Election’s box office returns

In Indian public life, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi were all charismatic figures. “Bharatiyeta” or Indianness could not help elevating Gandhi to the level of “Mahatma”. In our own house we were reprimanded for addressing Nehru as anything other than “Panditji”. The Indian mind held on to the “Pandit” that had rubbed off on Indira Gandhi, her marriage to Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi, not withstanding.

Some charismatic leaders remained confined to regions and castes. For instance, Lokmanya Tilak remains the tallest figure in a congregation of intellectuals in Pune. His name cannot be publicly mentioned without being prefixed by “Lokmanya”. Likewise Babasaheb Ambedkar’s hold on the Dalit mind is so tenacious that he cannot be anything other than “Babasaheb”.

The Indian mind also reverses renunciation. Having followed Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s (Acharya, mind you) Sarvodaya track, renounced power politics, Jayaprakash Narayan also became a charismatic leader in his own right. To counter Indira Gandhi’s charisma, Ramnath Goenka and Nanaji Deshmukh resurrected JP to mobilise the Bihar movement around his charisma. This was the pressure (the Allahabad high court judgement against her was the trigger) which caused Indira Gandhi, now cast in the image of “Durga” after the successful Bangladesh operation, to falter into the trap of the Emergency. That was more or less the end of her charismatic politics.

In any case, since the Congress was held together by the momentum of the national movement, even Indira Gandhi’s charisma could not hold the party together. It quite logically began to break up into its constituent parts.

The Dravida movement in the south began to search for its own charismatic leaders. A clever collection of playwrights, theatre personalities and film stars under the supervision of Annadurai began to project the Tamil film hero, M.G. Ramachandran, as the charismatic embodiment of Tamil pride. This was the first successful experiment of cinematic glamour being infused with political charisma. It was the Congress yielding space to this new phenomenon.

In the early ’80s the infection caught on in Andhra Pradesh. In a widely reported incident Arun Nehru, as Indira Gandhi’s messenger, insulted Andhra Pradesh’s low key chief minister, T. Anjaiah, at Hyderabad airport. It became an issue of “Andhra pride”. N.T. Rama Rao, who had played god in countless Telugu movies, capitalised on this sentiment. This is how the Telugu Desam Party was born.

At the same time Kannada filmstar Raj Kumar raised the banner of “Kannada pride”. A language movement was launched. It was the cosmopolitanism of Bangalore that thwarted the project.

If the cinematic glamour of MGR, NTR and Raj Kumar could be endowed with political charisma, why could Amitabh Bachchan’s considerable popularity, including in the southern region, not be beamed nationwide? Theoretically it seemed a logical proposition. But the Bachchan experiment failed during the Rajiv Gandhi years. Those who had launched Bachchan into the Lok Sabha had completely misunderstood the reasons why the southern stars succeeded.

Cinematic glamour was not the only ingredient behind the success of the southern stars as durable figures in public life. The reason for the success of MGR, NTR and, to some extent, Raj Kumar was a potent mix of cinematic glamour and linguistic regionalism. This mix cannot be available to a film star from the Hindi belt.

Interesting, that the Malyalam film star Prem Nazir, who held the Guinness record for having played the hero in more films than any other star in history, never made a bid for a political career. He could not. The political turf in Kerala was saturated with education and politicisation. This can be attributed to the exceptionally enlightened rule of the maharajas of Travancore and Cochin, universal education spread by Christian schools and political training imparted by the Left movement.

Marxist training is one reason why no film star can dare make a dent in Bengali public life.

The opening of the doors to film stars in the Hindi belt is therefore only to occupy some media space in the absence of attractive enough politicians. It is not a move with any serious potential. It is a tentative quest for charisma which is most likely to peter out as an apotheosis of the bogus.