Memorial for Manmohan Singh is a requiem for a lost dream
Dead people never really die. They are kept alive through man’s endless need for ritual, both in the private and public realm. The tasteless, thankless and time-serving twaddle dissing the late Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the days following his death reveals how low netas can stoop to get eyeballs. Union ministers tweeted uncouth deprecations of the legacy of a man who changed the country for the better, whatever his politics, or the lack of it, may have been.
Congress calamitarians yelled disgrace and demanded a memorial for Dr Singh: a man they held in contempt for being too ‘academic’, too ‘non-aggressive’, too ‘non-political’. In Indian culture, or in most cultures, speaking ill of the dead is considered unseemly. The absence of culture in public figures was painfully manifested in public everywhere last week, perhaps, as a perverse acknowledgement of an accidental prime minister who unassumingly moulded a new India.
No doubt, Manmohan Singh is the father of the modern Indian economy. But his second term undid gains of his first—accelerating liberalisation, shielding the Indian economy from a global meltdown, massive GDP growth, the Indo-US nuclear deal, RTI and more. Policy paralysis was the pandemic in UPA 2. “I honestly believe that history will be kinder to me than the contemporary media or for that matter the Opposition in Parliament,” he had said in 2008.
Guess he was wrong. Lots of things went wrong on his watch. It rained scams. MPs, mantris and mandarins went to jail for looting billions of rupees. Pakistani terrorists wreaked mayhem on Mumbai’s roads, streets and in hotels; Singh did nothing and earned liberal Western praise for his ‘dignified restraint’. The fact is that he didn’t, voluntarily or not, take political decisions, but the buck stopped with him.
In contrast, PM Modi’s ‘aaj ka Bharat dushmano ko ghar mein ghuskar martaa hai’ (Today’s Bharat barges into its enemy’s home and finishes him off) was no hollow threat; when terrorists struck India, he ordered two hard-hitting military strikes on Pak soil. Maybe Dr Singh preferred Gandhi’s ‘turn the other cheek’ Biblical advice. Or he simply didn’t have the stomach for revenge. Or Sonia Gandhi stayed his hand under American pressure, since Islamabad was Washington’s bestie.
The tragedy of public life is immortality; often unwelcome. The first public ‘Ram Bhakt’ MK Gandhi haunts social media through the tweets of his detractors and their glorification of the men who shot him. Jawaharlal Nehru lives on as the BJP’s bête noire through the dismantling of various institutions and Kangana Ranaut’s raucous rants on Papa Nehru. Indira Gandhi is resurrected at Emergency anniversaries.
The clamour for a memorial for Dr Singh is unlikely to die down soon, since his death has become political. The government is in no hurry to build him one. The Congress had dragged its feet to honour Dr Singh’s mentor Narasimha Rao whom Sonia hated bitterly; the memorial finally came up only in 2015, after Modi came to power. Memorials are war through concrete (decisions): the BJP’s Native Nehruvian—the most desirable title in Indian public life still—the great Atal Bihari Vajpayee gets his salute with Rashtriya Smriti Sthal, where he was cremated.
In a gentler age, memorials remind people of what a dead personage stood for; his values, virtues and flaws. In stormy times, they become monuments to divisiveness, like the statues of Confederate heroes in America. Making history is commendable, but history gives its creators both a long rope and short shrift.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com