Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot’s false binary

You glib charmer, me rustic desi

Ashok Gehlot, the embattled Chief Minister of Rajasthan, speaking of his young, urbane and handsome Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot, whom he dismissed for rebellion, said, “speaking good English, giving good bytes and being handsome isn’t everything. What is inside your heart for the country, your ideology, policies, and commitment, everything is considered."

By that did he mean, that he, Gehlot, was himself not handsome, articulate or media savvy and that it’s not a handicap in Indian politics if you have other attributes? Did he mean he is against boarding school education, that he is not enamoured of foreign degrees from Ivy League universities (remember Modi’s jibe against P Chidambaram – “I’m not Harvard (educated). I’m hardworking”)? Or that he can’t be fooled by glib English because he himself lacks it? Was it just a sneering off-the-cuff remark because he felt insulted by Pilot, whom he considers a shallow upstart? Or was he trying to convey that the young, foreign-educated and suave, who enter politics cannot lay claim to people’s mandate by those attributes alone and they are divorced from the harsh realities of India?

Maybe he meant all of those. Gehlot may not be wrong, but the presumptuous ‘young brigade’, even if incapable of winning or weaning away the required number of legislators to form a government on their own and make the old guard irrelevant, are eminently capable of toppling a government and wrecking the party that nurtured them. Jyotiraditya Scindia demonstrated that in Madhya Pradesh. Not smart and astute enough to manoeuvre themselves to the throne by winning over enough legislators, but reckless enough to precipitate a crisis that may capsize the boat. Even if it means swimming ashore to the enemy’s den.

While there is much to be said for both sides – the urbane and debonair versus the rustic and homespun politician, one excelling in English with convent education, and the other with command over the native language, they are not virtues in themselves and are not enough to win over the inscrutable Indian voter. There are other attributes and accomplishments -- tangible and intangible -- that maketh a man.

This ‘desi’ versus ‘phoren’ goes back to the days of our freedom struggle. Mahatma Gandhi returned from London a refined and suited barrister. When he returned to India from South Africa after 20 years of struggle there against racial injustice and plunged head-long into the freedom struggle, he flung his attire and metamorphosed into a native Indian. Not even one in elegant Indian clothing but a traditional dhoti worn in a style that made him indistinguishable from the masses and which prompted Churchill’s description of him as a ‘half-naked fakir’. And many sophisticated foreign-educated Indians who joined him in the freedom struggle abandoned their European-style clothes and Western habits -- Sardar Patel, Abbas Tyabji, Jawaharlal Nehru, to name a few.

Nehru, the preeminent among them, even in his Indian clothing stood out among them for his elegance, elan and dapper looks. He was erudite, known for his oratory in English, smoked, drank wine, and women found him charming -- attributes anathema to ‘desi’ politicians. But he and all of the others in the freedom struggle were of towering stature. They commanded huge following among the masses during the freedom movement and enjoyed the trust and mandate of the people after Independence, winning them over not just by their language, looks or civilised manners but by their ideals, work, integrity and character.

Indira Gandhi -- demure, elegant, charming, graceful, sophisticated when she wanted to be, yet ‘iron lady’ when she had to be – educated and groomed by her father, in European schools and at Tagore’s Shantiniketan, who spoke fluent French and English, was yet steeped in Indian culture and the arts and crafts. And she outsmarted and ruthlessly ousted the rustic ‘old guard’ who made the mistake of taking her to be a “goongi Gudiya” that they could control. Does she not give the lie to Gehlot’s binary view of ‘young, English-speaking and handsome’ vs ‘desi, ideological and committed’ in politics? Indira was to the manor born but had her finger on the pulse of the people and the masses worshipped her. Gehlot cannot dismiss offhand the ‘young, English-speaking and handsome’; even worse to use his rustic tongue to call Pilot “nikamma aur nakara” (idle and worthless), having come to power at least partly due to the younger man’s hard work.

The ‘old guard’ versus the ‘young’, the villager versus the city slick, the ill-bred juxtaposed against the well-bred has continued into recent times. We have had the hilarious, inimitable Lalu Yadav with his irresistible rustic charm, Mayawati, the Yadavs -- father and son (one old-school, the other smart and educated), the Paswans, Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav, and our own starkly contrasting politicians in Karnataka – Deve Gowda, the late Ramakrishna Hegde, and SM Krishna. They all ruled the roost for a while, rose high and fell hard.

Here are some hard truths. The Indian people have voted in both the old and the young, the educated and the uneducated, the rural and rustic and the urban and urbane, the handsome and the ugly, and the clown and the criminal to power. And they have also seen through the young and the old, and the urbane crook and the village hoodlum, and ruthlessly booted out all of them.

Better that Gehlot and Pilot see their own follies and kiss and make up. Otherwise, the throne will be out of reach for both of them, like in the Panchatantra fable where the dog barks at its own reflection and loses the bone to the wolf! The buck, in the end, of course, stops with Rahul Gandhi, or may be Sonia Gandhi, and the ominous hands of the coterie behind her, not to discount Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra. No one has a clue, and that’s the bane of Congress today. But this is the time for all of them to stick together and not fall prey to the lurking lions outside the Congress menagerie, who may make a good meal of them all.

(The writer is a farmer, soldier and aviation pioneer)