. Singlehandedly, Modi has demonstrated what his
more reputed saffron colleagues elsewhere couldn't - mainly
because of their coalitional constraints - what fascism
is like.
In essence, it is the subversion of the democratic system.
The Modi government achieved this, first, by ensuring that
the police refrained from being too energetic in curbing
the riots. This was the allegation which a Gujarat minister
made before an unofficial inquiry panel. Modi suspected it
was Haren Pandya, who resigned from the ministry when
confronted by the Gujarat BJP chief on this point.
Subsequently, Modi saw to it that he was denied a ticket
for the assembly polls and, then, not long afterwards,
he was killed.
But merely making the police sitidly while the minorities
are targeted is not enough. Modi also ensured that the rioters
were not apprehended. As the Human Rights Watch has stated,
"Most of those arrested have since been acquitted, released
on bail with no further action or simply let off. Police
regularly downgrade serious charges to lesser crimes -
from murder or rape or rioting, for example - and alter
victims' statements to delete the names of the accused."
Deletion is not the only act of police misconduct. As the
acquittal of the accused in the Best Bakery case has exposed,
the already traumatised witnesses were threatened with dire
consequences in order to make them change their testimony.
Rarely has the official machinery been put to such
diabolical use to subvert the course of justice. This
is fascism in action - something which has rarely been s
een in India before.
Not surprisingly, it is being done in a state where the
BJP has a majority. There is little doubt that its majority
elsewhere will lead to a similar subversion of the present
system. At present, the law does ultimately deliver justice,
even if the process is long-drawn. In Modi's domain, there
is no possibility of the minorities receiving any kind of
fair play for, in accordance with the fascist weltanschauung,
they are aliens, like the Jews in Nazi Germany.
Apart from his demonic role in Gujarat, there are other
reasons why Modi deserves the title of the worst Indian.
His politics is of such a virulent nature that even his own
party is wary of him. As the BJP's louha purush L.K. Advani
admitted after Pandya's murder, the party made a mistake
in allowing Modi to deny Pandya a ticket for the elections.
Other party men may not call Modi a Ravan - as Pandya's
father does - but they are aware that his rabid politics
can be an embarrassment in a democratic polity, to which
the BJP still formally subscribes.
Unlike Fernandes, Modi is not a turncoat. He will remain
committed to the BJP unless the VHP turns into a political
party and he joins it with his childhood friend Togadia.
Modi's claim to be the worst Indian springs from a mindset
which, like the Naxalite Charu Mazumdar's, is closed to the
constitutional imperatives of a pluralistic democracy, where
there are no second class citizens - no 'class enemies'
or minorities. In contrast, Modi's outlook and policies
are viciously sectarian. If implemented, as he is trying
to do in Gujarat, they can destroy India.