Hegde at home

Once upon a time, there was an extraordinary politician called Ramakrishna Hegde. As India's only practitioner of value-based politics, he c...

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Once upon a time, there was an extraordinary politician called Ramakrishna Hegde. As India’s only practitioner of value-based politics, he colonised the media columns as the most favoured prime ministerial candidate of the middle class. In the distorted group photo of the Janata, this suave Brahmin from Karnataka stood apart as an epitome of morality and principles, a rare figure of moderation and responsibility. Urbane and articulate, Hegde was in those days anti-Congressism’s most sophisticated expression. Charisma was not a quality of the Dynasty alone, Hegde proved. And social justice didn’t mean sub-rural comedy at the expense of the socially underprivileged, Hegde whispered with an accent. He was the leader writer’s delight, and a drawing room subject of political redemption. Hegde was the alternative, an answer to disillusion, the permanent hero of opinion polls. A tapped phone was enough for this chief minister to quit the office which, for the value-based politician, didn’t matter much anyway. A DeveGowda was enough for him to realise the valuelessness of a protege. Hegde dreamed of Delhi; Gowda got it without an effort. Hegde was the prime minister of the (English) media; Gowda, protege-turned-patriarch, was the Prime Minister of, yes, Karnataka. Soon Hegde became the lord of value-based wilderness.

How fragile is the adjective in Indian politics! Today, Hegde is the new refugee at the Sangh Parivar. There he is, the leader of Lok Shakti, clad in a borrowed piece of saffron, desperately preparing for a second coming. This is certainly a defining moment in the evolutionary tale of Hegde. A moment that shows how valueless, how elastic, is the value-based politics of Ramakrishna Hegde. True, principle or, for that matter, morality, is not an autonomous abstraction. In politics, these are virtues subordinated to survival instincts. The smart ones know how to achieve a politically viable harmony between his value system and his own political worth. The problem is with the pretender, and it seems that Hegde has always been a friendly pretender, that his much projected constituency has been a victim of the image-trap. Social justice and secularism are words that belong to the discredited. There are value-based leaders who try to redeem them through photography and painting. Hegde too could have done that. Let down by both the Congress and the Janata Dal, he joined the flotsam and jetsam flowing towards the BJP. Ha, the values, look for them in the garbage of redundant heroism.

The Hegde story is a familiar one. It is perhaps the V.P. Singh story with a definitive ending. Hegde was the pioneer in the art of grand deception. For, when V.P. Singh was just an efficient politician, Hegde was a politician who preferred to occupy the apolitical realm. In the arena of anti-Congressism, he was the first master of soundbites and media-friendly gestures. He didn’t even require a padyatra to get a place in the elite mind. Elsewhere in the world, an apolitical politician symbolised the moral rejoinder to injustice and tyranny. In India, so farcically, he had names like V. P. Singh and Ramakrishna Hegde. Singh can still afford to be a Senior Machiavelli. Hegde has finally become a culturally identifiable politician: the socially concerned secularist waiting for oxygen at the Sangh Parivar. Redundancy of heroism requires no further clarification.