The pretence to sanity unmasked

For successful exorcism, which means Expulsion of the Devil from the patient’s body, it is necessary to first break this Pretence. “The Demonic must be uncovered and brought into the open,” says psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie.

This is precisely what happened on October 21 in the UP Assembly. It was our rare good fortune that it happened. It happens but rarely in such titanic struggles that we pass from the first to the second phase, called Presence. Those of us who were fortunate to see the ghastly grin of the Devil in the Assembly could feel its palpable Presence. Its utter malevolence, incredible contempt for the law of the land, inhuman, alien Presence was a sight to behold. The blatant way in which it forced the hapless, leaderless United Front government to recommend the dissolution of the BJP government in UP further reinforces the impression that it realises that its Pretence has been finally penetrated.

This final stripping away of the Pretence was overdue. A partial penetration had taken place earlier. The Congress Party’s pretence to nationalism was stripped away when it passed the resolution to divide the country in 1947. Its pretence to good, democratic governance was penetrated when it accepted the colonial, anti-people bureaucratic structure and personnel along with the laws of its masters as a worthy successor to the colonial administration that kindly installed its government in 1947. Its pretence to democracy was destroyed with the Emergency. So too its pretence to garibi hatao (remove poverty) with the garib hatao (remove the poor) programme implemented in the same period. Its pretence to socialism, with the liberalism of 1990s, and to liberalism with the continued bureaucratic stranglehold. Its pretence to honesty and integrity, with Bofors and other scams involving its leading lights. Its pretence to secularism had been partly penetrated time and again with massacres of Muslims and Sikhs that strangely took place only in states ruled by it.

But the pretence to secularism was penetrated finally when it forced kar sevaks to demolish the Babri Masjid by closing all their other options, apparently to capture four large states then ruled by the Sangh Parivar. With all central security forces removed from the Masjid area, the six lakh kar sevaks simply could not have gone back to other constituencies without demolishing the mosque. They would have suffered a total loss of face with their supporters, having made repeated commitments to building a Ram temple where the mosque stood.

And yet there was one pretence the Congress was able to maintain through the manipulations of its century-old politics. It was the one party that had never joined hands with the communal Sangh Parivar. With that penetrated, we have finally moved to the stage of feeling its demonic presence.

Sangh exorcists are now free to wrestle with the demonic behind the Pretence. Let the nation not allow the party to again wear what Harvey M. Cleckley called “the mask of sanity” in his book of the same title. “It is precisely the sane ones,” wrote Thomas Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable, “who are the most dangerous.” He elaborated: “It is the same ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. He was commenting on the fact that when Nazi Devil Eichmann was examined by a competent psychiatrist, he was found to be perfectly Sane. Let us not be tricked again by the Congress Party’s pretence to sanity.

Sultan Shahin writes on politics and religion