Deliberately remembering the dead erroneously

In recent weeks, two leading public figures, one a communist politician and the other a tycoon from India’s most famous business family, passed on. Sitaram Yechury and Ratan Tata were chalk and cheese. But at one time in the mid-2000s, they were nearly shaking hands to get Tata lands to build the Nano factory in communist-ruled West Bengal. That attempt set off a chain of events hastening the downfall of the Left.

Both men received accolades from many hues of the Indian press: Yechury, embellishments from the left-liberal media, and Tata, blandishments from media of myriad mindsets. Tata, in particular, got oodles of encomia in social media – that space has a yen for corporate doyens, and not just in our part of the world. Plus, Tata’s personality spoke centrally to the desires of a younger, startup-geared digital native generation. Tata’s ‘vibing’ with India’s really young and not so well-heeled, in one sense, was remarkable. Yet the way both Yechury’s and Tata’s lives were presented in the wake of their passing merits real scrutiny.

Let’s be fair. As a student leader in Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1977, Yechury displayed gumption in reading out in public to Indira Gandhi why it was untenable for her to continue as the chancellor after losing the post-Emergency elections. Later, he gained fame as cross-party consensus builder, most recently, with the coalition building efforts for the I.N.D.I.A. alliance in 2023 – 2024. All this our press and social media posted reams on. Not a word though on how he was right in the middle of the dramatic collapse of the Left. That he was part of a team wanting to bring in investment in Left-ruled states, attempting it all of a sudden, trying to vindicate the ideological U-turn to voters, expecting people to accept in making those states a little more pro-investment while criticising erstwhile prime ministers Manmohan Singh or Atal Bihari Vajpayee for doing likewise. No obituary your writer read touched on such paradoxes even remotely.

In faith-obsessed India, Ratan Tata’s remembrances hit the zenith of over-glorification. In outpourings in print, online, social media and WhatsApp forwards, he was made to look like a saint, an angel, a messiah, a pioneer, a paragon, a person and corporate captain beyond blemish. Large swathes of India’s business media have battened while babying our corporate czars and czarinas. Whole eras of mainstream business journalism quintessentially did PR for Indian CEOs and MDs ad nauseam. In 1997, the Assam government arraigned Tata Tea of aiding the banned United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) militants. In 2010, Tata was one of the industrialists mentioned in taped conversations with controversial lobbyist Niira Radia, who had handled public relations for them in the then past. The Tatas appealed in the Supreme Court for the tapes to not be aired over privacy violations. Police firing in 2006 killed 13 protesting tribals in Kalinganagar in Odisha where Tata Steel intended to construct a six million tonne-per-annum steel plant.

The way in which he was condoled keeps off these eggshells. Barely a decade ago, microscopic parts of the mainstream media, including business media, attempted to present a balanced, hopefully fair picture on our corporate honchos. Now, presenting just a nuanced, grey, portrait of a public figure or private business person who has become a public figure, has become a challenge. Nearly every public figure who dies (or lives) is a god, demi-god, evangelist. Anything but a flawed, complex, Janus-faced human being, entirely capable of unvarnished ill or evil: It’s the enigma of our arrival to a time where we’re deliberately made to remember the dead, erroneously.