Showing posts with label Rahul Gandhi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rahul Gandhi. Show all posts
Monday, 14 April 2014
PM MANMOHAN SINGH ismisses Baru’s claims, "baseless and mischievous’"
Sunday, 2 March 2014
NARENDAR MODI -Authors and able allies
Are these biographies or hagiographies, asks the writer of the latest crop of books on political leaders.
In the year of the general elections, hagiographies seem to be in. Barring occasional rays of hope, authors today increasingly resemble medieval courtiers.
Pick up the latest biography of Narendra Modi, Sudesh Verma’s The Gamechanger and you could be excused for thinking that the Gujarat Chief Minister is the panacea for all the maladies afflicting the nation. The title of Verma’s book, though, seems tame when one comes across D.P. Singh’s Narendra Modi: Yes, He Can… Only He can save India from Impending Doom. The cover leaves no room for speculation. Or try Akhilesh Yadav: Winds of Change by Sunita Aron. Then there isRahul by Jatin Gandhi and Veenu Sandhu that tells us the Gandhi scion is a patient man ready to bide his time for final success. But, Rahul Gandhi being both inaccessible and inscrutable, the husband-wife team had a mountain to climb.
Add other books on our leaders, their economics, their politics and it seems there is no dearth of modern-day Chanakyas! We are spoiled for choice. Some of the books attempt to woo slinking shadows, others prop up individuals squandered in a maze of narcissism. Our media is often accused of being both pliant and given to predilections. But authors? In the season of elections, nobody, it seems, minds a good harvest. And some authors have turned into able allies. They paint their subjects with a halo — men who never sinned, were only sinned against. Alternately, they build a myth around them.
Sample this: On the failed marriage of the Gujarat Chief Minister, Verma writes, “Narendra was able to defend his action by remembering Gautama Buddha. Narendra’s friends recall his explanation in private talks that even Buddha had left his wife, son and all pleasures and luxuries of a royal life in search of Truth….”
And how is this for an anecdote from childhood to embellish the narrative: “Once, Narendra was badly injured when a crocodile hit his left foot with its tail. A croc’s tail is strong; a hit by it can be fatal… Narendra was an eighth grade student then. He got nine stitches on his left foot near the ankle and was bed-ridden for more than a week… This incident would have scared any other child for the rest of his life, but not Narendra. Within a month, he was back in the lake.” Later Verma adds, “While coming back from his swimming routine, he found a baby crocodile lying alone at the side of the lake. It was more than a foot long. ND took the baby croc to his residence to nurse it…”
Verma claims he gleaned these details because of his team of five members. “I took leave for eight months to write the book. I spoke to his relatives, his neighbours. I was privileged enough to meet Modi more than half a dozen times. It changed my perception of him. He was more sinned against.”
Aron, on the other hand, does not attempt to invest Akhilesh with a halo; she gets help from unexpected quarters. Akhilesh, in a direct reference to the much-hailed sultan, was called Tipu in childhood. However, when talking of his birth, Aron cannot resist painting a picture that reminds readers of the birth of Krishna, replete with songs, bhajans and gaiety. Aron writes, “…There was anxiety in the air as a frail Malti Devi moaned with labour pains…The midwife tried to comfort Malti, who was in her early thirties, in a room faintly lit by a lantern. An infant’s first cry around 5.30 a.m. triggered a flurry of activity in the house. An excited midwife announced the birth of a baby boy and triggered celebrations. There were smiles all around and sweets were distributed even as people started pouring in to bless the boy. The sound of dholak reverberated as women with their faces covered in ghunghats sang jachchaand jananas to welcome the new arrival in the family of an ordinary farmer.”
Aron, however, says that she wrote the book like a journalist. “I don’t know how the book is going to be positioned in the election year. It is up to the publishers. It has formally not been released yet as the CM is busy. Incidentally, I found him very reticent in my talks and I spoke to a lot of relatives and others to take the story forward. I used a novel-like narrative, built the story on anecdotes.” But winds of change? “Yes, there are winds of change; there is a generational shift in U.P. politics,” she insists.
