In September 2018 I published this article on a now-defunct website called Indiaopines. Many of my posts have been irretrievably lost when this website shut down its portals. However, there are some that I have saved in my system, and a revisit to this post revealed that, on the political scene, nothing really had changed in the interim period. I am re-plugging one article with a few comments in parentheses that suggest that only some inconsequential changes have happened in the meantime.

With each passing day, the countdown to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections is getting, in the words of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, “curiouser and curiouser.” There are Narendra Modi and Amit Shah on one side looking through the glass at a Mad Hatter who is running from pillar to post searching for an Indian factory where he can manufacture non-Chinese mobile phones. Why he wants to make these in India when Chinese versions are available at throwaway prices is perhaps safely tucked under his hat. There’s also the Red Queen, probably from Javier Moro’s proscribed book, whipping the Mad Hatter into a frenzy whenever she looks at the ruins of the Kingdom she had conquered with no effort. Then there are various other characters coming together and separating like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers while performing their American-style Ballroom dances. These, like the Elephant Queen, or the Bicycle Thieves, separate faster and more often than they come together.

The Elephant Queen has an ego the same size as her symbol; while the Bicycle Thieves think they are smarter than the Mad Hatter having donned Red caps thinking its colour will compete favourably with Moro’s draped-in-red Queen. (Meanwhile, the Elephant Queen has passed into political irrelevance, while the most irascible and far more dangerous Pauper-Queen of Bengal has come to occupy her place. An even more dangerous entity, Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party has made its appearance and threatened to destroy this nation with its economically exploitative agenda that is being promoted as a ‘freebie culture’. Then there is the chara-chor, searching with a lantern a way up from the dungeon where he is presently lodged.

(Nitish Kumar, continuing with his seesaw existence, has just provided him with a lifeline, and pulled him out in the hope that comes 2024 he will be the choice of the opposition for the office of the Prime Minister. Bihar is already witnessing the return of Jungle Raj with a rapidity that we last saw in the chariot race in Ben Hur).  There are disgruntled ex-Ministers within the BJP, once part of Lutyen’s cocktail circuit, and now made to cool their heels in anterooms waiting for a call to serve the nation. Their methods of showing their displeasure confirm the wisdom of Modi and Shah in keeping them out of the inner circle. Being part of the IAS or a World Bank economist-cum-journalist, or a successful Bollywood villain does not guarantee an automatic place at the table with Modi. He had found these people out even before he was chosen by the party to lead it in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

(Today the first one found humiliation as his reward for jumping ship and landing in the broken-down pirate vessel of the Pauper-Queen. Egged on to take a genuine Adivasi lady in the contest for the highest Constitutional office of India, he was left with lots of egg on his face. He too has passed into political oblivion. The Bollywood villain has again reappeared and bought himself a ticket to the Lok Sabha with the Pauper-Queen’s help. Though it may satisfy his gargantuan ego while making no difference to his fortunes, politically he too has moved into the shadows. As for the economist-journalist, his political ambitions were always rather limited, and I find it very hard to fathom the reasons for his vitriolic bitterness toward Modi. Perhaps his personal tragedies are taking a toll on his mental abilities, which at one time were considerable).

When Narendra Modi was elevated to the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, it sent shock ways through the political firmament and brought about a virulent reaction from the Congress and the secular brigade; the first casualty of which came from within the NDA. Nitish Kumar’s departure from it, and the sulking of the senior leaders in the BJP, reminded me then of a book of essays by Arthur Koestler, that the Hungarian-British author and journalist wrote after his travels to India and Japan in 1959. The book titled “The Lotus and the Robot” primarily explored Eastern mysticism, through the practices of yoga and Zen. The book was promptly banned in India by the Nehruvian establishment, as was the propensity of the Supreme Leader who brooked no dissent.                                               

Koestler was a political activist, having lived through perhaps the most turbulent period of European history. He was thirteen years of age when the First World War ended in 1918 which saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the Tsarist Russian empires. As a German-speaking Jew in Europe, the period between the First and the Second World Wars was perhaps the most stifling time for a writer of his talents. Educated in Austria, he joined the German Communist Party, but was soon disillusioned by the state of terror unleashed by Stalin. He resigned from the Party in 1938, having closely witnessed another facet of totalitarianism in Franco’s Spain, and immigrated to England. In 1940, he published “Darkness at Noon,” a novel that is as strong an indictment of totalitarianism as George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Koestler’s terrific sense of phraseology has resulted in some very catchy titles that adorn his writings. Apart from the two titles mentioned above, he also wrote- “The Yogi and the Commissar,” “The Ghost in the Machine,” “Thieves in the Night,” “Arrival and Departure,” and “The Age of Longing,” several other works of fiction and non-fiction.

