The aesthetics of politics

Rao’s pout, so well-captured in a sculpture in this exhibition, is rare. It protrudes so much that it almost touches his chin. Now this pout, which became so pronounced in the face of an awkward question at a Press conference or in a tense situation, was supposed to symbolise for many people his indecisiveness. I rather think it is symbolic of a person who only reflects but fears action. He looks at politics in a way a demographer looks at people — abstractly. That is why he could never fully engage himself in politics. Thus the pout.

For years he loyally served, at least outwardly, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. Too loyal a person can never be number one. He came to be number one after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination because he was acceptable to all the contestants. None feared him.

What is interesting is what he would have done had he not become Prime Minister. It is said that he was planning to retire to an ashram in Andhra Pradesh to contemplate writing a book, presumably on rajniti.

No doubt he would have written a scholarly, dry, dispassionate work on politics. It would have been much like Vatsyayna’s Kama Sutra, a bureaucratic manual on love making; he was a celibate writing on sex. It does not have the poetry or aesthetics of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Nefazumi’s The Perfumed Garden.

His public speeches were cut and dry, just statements of facts and figures, and he delivered them in a same flat voice that an announcer at an airport announces flight schedules. So Rao’s pout was basically expressive of his detachment from action.

V.P. Singh’s five paintings at the exhibition have Ganesh as their motif. Ganesh represents for him the “downtrodden”. It’s the first time he has taken to abstract painting. The paintings are really a cri du coeur. His heart cries out for the poor, the oppressed, the dispossessed.

V.P. is always melancholic even when he is smiling. Melancholia is a state of mind, far more characteristic of westerners than us. It doesn’t figure in our tradition, but it does in the western tradition. For example, President Woodrow Wilson was melancholic as was an artist like Vincent Van Gogh or a music composer like Gustaf Mahler.

Presumably VP’s melancholia comes from the pain he feels at the sight of people crushed by poverty and caste oppression. Of course it was also in his interest to champion the Mandal cause because that was the only way he could counter the Kamandal cause championed by the BJP. Mandal is still the best counterweight to Kamandal, and we shall soon see in whose favour the scales tip.

There is no lighter side to V.P. Humour, satire, frivolity, or dissemblance which you see in so many politicians is absent in him. He is an unusual politician but also, I think, a formidable one. It is he who stitched together from very poor material the U.F. coalition and negotiated every crisis it faced from his bed in Delhi’s Apollo Hospital.

In A.B. Vajpayee you see a consummate politician. Poetry is an arm of his politics. Many of his poems are addressed to the occasion, though some of them transcend the occasion for which they were written. I remember one he recited on TV during his twelve-day Prime Ministership: “Do not take me to the summit whence I cannot descend”. He’s a person of touching modesty.

Ataljee’s love for poetry has softened his politics. He speaks the language of a decent, sensitive liberal politician, and this is not now; he has been speaking it for the past 20 years or more. The Jan Sangh, which he merged with the Janata Party in 1977, had as its programme, Gandhian socialism, integral humanism and swadeshi. The words were Ataljee’s and the Jan Sangh of 1977 was substantially his creation. Had the Janata experiment lasted and not crumbled as it did by 1979, the former Jan Sangh would have perhaps evolved the way some semi-religious parties in Europe have evolved over the years — for example, the Christian Democratic Party in Germany or Christian Socialists in Italy.

Vajpayee was greatly pained at the act of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. At a small gathering soon after the event, he spoke, almost inaudibly, “Have I become old”? Too old to openly denounce the demolition — is this what he meant? He should have condemned the Ayodhya demolition as forcefully as he had condemned the Sikh killings in November 1984.

I simply find laughable the explanation given by our die-hard secularists that Vajpayee’s humane face is really not his but a sort of a mask put on him by the RSS or the VHP. You simply cannot programme politics like this.

Politics becomes a destructive contest when it becomes the all-consuming passions of politicians. You see this today in Lucknow, Ahmedabad or Islamabad. Here politics is a matter of life and death; who will eat whom: Mayawati or Mulayam, Vaghela or Keshubhai, Benazir or Nawaz Sharif.

With the coming of Indira Gandhi to power in the late-sixties our politics became dirtier and our politicians crasser. Persons who took to politics then were driven only by money and power. Of course power is a perfectly legitimate motive for politicians; but how it is acquired does matter in a democracy.

Under Indira Gandhi and those who succeeded her acquiring power at all cost and maintaining it by crooked ones, became the operating principle of politics. It still operates.

Politics can become a useful and even a pleasurable activity when it is played somewhat like cricket. That is the way it was played in a country which gave birth to modern democracy, England. Here gentlemen of leisure, taste and standing took up public office and left it when their innings were up. This tradition still largely continues in England, despite Thatcher’s attempts to disrupt it. In a sense, V.P. Singh and A.B. Vajpayee follow this tradition. Will the tradition survive the turbulent 1998 election?

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi