The other day, Mamata Banerjee did something unprecedented. She criticized Congress leadership. And no, it wasn’t even on some issue. She (and her campaign surrogate) questioned the supposedly divine right of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. It is the ultimate taboo in Indian politics. You will see many parties which might ally with BJP, or might even be currently allied with the BJP, take swipes at PM Modi or Amit Shah without fear. With the Congress leadership, they wouldn’t dare. The spectre of 10 Janpath looms large in the minds of every political party in India (except the BJP). There is too much fear and too much awe.
Mamata Banerjee crossed that line yesterday. She walked boldly into what people think is the dragon’s lair. Worse, she said it is no dragon at all. Anyone can pull its tail to make sure.
I am no fan of TMC, but when Mamata and her crew took on the Nehru-Gandhis the other day, it made me cheer. There we go! There’s the woman who used to be called “Agnikanya” in Bengal. The one who took on Stalin’s regime in the state.
Something is happening in Indian politics. The churn that began with Modi’s call for Congress Mukt Bharat is heading towards a tipping point. The BJP has already created the conditions for it. But a Congress mukt Bharat could only happen when the other side dumps the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. So let us talk about it.
Last year, when Michael Bloomberg ran briefly for the Democratic nomination for President, he said in one of his interviews that Xi Jinping is not exactly a dictator. And that it would be wrong to say there is no democracy in China at all. Naturally, this statement was widely mocked. His campaign got no traction anyway. The campaign folded quickly, despite spending millions.
Now, Bloomberg is a brilliant man, a billionaire and a media baron. But he is not particularly well-spoken, as you can see right there. More interestingly though, I believe there is some truth to what Bloomberg was (probably) trying to say. In reality, nobody can rule ‘alone.’ Nobody ever has. What can one man or one woman do, really? I mean physically. They need collaborators, people who will ensure that their commands are followed. And unless these people are loyal to the dictator, the dictator cannot get anything done. For that, the dictator must keep these people happy. The rule of the dictator must benefit them in direct ways. In that limited sense, every regime is ‘democratic,’ in some perverted way at least.
The same goes for Congress. From the outside, it is a hereditary monarchy, starting from the days of Nehru. I am talking of course about Motilal Nehru. People tend to forget that the dynasty did not begin with Jawahar, but with his dad. You can read it in the correspondence between Motilal Nehru and the Mahatma. They were discussing when it would be time for Jawahar to “wear the crown” (exact words). And sure enough, Motilal Nehru became Congress president in 1928-29. The following year, he handed it down to his son.
Since that day, the dynasty dismantled the Congress party’s internal democracy brick by brick. It wasn’t very easy. They had to sideline powerful opponents such as Sardar Patel. When Nehru was Prime Minister, he made sure that Indira Gandhi became youth congress president, but it was only for a year. After Nehru’s death, the family briefly lost power, until Indira clawed her way back. The party split with the old guard pushed into irrelevance. Note that even as late as 1984, Pranab da briefly hoped that as senior-most Cabinet minister, he should succeed as Prime Minister after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi. The last gasp of “democracy” within the party was in the 1990s when the late Jitendra Prasad thought he could challenge Sonia Gandhi for the leadership of Congress. The monarchy we see today, the absolute concentration of power, was not achieved in a day.
No political party has ever understood India as perfectly as the Congress has. And so the Congress project was simple. In the village hierarchy, the zamindar is on top. And it is a hereditary position. So you keep India as an agrarian, underdeveloped state. Nehru had some dreams of modernity, inspired by the industrialization of the Soviet Union. But Indira Gandhi understood the power structures much better.
But, as I was saying, nobody can rule alone. The Congress monarchy was aided by a ruling class that the party gathered around itself. The Congress pampered them. These people were the enforcers. They used to define what was acceptable thought and what was not. They defined our self-image, both individually and as a nation. The Congress gave them high sounding titles, but it was more than just government patronage. The power of people like filmmakers and at least some newspaper editors could be attributed to the semblance of a “free market.” But they knew where to draw the line.
