Sardar Patel’s statue created little more than the proverbial storm in the tea cup. It was not long before our increasingly short attention span forced us to shift our gaze elsewhere. A BJP MP slapping or punching a policeman in uniform deployed to control an unruly crowd at the inauguration ceremony of the Signature Bridge in Delhi.
AAP is touting this as the Pride of Delhi, a technological marvel and a unique work of art. It has now hogged headlines with shocking images in ‘breaking news’. This too, as the Buddha said, shall pass. We will soon move on to some other titillating distraction. The skeletons in the CBI cupboard will no doubt keep tumbling out and as the election campaigns heat up, disastrous disclosures and revelations causing collateral damage are going to multiply. But we digress.
Why should we in India continue to be obsessed with statues? True, we are a nation of idol worshippers and have a propensity to elevate politicians to status of deities. Sycophancy has long replaced hero worship. Whoever occupies a seat of power is considered an incarnation of Maryada Purushottam Ram or Yogeshwar Krishna.
If it’s a woman she can easily be idolised as Durga. But do we have to express our (andh) bhakti in terms of the size of the statues we build and install? Is commissioning statues the only way to honour those who fought for independence, or to establish a just social order? Can the competition to ‘undo the injustice’ done to forgotten great men be allowed to continue forever exacerbating bitter divisions in society?
The ‘Statue of Unity’ has served us well by drawing our attention to ‘opportunistic appropriation’ as well as the neglect of the Makers of Modern India who didn’t belong to the Dynasty. It’s futile to pit Bhagat Singh or Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose against V D Savarkar and M S Golwalkar. Contemporary India is very different from what the aggregation of the territories ruled by the British and Indian Princes was almost a hundred years ago.
From Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore to Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Baba Saheb Ambedkar, not every patriotic Indian had ‘fought the British and gone to Jail’. There are many freedom fighters whose memory is alive only in school history textbooks that are constantly revised with the change in government.
As a matter of fact, Sardar Patel has fared much better. The merger of princely states in the Indian Union is ungrudgingly credited to him and ever since the Sino-Indian War of 1962, he is remembered as the man who had warned then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the Chinese threat. Nor can it be denied that those who worship Nehru as a secular, liberal, moderniser with a scientific outlook had all these years managed to portray the Sardar as a traditionalist conservative with an authoritarian streak and at heart a sympathiser of what we call today forces of Hindutva. He may have been constrained to ban the RSS after the assassination of the Father of the Nation, but then didn’t he favour the reconstruction of a grand temple at Somnath?
It’s going to prove difficult for the Congress to wriggle out of the tangled web of its own making. What the controversy over the statue has exposed is the difference in stature of leaders then and now. It’s not the size that matters but the style and substance that ultimately decide the mark a man leaves. A great man doesn’t need a gigantic statue to keep his memory alive, it is men of smaller stature who worry about their place in history.
The unseemly fracas at the inauguration of the Signature Bridge should prompt serious soul-searching among the leaders and supporters of both the AAP and BJP. Delhi government was graceless in not inviting the local MP, Manoj Tiwari, as protocol demanded. Nor did Tiwari conduct himself in a manner expected and required of a Member of Parliament.
In this age of digital reporting, not much is lost in transmission. There is little scope of pleading ‘miscommunication’ or ‘malicious reporting’ in defence. The arrogance of elected representatives is not confined to these two political parties. A video posted on social media showed Jyotiraditya Scindia flouting traffic rules oblivious of the presence of others on the road. Rules and regulations, it seems, are only for lesser mortals.
Those charged with the responsibility of ensuring the rule of law and protecting the citizen have happily absolved themselves of this task. Policemen in uniform are content to serve as minions of their masters. The dwarfs who are strutting the stage apparently live under the illusion that they can emulate the Vaman Avtar at will by transforming themselves into Titans. pushpeshpant@gmail.com