Electioneering is in full throttle. As the temperatures and decibel levels rise, so do informed and uninformed rumours and predictions despite a strict election code being in place.
The meek mainstream media has the Great Leader straddling it like a colossus and presenting new narratives of the nation’s grand journey under the incumbent government to world-level development and a good life. He tells foreign media that during his 10 year rule, a grand temple to India’s revered Lord Ram has come up after a wait of five centuries. That he was the first to talk publically of the need for new toilets and sanitary pads for women. At home in public rallies in rural areas he lambasts opposition leaders for not visiting the Ayodhya temple despite being invited to the grand installation of life in the statue of Ram Lalla. He calls this a great sin, paap!
Such preternatural ability to politicise everything from science to religion fills you with awe and wonder.
One saw bits of a video in which a young girl is telling her father he made phone calls to world leaders and stopped the wars in Europe until Indians stranded there were brought back safely. As the polling days creep closer, the media becomes a willing platform for speeches by the ruling dispensation to predict a total sweep all over India including the South, which has so far been ruled by local parties and their defiant leaders.
Then comes news of a certain caged fortune-teller parrot at Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, reportedly getting his owner in big trouble by predicting that a candidate from a local Dravidian party, the Pattali Makkal Katchi, would win. According to the Forest Ranger, who immediately took cognisance of the report, since parrots are deemed Section 2 species under India’s Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, it is a cognisable offence to cage a parrot and get it to predict election results before polls. The owner Selvaraj, we learn, can be let off with a warning and a penalty which could be as high as Rs 10,000.
Electoral politics in India eventually clings to old mythological plots. In Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s constituency, the media tells us policemen guarding the glitteringly renovated Vishwanath temple will be wearing saffron scarves and tilak upon their foreheads. As though replaying another plot from the Mahabharat, news comes that a transperson shall be contesting against the grand warrior just as Shikhandi once stood against Bhishma, the undefeatable patriarch. Many more plots focus on old historical family and kinship patterns. One trope you hear repeatedly now is the nation as one great family with The Leader with no family of his own as its doting protector. Across caste, gender and class, all voters are family and this relationship guarantees all a future full of hope and good cheer.
Having established this lambasting of the opposition and its supporters begins with how a young leader was initially mocked and abused repeatedly for rising from the poor classes and challenging the hegemony of family-run political parties. Family, it is explained painstakingly, actually means an ancient Hindu structure rooted in our scriptures. It is supportive of gender and caste hierarchies, where needed, to keep the society functional and peaceful. At the head stands the father figure, the sole custodian of the welfare of women and children who must understand that if they honour and obey the age-old rules they have a strong guarantee of peace, safety, free rations and cash in bank accounts each month as also a pucca – strong – house with a toilet. It feels a bit strange to see national politics become a pursuit of lost patriarchal plots that demand all married women wear vermillion as a marker of their status, raise children (read more males) and give them a set of already defined ‘samskaras’ including vegetarianism and reverence for all older males.
These guidelines do not say outright but specify politics as something men handle. Women are there to help when asked. If this was untrue, powerful women who won the popular mandate with wide margins and made their way to the top in regional parties, would have had it easy. A Jayalalithaa, a Mayawati, a Mamata – all powerful regional leaders – faced bitter sexist and casteist slurs and grave physical threats to themselves and their families when they showed both courage and capability. Even Sonia Gandhi, who refused to be a Prime Minister, repeatedly faced a barrage of personal attacks with one prominent politician threatening to tonsure herself and sleep on the floor if a foreigner from Italy were ever to assume the reins of the highest office. Well, she did not, but sly digs at her Italian roots and her children’s close family ties with their Italian grandmother and cousins continue to fly. They are all tarred as an “entitled family” of haves.
Given all this what can grand political slogans of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – all the world’s one big jolly family – and all the citizens in this lovely state being family (iss rajya ke log hee mera apna parivar hain), coming from those who have mocked the Parivarvaad – dynasty politics – in Congress or RJD or DMK mean? No, saying the basic prototype of time honoured family and kinship in India has been set in stone by our ancestors, does not work. It had actually ceased to exist as long ago as the mythical Dwapar Yug when five illegitimate sons of Kunti waged a bloody war against their blind interloper uncle and his sons’ equally disputed claim to the throne of Indraprastha.
Annie Ernaux writes in The Years:
“…[T]here are things the society hushes up…Then the silence breaks little by little and suddenly one day words burst forth , recognised at last… underneath them other silences start to form…”
Are we indeed headed towards the prototype of family where we must be united in flesh till death do us part and thereafter remain connected spiritually?
Indeed, we have known death in the last decade, possibly in numbers our generation did not know. Still, we refused to collect scientifically verifiable data and do a verbal autopsy of deaths during COVID, by malnutrition, suicides, lynchings and rioting, in custody and outside in fields during ‘encounters’. Why are our family patriarchs so reluctant to share data and details about casualties of the past decade? We are past expecting power to apologise but what about a formal acceptance that in several cases the state and its institutions and mandarins who run them, were wrong to deny citizens their constitutional rights, answers to queries filed under the RTI? With so much power in so few hands, facts are what the public needs. Facts are work. Facts need study. Facts need rational search driven by real curiosity. Patience. Humility.
Our leadership, never at a loss for words, seems strangely disinclined to consider citizens’ lives as an integrated whole from birth till death. Lives that include not just guarantees for a better tomorrow but a focus on here and now: the joblessness, water shortages, farmers’ and young students’ despair and a big jump in sexual crimes mostly against women. As the leader winds up the day’s speech there is a din of ringing of a thousand bells and gongs and religious festivities begin.
If life were not stranger than fiction in India, and religion had not seeped so deeply in political narratives, the Forest Ranger Sahib in Cuddalore, a small town where authority ends at the Civil Lines area, would not be so alarmed by a fortune-teller parrot, (a shuka, a tota, straight from our mythologies and folk tales) opening his red beak!
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
