From
Nitin Gadkari to Mamata Banerji, all politicians describe controversies
surrounding them as media creations. Which is like looking at a pimple on your
face and calling it a mirror creation. There are other things which are indeed
media creations. The idea of the “Rahul Stamp”,
for example. First, media mandarins said the cabinet reshuffle was going
to bear the Rahul Stamp. Then they said the Rahul Stamp was missing. Then they
found that the Rahul Stamp had in fact worked and brought the average age of
the cabinet down from 65 to 64.
The
advantage with the media, especially the variety that shouts from inside boxes,
is that it is concerned only with the moment. What happens the next moment is
another headline and another shout. There was no logic in creating a hype in
the first place about a Rahul Stamp on the cabinet. A stamp is put on things by those who have outstanding
ideological and philosophical convictions that influence others. Jawaharlal
Nehru put his stamp on the post-war
world with concepts like non-alignment.
Jyoti Basu and E.M.S. Nambudiripad imprinted their stamp on their states by the
power of their personalities. Annadurai engraved his stamp on Tamil country,
Narasimha Rao on India’s economy.
Rahul
Gandhi does not belong to this league. His true asset is that he seems to
realise this – assuming that that is the
reason he has declined to become prime minister. In terms of grand convictions
that influence others, he has betrayed none so far. No notable speech stands in
his name. No policy initiative has stirred up popular imagination. No electoral
campaign he led has met with success.
Only fawning sycophancy is there to sustain the hype. As The Economist
put it: “Nobody really knows what he is
capable of, nor what he wishes to do should he ever attain power and
responsibility. The suspicion is growing that Mr Gandhi himself does not know”.
He
doesn’t have to. Not when he is his father’s son. To appreciate this we must
look at something the media played up with a more appropriate phrase, the
“Rahul Brigade”. Headline writers went effusive about the freshness and promise
of the Brigade. They actually meant Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot,
Jitendra Singh, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora.
Accomplished young men who deserve to do well. But that was not why they
got prominent positions in the cabinet.
This
is where the real stamp imprinted on today’s India emerges into view: The stamp
of dynasty. If it were simply a matter of the Rahul Brigade, at least two
others should have been somewhere in the limelight. From 2008 what was known as
Rahul’s core team at the Congress headquarters comprised Jitendra Singh,
Meenakshi Natarajan and Ashok Tanwar. They were closest to Rahul, strategizing
every move of his, united in their
devotion to him. When the moment of truth came, however, the differences
among them came to the fore. Jitendra Singh was the scion of Alwar royalty, Meenakshi was a Madhya Pradesh
grassroot worker, Tanwar a dalit. The one who fitted into the dynastic
framework moved up to join his kind – Scindia and Pilot, Prasada and Deora, all
of them their fathers’ sons.
When
sons and daughters, on their own, are unable to climb the steps of leadership,
democracy is diminished. Our democracy was subverted when dynastic rule
followed the Emergency. Two factors since made it worse. First, the idea spread
to other parties reviving the spectre of hereditary rulers. Secondly, Sonia Gandhi emerged as a more
formidable wielder of power than Indira. A surprised nation watched with awe as she tore into L.K.Advani in the
Lok Sabha recently, bristling with rage, shouting, gesticulating and repeatedly
goading her party men to shout down the opposition. For the first time the
nation understood why Congressmen were terrified of her.
This
is the real India, beyond the
make-believe of democracy. In this India only two forces can decide matters
like cabinet appointments. And the Prime Minister is not one of them. Ask
Jaipal Reddy.