The real deluge of icons, that the lay Indian never suspected of having done any remarkable good to the nation, began under PM Narendra Modi’s leadership. Gandhi retained primacy but others, discarded until now, edged their way into the public consciousness. And while the Congress had used the icons to name pet projects and institutions that were not necessarily in sync with those historical figures, the Modi Government cleverly developed that link, says RAJESH SINGH
American singer Jim Morrison had once remarked: “Each generation wants new symbols, new people, (and) new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.” He must have had transient symbols and names in mind that are easily replaced by the tide of time. He must surely not have had political icons under consideration that are evergreen, like Dev Anand was. The filmstar kept himself ‘youthful’, partly with the help of science and partly with his ebullience and unbridled energy. Political symbols are kept alive by their claimants, real and counterfeit, long after they have travelled into the other world.
One reason why Morrison’s observation does not apply to politics is the drought of arresting names and symbols that the present generation faces from within its own. This is as true of India as it is of any other country. There hasn’t been another Martin luther King Jr or another Abraham lincoln in the US, or another Churchill in the UK. There has not been another Mahatma Gandhi, another Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, or another Swami Vivekananda in India. An icon comes once in a way — and it can represent universal brotherhood like Swami Vivekananda, racial equality like Martin luther King, non-violence like Mahatma Gandhi, social non-discrimination like BR Ambedkar, or fiery patriotism like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Someone like Che Guevara is an icon for propaganda in favour of armed revolution.
looking for icons in today’s times is more futile than seeking a needle in a haystack. One reason is the degeneration of values, which reflects in personalities that are in public life today. They have no personal stature that transcends social or national barriers, and they certainly are no match for the ones of the past in terms of both performance and idealism.
The other explanation is the circumstance of the day. The freedom struggle is over; the Constitution has been framed; equality of all humans is an accepted norm in all democracies; and armed rebellions are led by marauders and religious bigots who have become terrorists. The age of idealism is over, and the era of fraud has dawned. little wonder, therefore, that the exasperated generation harks back to the lives and memories of past and dead leaders.
There may be many faults with the political class of today, but to give the devil its due, it has adroitly ‘managed’ and ‘appropriated’ icons in a way that can do internationally-acclaimed marketing guru Philip Kotler proud. They have performed the task so efficiently that they have become ‘icons’ in marketing icons! The American writer on business management, Tom Peters, once paid a tribute to these clever minds when he said that “the best leaders, almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols”. Icons are nothing but ‘symbols’ and ‘stories’ that present-day netas across the globe invoke at suitable moments.
The appropriation of icons is not a bad thing in itself, nor is the effort to ‘use’ them invidious. The problem is one of over-use or misuse or a mismatch between what the icons stand for and what they are being used to project. At times, over-zealous leaders confuse prominent personalities with iconic figures, and the result is a complete display of sycophancy. In the decades of Congress rule at the Centre and in many States, hundreds of roads and bridges and educational institutions and medical and engineering colleges were named after Motilal Nehru, Swaroop Rani Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru and Kamla Nehru. The later years were devoted to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Even the most ardent admirer of the Congress will be hard put to justify that these eminent names, barring Jawaharlal Nehru, are national icons. And, even as an icon, Nehru was milked on so many occasions under various pretexts that it became difficult to understand if the Congress was paying tribute to the man or torturing him in his death.
For decades, the Congress had a stranglehold on the subject of national icons. The party determined who the icons were, and how they must be used/over-used/misused. It sustained the primacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family and ensured that the others remained insignificant satellites or smaller stars in a galaxy illuminated by the Nehru-Gandhis.
Congress-friendly historians laboured hard to produce books that sang paeans to the contribution of members of the family not just to the country’s freedom struggle but also to its moral conscience. Since the last few years, after the Congress hegemony on Indian politics collapsed, other names, buried into history books, have begun sneaking out of the pages they were confined to. Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati propelled Ambedkar to centre-stage as a Dalit icon; and Ram Manohar lohia became a larger-than-life figure in the hands of Mulayam Singh Yadav and his bunch of fake socialists.
But the real deluge of icons that the lay Indian never suspected, thanks to being carefully and misguidedly tutored, of having done any remarkable good to the nation, began after the Bharatiya Janata Party assumed charge under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. Mahatma Gandhi retained primacy but others, discarded until now, edged their way into the public consciousness as well. And there was another difference. While the Congress had used the icons to name pet projects and institutions that were not necessarily in sync with those historical figures, the Modi Government cleverly developed that link.
For instance, Mahatma Gandhi stood for cleanliness as much as he preached communal harmony. Modi kicked off his Swachch Bharat Abhiyan on Gandhi Jayanti — and the logo for the project had the Mahatma represented through his ‘patented’ spectacles. The Prime Minister ensured that Government servants worked on that day to launch the programme. There were, understandably, murmurs of protest, but the general impression was that Modi had achieved a coup of sorts by so directly linking the Mahatma with a belief close to the latter’s heart, which is: Work is worship.
The Congress too had tied the Mahatma’s name to its flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, but it was seen as just another christening, like the Government medical college in Allahabad after Swaroop Rani, the engineering college (now a National Institute of Technology), again in Allahabad, after Motilal Nehru, and a women’s hospital — yes, again in Allahabad — after Kamla Nehru. It’s a relief that the Nehru family’s ancestral home in the town, Anand Bhavan, was renamed Swaraj Bhavan and not ‘Nehru Bhavan’.