In fact, as long as you stayed within the lines, you could even be a bit naughty. You could talk about the Marxist style revolution as long as it was just a fashion statement. This was the old culture of “dissent” that you will hear the intellectuals crying about nowadays. In their youth, they drank endless cups of tea sitting in college canteens, as they pondered revolution or their upcoming unemployment. At some point, you were expected to grow up, get into an arranged marriage and see the light, which was always at the feet of the Nehru-Gandhis.
Every now and then, a few would be chosen from the ranks of the unemployable and elevated above the rest of us. The surest way into this class was, of course, birth. But then there were upper ranks of the civil services, certain colleges at Delhi University and the like. At the peak of UPA, their favourite channel held a debate on whether St. Stephens students speak better English than some other DU colleges. If I remember correctly, they featured Mani Shankar Aiyar. Note that at the time they held this debate, over 60 per cent of Indians were defecating in the open every day.
So if you got into this class, you could enjoy a bunch of “luxuries,” which could be anything from foreign chocolates to dating. Or in a more realistic sense, you would have access to the banal things that everyone outside India takes for granted, but the vast majority of Indians cannot even dream about. That was the whole point actually. Rahul Gandhi was right. Poverty is a state of mind, and so is the standard of living. A lot of people in America might have access to Swiss chocolate daily. But it isn’t the same as popping chocolates from your last box after you come back from your government-sponsored foreign trip and tell the barefooted servants about the inside of an aeroplane.
Think about it this way. In America, literally, everyone can speak English. In India, they made speaking English a status symbol. It matters because not everyone can have it.
This is the ruling class. At their core, they are nothing. They contribute nothing to the country, nor to the world. They lead trivial lives, enjoying trivial things that normal folks in the west take for granted. But they had those tiny things that gave them an ego boost.
This ruling class *loved* the dynasty. They loved what the monarchy did to India. And then, India changed.
For them, Modi represented a class revolt. He brought with him a bunch of people that the ruling class sees as unsophisticated. But more importantly, these unsophisticated people had zero regards for the ruling class and its pretensions. Did you just refer to “roti” as “Indian bread”? No, they won’t whisper in awe about how high class you are for not being fluent in your mother tongue. They will laugh at you. And they will do it to your face.
The second part is really important. The ruling class isn’t against Modi simply because they find his supporters unsophisticated. How sophisticated is Mamata Banerjee? Remember Lalu Yadav? Would you call him sophisticated?
The difference is that the latter gave due salaams and pranaams to the ruling class. Let me point out an incident at Mamata Banerjee’s Mumbai event the other day. Some actors from the audience got up and praised the Bengal CM for defeating the BJP. She peppered her words with a little Bangla, spoken in an American accent. The Bengal CM was so impressed that she advised the actor to join politics.
Imagine that for a moment. A mass leader like Mamata Banerjee, with millions of votes in her bag, complimenting the political abilities of an actor who has no talents at all. Imagine the ego boost. That is what the ruling class wants. More than money, they need to be assured that they are the brightest and the best. Or think of the tea garden princess, whose dad sent her to an expensive private college in America. She is in Goa these days, demanding that veteran politicians from the state should answer to her. LOL. Every time she opens her mouth in Parliament, she wants people to know that she has toured Europe.
Modi ignores this class completely. In other words, he has as much contempt for them as they have for him. That is why they hate him.
The ruling class used to adore Congress. Now they are pulling away. The Congress has not performed for them in nearly 10 years now and they see little future prospect.
A lot of people mocked the small crowd of intellectuals that Mamata drew in Mumbai. Yes, it may not be as big as even a ward size political rally. But the point is what it represented. It was a revolt within the ruling class. Like I said, nobody rules alone. The Congress could rule because these people were its amplifiers and its enforcers. Now they have a new champion in Mamata Banerjee. She humors them, she treats them like they are something. She also has her nephew, who can be a great replacement prince for this class of compulsive bootlickers. Congress should watch out.
