The liberals have got it wrong again. No golden age of parliamentary civility is being desecrated. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’ invective—bhaade ke tatte— requires unpacking because of the choice of anatomy. It uses male genitalia as the primary vehicle of insult, deployed in a legislative chamber against citizens exercising democratic accountability. The message is not just “you are worthless”; it is: “I govern through bodily contempt. My power is expressed in your humiliation.” Fadnavis has illustrious forbears. Mulayam Singh Yadav excused gang rape as “boys will be boys.” He was Defence Minister at the time. Abhijit Mukherjee, then a Congress MP, dismissed women protesting the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape as “dented and painted women.” The late Sharad Yadav, recipient of the Best Parliamentarian Award, called South Indian women dark but “as beautiful as their bodies.”
Language is mirror of the times. Former British prime minister David Lyold George sneered at a defector who has “twice crossed the floor of this House, each time leaving behind a trail of slime”. He was describing defection and the character that makes defection possible: the slithering, the slime. Bhaade ke tatte only demonstrates that the speaker is angry and has access to the vernacular vocabulary of the chawl. Which, in fairness, is a vocabulary Fadnavis earned the right to use because he did not grow up in Mayfair. But he is a Chief Minister, and the chamber is not a chawl. It is the place where the Constitution is sacrosanct.
Sadly, Indian politics has lost the ability to insult with intelligence. This degradation is not primarily the politicians’ fault. Netas are products of their environment, not its architects. Abuse is part of the lingo non-elitist politicians grew up using, and phrases that would have made your mother wash your mouth out with soap is the new normal. Fadnavis abuses in the Assembly because no costs are imposed on such usage. The Speaker does not expunge it. The party high command does not discipline him. The voters do not punish. The political insult today thrives in a system where the leader’s toxicity is the brand, not a liability. The vulgarity of Fadnavis, the communal micro-harassment of Himanta Sarma, and the stumbling constitutional illiteracy of Samrat Choudhary’s Bihar are not aberrations. It is the water these fish swim in, and they do not notice the water because they have never been required to.
In Maharashtra, a state with extraordinary urban sophistication, and a literary culture boasting Dnyaneshwar and Vijay Tendulkar, the Chief Minister speaks in the register of the street. In Assam, cradle of Vaishnavite philosophy, and the luminosity of Sankardev’s borgeets, a Chief Minister builds his brand on the exoskeleton of humiliation. In Bihar, once the intellectual and spiritual centre of the known world, which housed Nalanda’s great library and administered the first pan-Indian empire, the Chief Minister cannot read his own oath without stumbling. This is not a failure of individual politicians. It is the preference of a political ecosystem, tested repeatedly across multiple election cycles. The verdict: none of this is disqualifying. Which means the language, the theatre, and the stumbling are not the cause of the problem. It is the implicit agreement between the political class and the governed, that power need not be accompanied by the disciplines that power was once expected to maintain.
The vernacularisation of Indian politics starting with the Mandal riots to the entry of backward-caste, Dalit, and OBC leadership into power was genuinely necessary. The Lok Sabha of Vajpayee, and the editorial judgment of a press that distinguished between the parliamentary and the gutter has been demolished simultaneously by technology, competitive media economics; by a specific ideological project that made the destruction of institutional restraint its objective. The result is not vulgarity. Vulgarity, at least, is honest. No doubt, the darbari culture of the Nehruvian Congress—a club that kept three-quarters of India’s population at the door—deserved to be broken. But vernacularisation brought in the ambient patriarchy of the biradari, the akhada, the tehsil.
Lalu’s rallies featured launda dance and lathi, flaunting masculinity as deliberate political theatre. This is the pathology of the liberated-oppressed, duplicating the same structures they were liberated from.
Democracies do not usually die in the way the textbooks describe. Not always with a coup, tanks, or a burning parliament. They die in the ordinary way all living things die when the conditions for life quietly cease to be. The language goes first. Then the institutions the language is supposed to protect. And last, the memory of anything different that was. We are somewhere in the middle of that sequence. And nobody will mark the moment when it comes. Nobody to recognise it will be around.