Even before he became Prime Minister, Modi had deftly appropriated Sardar Patel from under the very nose of the Congress regime at the Centre. He announced the construction of the Sardar’s statue in Gujarat — to be the tallest such structure in the world, beating the Statue of liberty by some notches. In one stroke, he had underlined the raw deal that Sardar Patel had received at the hands of Congress leaders since Independence, primarily because the Congress did not want any other figure to overshadow Nehru. The fact that Modi was seen to be iron-willed, in the mould of the country’s ‘Iron Man’, helped him gain the leverage and establish the political connection. The Congress cried foul, but it was too late for its protests to register in the public mind.
If the Congress had over-used the Mahatma’s name and underplayed the Sardar’s iconic status, it had disdainfully rejected the likes of Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Syama Prasad Mookerjee and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The Prime Minister in October last year launched the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Shramev Jayate Karyakram. In his first Union Budget last year, Union Minister for Finance announced the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Rurban Mission — a project to urbanise rural areas in the sense of providing urban-like amenities there.
The Government also launched a teachers’ training programme named after Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, himself a noted academic. The Modi regime went a step further by naming Pandit Malaviya for the prestigious Bharat Ratna. It became clear soon enough that the days of eulogising Nehru-Gandhi family members at the drop of a hat and appending their names to every ‘revolutionary’ national project, were over. The time had come for new icons to find their place under the sun.
If the Congress finds its face in the dust over the Netaji Bose incident which has been dominating national headlines over the last fortnight, it is because of the long-held perception that the party had hounded the great freedom fighter and an icon in the real sense of the word, out of its fold, because he had become popular enough to challenge Nehru’s hegemony not just within the Congress but even in the hearts and minds of the average Indian. The ongoing controversy over the snooping charges and related dirt that has blackened the Congress’s face, is a scintillating example of how Prime Minister Modi has turned the tables on his rivals by appropriating Netaji’s larger legacy, if not his micro political ideology.
look at the sequence of events: During the lok Sabha election campaign, the BJP promised to declassify the Netaji files if it came to power and slammed the Congress regime for keeping the lid on the material to protect the image of its leaders. On being voted in with a comfortable majority, it took a different stand and said the Government could not declassify because of security and political implications. For all intents and purposes, the BJP was speaking the Congress language. Suddenly, after the snooping charge broke out and the controversy over his death resurfaced, a member of the Netaji Bose family met Modi in Germany and got an assurance from the Prime Minister that the truth would come out.
Within 24 hours of that promise, the Government formed an inter-ministerial group to revisit the Official Secrets Act that keeps the Netaji documents away from the public domain. Suddenly, the BJP is seen on Netaji Bose’s side while the Congress appears to be on the opposite end.
The Bose coup is remarkable also because Modi has managed to appropriate an icon that is far removed from the BJP’s core ideology. Netaji was a tall leader of the Congress. Even after he quit in desperation and disgust, he did not veer to the Right but formed his own outfit, the All India Forward Bloc, which in later years aligned with the left. If there is a declassification of the files, even if partial to begin with, to throw light on his death, Modi and the BJP will have completed the appropriation of the iconic leader.
The approach to Ambedkar has been different because the circumstances are so. Here, the BJP and Prime Minister Modi have sought to raise his stature from that of just a Dalit leader to a national hero who straddles law, social reform, foreign policy pragmatism and intense nationalism.
It helps to know that Ambedkar was opposed to reservations on the basis of caste, and accepted a provision in the Constitution to enable the quota system on the condition that it would have a limited time-span; he was displeased with Nehru’s handling of foreign policy, especially with regard to Pakistan.
Not surprisingly, these have endeared him to the Rightists, with the RSS mouthpiece devoting a special issue to Ambedkar to mark his anniversary recently. Interestingly, while Ambedkar disdained and debunked Brahmanism — which was one reason why he discarded Hinduism — the RSS too has repeatedly rejected the caste system that is prevalent among the Hindus, albeit with a view to gather a unified Hindu community under its umbrella.
The deftness with which the BJP has appropriated both Gandhi and Ambedkar should be a matter of a case study! The two leaders were so different from each other that, but for being co-travellers on the path of freedom struggle, they would have passed off as deep political adversaries.
The differences between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi were nearly as sharp as that between the Mahatma and Netaji Bose. But Ambedkar did not turn into a revolutionary. Instead, he stuck on despite facing defeat in an election due to the machinations of Congress leaders who owed allegiance to Nehru. Popular American science fiction author Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” To rephrase the maxim: “You don’t have to forget your icons to destroy your history. Just get people to distort, dislike and hate them.”
Ironically historians, at least a considerable number of them, who should have been most concerned by the phenomenon, were hand-in-glove with the political establishment since Independence to deny Indians their real icons and sense of history. The exploits of such academicians were effectively exposed in Arun Shourie’s book, Eminent Historians, which exposed the ‘you scratch my back, and I will yours’ syndrome among them. This ought to be complemented with another: ‘You obliterate one icon, I will another’. But that’s another story for a different day.