In January 49 BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon to wage war on the Roman Republic, Plutarch recorded him as quoting Athenian playwright Menander, “The die is cast.” Many historians mark this fording as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Caesar was assassinated in March. The ides of March are coming, and Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s Caesar, is a subject of character assassination by his own Brutus and Cassius even as he recuperates in expensive naturopathic environs. The AAP Republic is giving way to the dictatorship of a reformer who is convinced that power centralised in one man is the way to progress and expansion. The same is being said of Narendra Modi.
The idea behind the world’s first republic was that the will of the people is sovereign. It was also about balance: the consuls who elected representatives ruled, heeding the advice of the aristocratic Senate. Yet, the strife was intense. Where there is power, there is conflict. In the forge of such struggle is born dominating personalities who govern with ruthless determination to perpetuate their power and that of their state. The contradiction is that the personality cult is also distrusted by the people who created it in the first place, because most dictators are subject to megalomania. The attack on Kejriwal by his former allies is paranoia vs megalomania. Sounds familiar? Modi’s enemies represented the political aristocrats of the saffron senate—L K Advani, M M Joshi and their jaded cohorts. As Modi became an unstoppable icon, both in the party and among the people, it marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s only Hindu Socialist, was the last of the political aristocrats. Modi, with his plebian background and savvy image, marked a definitive departure from an uncertain past. Kejriwal is following the template.
Power, if concentrated in one person, can create an empire or lead to its fall later. The personality cult scares liberals, because it threatens the basic principle of democracy. They feel that in the sonic rhetoric of the dictator, other voices will be lost. Ironically, ‘dictator’ started out as not a bad word. It even had nuances of being a saviour. In Rome, the Senate appointed a dictator to rule the republic in times of crisis. India’s last dictator, Indira Gandhi, helped the country ride many crises. She engineered massive changes: the green and white revolutions, nationalisation of banks, abolition of the Privy Purse and the 1971 victory against Pakistan that created Bangladesh. Her Garibi Hatao scheme won her a mythical stature among the poor. Yet the dark side of the dictator surfaced at the prospect of losing power: she imposed the Emergency in 1975 and India became a police state. After her death and Rajiv Gandhi’s fall, successive governments existed in precarious states of compromised balance between weak or wily Prime Ministers and whimsical allies. Modi’s rise put a halt to that. His personality cult won him a brute majority. It is also reshaping the BJP as a Modi empire. So is Kejriwal with AAP, at a state level. Yet all dictators are not evil. Garibaldi who united Italy, Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, Chandragupta Maurya who created India’s greatest empire are some examples of the economic renovation and patriotic unity of their nations.
Once, when out riding, Caesar passed a soothsayer. He warned the dictator that he would live no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the soothsayer again and joked, “The ides of March have come,” suggesting that he was still alive. The soothsayer replied, “Aye, Caesar; but not gone.”
ravi@newindianexpress.com