Personal Poll Attacks
By Inder Jit
(Released on 5 October 1999)
Unlike top leaders of the BJP, the Congress and other parties, I am not upset by the marked tendency among those involved in the recent poll battle to indulge in “dirty and loathsome” personal attacks. On the other hand, I welcome what has come to pass and consider all the brouhaha whipped up over certain remarks against some leaders largely uncalled for. In fact, I even believe that Mahatma Gandhi, whose jayanti we celebrated last Saturday, would be on my side and may well puckishly repeat from the high heavens above a line made famous by Sachin Tendulkar: “Dilmaange more.”
Shocked? Perhaps yes. But you really don’t need to feel outraged. The Mahatma would not only have found the development desirable but hoped that it would help revive an important debate he was having with Jawaharlal Nehru before the assassin cut short his life. Gandhi wanted Nehru to judge people not only by their public actions but equally by their private conduct. Nehru, influenced by the western ethos, insisted that he was concerned only with a person’s public doings and not with his private life. The Mahatma, however, maintained: “A man’s public life cannot be clean, if his private life is not clean. You cannot separate the two!”
Almost all the leaders and many others are today loudly lamenting what they call a decline in the standard of poll campaigning and aver that the battle should be fought only on issues and not on personalities. This is an absurd proposition which must be summarily rejected. May I ask: Should we as voters not take a good close look at the candidates who seek our support andare eager to be elected to the Lok Sabha? The character, commitment and credibility of persons making poll promises are of crucial importance. In fact, we need to recall what Baba Sahib Ambedkar emphasised about the importance of the individual during the concluding session of the Constituent Assembly on 25thNovember 1949.
Ambedkar said the Assembly had laboured hard to give India a good Constitution. But much in regard toits merit would depend upon the people who worked the Constitution, adding: “However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it happen to be a good lot.” In short, the man operating the system was no less important than the system itself.
Every party today offers us the moon in the course of glossy manifestos. But who will give us what our people have been demanding for the past five decades: a good, clean Government. Clearly, we need leaders who can truly be trusted to put the country before all else — self, family, caste, community and party — and implement their solemn promises. This may have happened had Nehru and those who followed him shunned sycophancy and enforced selfless Gandhian standards. Sadly however, Nehru, though Bapu’s political heir, had his own ideas — and agenda.
Corruption and political harlotry may not have flourished as brazenly as they do in India today if only we had focussed as much on the character of our rulers as on the issues. Especially when issues have largely become irrelevant with politics increasingly becoming an exercise in unabashed hypocrisy, double talk and deception. We have adopted the Westminster form of democracy, but not applied its standards of probity. Churchill’s War Minister quit during World War II for having accepted no more than three bottles of liquor. Profumo had to go not because he slept with Christine Keeler but because he told a lie in the high temple of democracy — the House of Commons.
We have allowed politicians and many others to get away not only with lies and damn lies but even with murder at high noon. We have spoken loudly but done little to punish the crooks and the corrupt among our rulers as also those who have made a mockery of the Constitution. We often lambasted those who have shown the courage to expose unprincipled doings instead of praising them. Pramod Mahajan has, for instance, been condemned for comparing Sharad Pawar to Elizabeth Taylor and saying: “He marries, divorces, remarries and again divorces!” Instead, he deserved to be complimented for his delightful quip.
Even Sonia Gandhi loyalists privately concede that the issue of her foreign origin is of crucial importance to India’s national security, integrity and self-respect. At the time of the Chinese aggression, Nehru warned: “Freedom is in peril. Defend it with all your might.” This warning is as relevant today as in 1962, now that the Congress has no qualms of conscience in projecting a person of foreign origin for the office of the country’s Prime Minister. Remember, Nehru barred officers of India’s Foreign Service from marrying foreigners on considerations of national security. This ban, I gather, also virtually applies even today to the officers of India’s Armed Forces. Remember also, that the United States, by the same token, has amended its Constitution to bar persons of foreign origin from becoming the Country’s President!
Many more pointed questions need to be asked from various leaders. Our people have a right to seek some basic information from Sonia Gandhi: Her family background, education, political philosophy and links, if any, with Italy. Why did she not take up Indian citizenship on her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi, since she now claims to love India? Why did she wait for 16 years before doing so? For Sonia to dismiss the query as “technical” is as ridiculous as Indira Gandhi’s absurd assertion in 1975 that Justice Sinha’s decision to unseat her from the Lok Sabha and disqualify her for six years was based on “technical” grounds. This historic judgment eventually led to the diabolic Emergency.
Likewise, our people have every right to get adequate answers to the questions raised about Prime Minister Vajpayee by Congressmen Ghulam Nabi Azad and Rajesh Khanna, both of whom have been unfairly slandered by angry BJP leaders. Ghulam Nabi asked: “How does the PM have a son-in-law without being married? Whose son-in-law? Who is married to whom?” Rajesh Khanna queried more pithily: “Auladnahin, dammadhai.” Vajpayee, as we have all known for years, has an honourable answer. His life is an open book, leaving no scope for any canard, including one regarding his role in the 1942 freedom movement.
I am one with the others in opposing personal vilification. At the same time, let us not shut out the cut and thrust of a political debate, which once made Mohammed Ali Jinnah, prior to independence, mischievously describe half the members of the Central Assembly as consisting of fools and knaves. When some members protested and the Speaker asked for amends, Jinnah cleverly corrected himself and stated amidst smiles and thumping of desks: “Sir, half the members are not fools and knaves!” In fact, DMK’s Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, deserves a hand for the ingenuity with which he has been hitting out at his bete noir, Jayalalitha. When the AIADMK Supremo coupled her campaign speeches with a song which said:”Oh Vajpayee you have cheated me”, Karunanidhi commented: “I don’t think it is ingood taste… If a woman says she has been cheated, we can only draw awkward conclusions!”
In the final analysis, India faces many crises today because our voters have tragically failed to demand the highest probity, integrity and commitment from our publicmen. We have recklessly compromised with minimum standards wherever our friends, relations, partymen and benefactors were involved, greatly encouraging all-round decline in standards and institutions and even criminalisation of politics. Our people, therefore, need to take a good close look at every candidate and apply the Gandhian yardstick sternly. Crooks, criminals and the corrupt among our leaders and aspirants for Parliament must be exposed ruthlessly together with their carefully hidden personal frailties. No quarter must ever be given to them under the misplaced plea of good taste and decency. – INFA