But, as is my wont, the reference to Koestler’s writings in this essay, is actually not any critique or an appreciation of his craft. It is just my way of writing. When I read a book, I tend to pick out words, sentences, and sometimes complete passages that can be used to expand a particular idea that I may be developing in my mind. My indulgent readers would have noticed that I write opinion pieces on current politics as it is shaping up in India, and I usually build these pieces around a phrase or a word from a known work of literature. The inspiration I draw from these intellects is enough to make my two-bit opinions a bit more weighty and sound scholastic.

Now, coming to the crux of this piece:

In 1975 Indira Gandhi imposed a state of Emergency to save herself from political oblivion. When the Emergency was lifted in 1977 it brought about a whole new experiment in Indian politics. For the first time since Independence, a right of the centre party, that Nehru and the Congress publicly reviled, had found common cause with the socialists, and a new dispensation called the Janata Party replaced the Congress at the centre. But the experiment did not last even two years. The socialists within the Janata Party took objection to the Jana Sangha members retaining their membership of the RSS and brought about the collapse of the experiment. The break-up of the Janata Party led to the formation of small, left-leaning, sectarian, regional, parties that became the private fiefdoms of political warlords whose sole purpose was to amass huge personal fortunes that would be used for buying elections in the future. The political landscape of the country had completely changed from the days of Nehru in the first flush of Independence, when people voted for the Congress, as it had no worthwhile opposition anywhere in the national or regional arenas.

Vote-bank politics, which was largely absent till 1979, raised its ugly head, as political parties vied for power on narrow regional, sectarian, class and caste calculations. The Jana Sangha, which was a major constituent of the Janata Party, also morphed into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), replacing its symbol of a lighted lamp with a lotus flower in bloom.

In disgust, the people voted Indira Gandhi back into office, giving her and the Congress a new lease on life. But, by now the Congress had shed all those members who had made common cause with the Janata Party and challenged the leadership of Indira Gandhi. The new Congress that emerged was christened Congress (I), making it a political vehicle wholly dedicated to her persona. Indira Gandhi systematically dismantled the structure of the old Congress party by concentrating absolute power in her hands, forcing the state legislatures to (s)elect her nominees as their leaders. She nominated each Chief Minister, and the party had no say in the matter.

Inner-party democracy disappeared and sycophants and flatterers quickly filled the spaces vacated by dedicated Congressmen. Dissent was promptly suppressed and chosen commissars were unleashed upon those who dared to differ. They were heckled and hounded out of the party by being dubbed as “CIA agents” or simply “anti-nationals.” The “court jester” of a Congress President, Deb Kant Borooah completed the transformation of the once grand old party to a fascist dispensation when he said that “Indira is India, and India is Indira”. Indira Gandhi, at the top of the power structure, started the emasculation of the Congress party and gradually replaced the human elements with mechanical robots, trained to genuflect to the ruling Deity and open their mouths only to stifle dissent and to sing paeans in praise of the First Family.

Politics across the country became a fertile ground for violent conflict, unleashing vast fires of strife between castes, creeds, languages, and every other distinction among the people of the land. Punjab was the first state to burn in this conflagration.

The actions of the two Sikh bodyguards of Indira Gandhi, in 1984, would have very far-reaching ramifications. Coincidentally, it was the year that George Orwell had chosen for his ‘futuristic’ depiction of a dystopic state at its peak of power and repression. The resultant retribution that the automatons and their mindless legions visited upon the hapless Sikh community has been recorded in great detail, and it is not my purpose here to revisit those terrible times. Within less than a generation after the dismemberment of the Indian subcontinent, India was once again descending into religious fratricide, dividing the nation into smaller constituents of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc., and into even smaller fragments along sect, caste, and class; each constituent ready to spring at the throat of the other at the slightest provocation.

