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1 March 2003

1 March 2003

These weeks mark what could be a turning point in global history. A new war is about to break out in Iraq. There is a never-ending global downturn. This is also the week of the budget, and so much cricketing action.* 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 and tactical confusion that it oke up this late to raise a protest. What makes it funnier is that two of its own luminaries, as also o the Left, had at an earlier meeting absent-mindedly said yes to the Savarkar portrait. It is only now, punch-drunk from Gujarat on the one hand and from the charges of indulging in soft Hindutva on the

other, that the Congress decided this was an issue worthy of high attention. The same Congress that goes along so meekly with the VHP’s anti-cow slaughter drive and whose leaders happily collect 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.* 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 Gandhis? But is this the only

ay for the saffron Right to leave its mark in history? 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. 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.

prehistoric to the freedom movement, of dividing it between yours and mine. Certainly the Congress and the Left played this game in the past. The BJP has come to the party now. 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 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, chosen through a resolution by lawmakers. The last four statues installed, between 1985 and 2000, were so apolitical you could 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 instead o 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 Ram and Krishna, to ‘correct’ the injustices of eight centuries of Muslim subjugation. Then Mayawati wants to rule you in Ambedkar’s name, Mulayam Singh in Lohia’s, Jayalalithaa swears by MGR, and so on.

If you are so obsessed with the past, you cannot really leave it behind. How can you progress hen everything is an unfinished agenda, a never-ending blood feud? 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 o

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 compete for our children’s futures rather than be allowed to

settle scores over the past.

Those who fight over the past forget that 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. 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 waste his lifetime quarrelling over it.