Not too different in mood and spirit is Arun Sinha’s Nitish Kumar and the Rise of Bihar. Sinha, a college-time friend of the Bihar CM, writes like a friend too. No uncomfortable questions, no sneak asides.
Then there are others who have revisited a political subject. For instance, veteran M.V. Kamath and Kalindi Randeri with The Man of the Moment: Modi, or Sameer Kochhar withModiNomics. Kamath and his co-author had earlier authored another book on Modi, The Architect of a Modern State.
Many of these works are not easy to read. Their prose is laboured, tainted with pedantry, breathless with stuffiness. Life is not linear; a single-strand narrative cannot render it accurately. These days, as we have discovered, the language of political discourse is both banal and inaccurate.
Some works, when they shift focus from the immediate subject, make interesting reading, like Aarthi Ramachandran’s Decoding Rahul Gandhi, but where is the bravura, that dash of irreverence? Certainly not in Pappu Yadav’s Hindi autobiography, or even Sutanu Guru’s more nuanced Beyond Rahul versus Modi.
However, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s and Kingshuk Nag’s books — Narendra Modi: The Man, the Times and The NaMo Story respectively — are a breath of fresh air. Neither seeks to impart a halo to Modi nor run him down unnecessarily. Mukhopadhyay says, “On Modi there is tremendous polarisation; either you are 150 per cent with him or against him. It is difficult to be nuanced. I was taking a risk of being isolated by either camp. I spoke to Modi many times. Fortunately, there has been a huge response from the market. But, yes, Modi has stopped speaking to me. Probablybecause he found the style offensive as I have taken small jabs at him. No bookstore has had an event in Ahmedabad.”
A Hindi version of the book has been brought out by Yatra and several Malayalam books have borrowed from his biography, but no Marathi or Gujarati publisher has come forward.
Nag did not interview Modi. He says, “You can love him, or hate him, but there is no way that you can ignore Narendra Modi.” Interestingly, Nag had the idea for the book from 2002 but when he approached a publisher, he was advised, “Write a book from the Hindu point of view.” It took another 10 years before a publisher (Roli Books) agreed to a biography that would neither “demonise” nor “lionise” the subject.
Another similar case is Sankarshan Thakur’s well-researched, persuasively-argued book on Nitish Kumar Single Man. Incidentally, Thakur had, much earlier, written about Nitish’s main rival Laloo Prasad Yadav in The Making of Laloo, the Unmaking of Bihar.
These are, however, exceptions in an age keen to rewrite its times.
Saturday, 22 February 2014
AAP KEJRIWAL chance for the outsiders
The ideology which Lutyens’ Delhi today represents is fundamentally at odds with an India which is growing accustomed to the idea of participatory democracy
Had Raj Thackeray been a ‘manoos’ from Lutyens’ Delhi, he would be facing an existential crisis. A strange wind is blowing across the corridors of Lutyens’ Delhi’ high-walled barbed gates, which metaphorically and physically remain out of bounds for 99 per cent of the population.
Ever since the British moved the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, central Delhi has become synonymous with power and prestige. After Edwin Lutyens radically redrew the capital, power was given a shape and symbol. And those who were fortunate enough to find themselves a space in Delhi’s vicinity invariably became the agents of change in independent India.
From there began an incestuous cycle of power where residents of the ‘chosen land’ dominated the country affairs, either directly or through proxy. Barring the inconsequential tenure of H.D. Deve Gowda, almost all Prime Ministers nourished their national political careers in one of the red sandstone buildings of the capital. For a large part of the last century and until recently, if one did not shape his or her public life under this dome-shaped edifice, he or she would be seen as lacking national appeal.
But now there is a discernible shift in the national mood. India is going for an election where its main political protagonists do not portray the look and feel of the conventional ‘Delhi-based leader.’ On the contrary, a common thread underlying the three key candidates — Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi — to Delhi’s throne is their sequestered relationship to capital politics.
Emergence of the exceptions
Mr. Modi pitches his candidature as the ‘external redeemer’ who will clean the mess in Lutyens’ Delhi. The last time Mr. Modi lived in the capital was in the late 1990’s when he worked in the party’s headquarters. Though he did play a crucial behind-the-scene role in the party, it is the time he served in Gujarat which has significantly added to his credentials as a suitable leader for the top job. Expectedly, his campaign and aides are not restricted to Delhi, which represents a point of departure for the party’s electoral strategy.
Mr. Gandhi, of late, has been trying his best to rub off the ‘elite stains’ of being a Lutyens’ resident. He projects himself as a mere observer and not actor to all that has unfolded in South block in the last 10 years. Such is the national rage against all those who inhabit the grandiose building of the capital that Mr. Gandhi is making every attempt to break away from this image. His remark — that he would tear up the controversial ordinance that aimed at protecting convicted law makers — was viewed as such an attempt.
Mr. Kejriwal casts himself as the ‘eternal outsider.’ A resident of Ghaziabad, he chooses Lutyens’ Delhi as his preferred choice for protest. Considering the ideology of his politics, given a chance, he may even demolish the lofty monuments built by Edwin Lutyens and replace them with more aam aadmi-like structures.
Delhi: the hub of power
For more than half a century, Lutyens’ Delhi was venerated with both respect and fear. If one wanted to build a career in national politics, it was ‘the place’ to network and mingle. Other than a few exceptions, in the Congress scheme of things, it was the ‘Delhi-based observers’ who would anoint Chief Minsters for States from places as far-flung from Delhi as Kerala and Nagaland.
In our flawed federal structure, it was deemed impossible for one to make the logical and sequential transition from sarpanch to Member of the Legislative Assembly to Member of Parliament and then to Prime Minster. The concentration of power in Lutyens’ Delhi perpetuated a potent cocktail of nepotism and malfeasance. Today, for many, Lutyens’ Delhi symbolises a closed system which defies meritocracy and capability. It is a construct reserved exclusively for the bureaucratic or political elite. For many, it is this concentration of power which is the root cause of India’s corruption problems.
The ideology which Lutyens’ Delhi today represents is fundamentally at odds with an India which is growing accustomed to the idea of participatory democracy. This is not an idea propagated exclusively by the Aam Aadmi Party but is being increasingly adopted by all political parties. Mr. Modi too, through his maxim ‘minimum government, maximum governance,’ is calling for greater involvement of citizens in politics. Even Mr. Gandhi is making an attempt to write his party’s manifesto outside Delhi — a first of its kind for the Congress.
As a pluralistic and regionally assertive India progresses toward modernity, it is becoming clear that the country needs not one single solution but a gamut of localised solutions to problems in the country. An active citizenry, which demands closer physical access to power, is changing the definition of ‘national politics.’ This is evident from a closer analysis of election turnouts.
Between 1989 and 2009, the turnout for the Lok Sabha elections has remained constant at around 60 per cent. Interestingly, the turnout for State elections continues to surge, even while incumbents are voted back to power. The States that went to polls last December saw an average increase of six percentage points in voter turnout compared to the 2008 Assembly elections. This trend could be emblematic of the fact that voters believe they have a larger role to play in affairs to which they have closer physical access.
If this divergence in voter turnout continues, India could produce many more Narendra Modis in the coming years as it will become much easier for a Shivraj Singh Chouhan or a Jayalalithaa to prove their national credentials by performing in their State, rather than trying to emerge from Delhi’s rat race.
The emergence of any of the above three leaders this summer could mark a paradigm shift in Indian polity — AAP making an impressive national debut, Mr. Gandhi rejuvenating the Congress in his new avatar or Mr. Modi becoming Prime Minster. It would make the dream for many to occupy Lutyens’ Delhi seem less distant; the road to the capital can now pass through Gandhinagar, Gangtok or Goa.
(Siddharth Mazumdar is founder of Citizens for Accountable Governance.)
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