But did these tragedies make any difference to the descendants of the Nehru-Gandhis? On the contrary, Rajiv Gandhi followed the same policies, which perhaps led to his own tragic assassination. If anything, his widow has perfected the art of Total Dictatorship and taken it to levels that were matched only by Mao or Stalin. This is the state of affairs that has continued from that fateful year in 1979 when the Robots and the Lotus first began their struggle for political control at the centre. The automatons of the Congress have systematically hounded out all potential threats to the First Family, and have brought the party down to such farcical levels that the best it can field in the upcoming elections are, to my mind, mechanical robots programmed only to replay the inanities of the Mad Hatter. Not that these people were actually blessed with the ability to think independently! The reason they have stuck to the First Family like limpets is precisely that! They are unable to reason for themselves. As the poet said: it’s not for them to reason why, but just to do and die. Lord Tennyson’s Light Brigade had 600 brave soldiers who were ready to charge into the valley of Death, knowing they were fighting for a higher cause. But the Mad Hatter’s Robots are riding into the hereafter fighting for the basest cause. The tragedy is that they are not even aware of it!

The Red Queen and the Mad Hatter have no time for anyone who has even an iota of intelligence. It is appalling to listen to party apparatchiks like Surjewala, Manish Tiwari, Sanjay Jha, Rajeev Gowda, and others mechanically repeating the lies and inanities uttered by their Hatmaster. (These have since been replaced by newer apparatchiks like Supriya Shrinate, Alka Lamba, Ajoy Kumar, Udit Raj, etc. One thing that we can say with certainty about them is that their level of understanding of complex matters is even more abysmal than that of those they replaced).

This collection of programmed and programmable Robots would do any puppet-master proud. The Robots have been unique in letting opprobrium upon opprobrium wash off their synthetic backs, day in and day out, as they still continue, “to crawl when asked only to bend.” They are the closest to Orwell’s Winston Smith after having been “treated” by O’Brien and his colleagues, in what is best described by Nandini Bahri-Danda as LYBB (Leave Your Brain Behind) chamber, where they are made to see the “light”.

Meanwhile, the Lotus, after the departure of Vajpayee from the scene, found it difficult to raise its head above the mud. L. K. Advani, with his penchant to go on rath yatras on makeshift automobiles, in search of a utopian Ram Rajya, looked more and more like Cervantes’ Knight of the Sour Countenance, tilting at imaginary windmills. After the unpleasant surprise of 2004 this Lord of Lost Causes kept losing one state after another, destroying any chances of the BJP becoming a serious contender for power at the centre. Until Narendra Modi came upon the national scene, it looked like the Congress would really have no worthwhile challenge from the opposition.

“The people who must never have power are the humourless.” This is what Christopher Hitchens wrote in June 2011, shortly before his untimely death. Can you imagine a more humourless bunch than Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, and Mamata Banerjee? Add the visages of Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal, A. K. Antony, Salman Khurshid, and the entire Congress leadership, and you will be seeing perhaps the most humourless faces in one group in history. (Manmohan Singh, mercifully, occupies a cupboard from which he is brought out occasionally by the Red Queen to mumble some obscure defence of the loot he permitted under his nose. Antony and Khurshid have made enough money to seek blissful retirement and are hardly seen these days).

To quote Hitchens once more: these are the kind of people who are “secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe…those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental.”

We must hope that the general public is no longer swayed by these interlopers and has learnt to use its vote with deliberate discretion and careful consideration.

(The next general elections are less than two years away. The Robots are coalescing in the hope that they can fool the voting public as they did in 2004 and 2009. The South, apart from Karnataka, is witnessing anti-India, anti-Hindu hatred of unprecedented levels. Imaginary Muslim grievances are being fanned by them with disastrous law and order consequences. The Church is not lagging far behind in its fractious agenda. There are many BJP supporters who are getting swayed by these elements and threatening to vote against the party. Mainstream Media is spreading lies fast and loose, NDTV and India Today being the main vehicles. Modi too has generally shown very little enthusiasm for Hindu consolidation in pursuit of his ‘sabka saath, sabka Vikas agenda. The juxtaposition of Kuran and Computer has brought him no significant votes. It’s time for him to embrace an aggressive Hindutva, as defined by Sri Aurobindo, and shed this diffidence towards his core constituency. With so many openly voracious predators like the Congress, AAP, AITMC, NCP, Mahathugbandhan, in the North; and DMK, CPM, YSRCongress, TRS, in the South, waiting with bared fangs to tear Bharat into pieces, what should be the response of us Hindus?)

Those who wish to divorce the BJP and get married once more to the Congress (in 2024) must recall Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous quip: “A second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience.” 1979 and 2004 are enough indicators that the “triumph of hope” in these marriages is merely ephemeral while the tragedy of experience is permanent!

Image source: Ahmedabadmirror.com