The subcontinent has a special place for smiling photgraphs of “great leaders,” “slightly less-than-great” leaders, those paying for putting up the photographs of the “great” and “slightly less-than-great” and so on.
They are as omnipresent as crows in our brown lands. Self-serving can take many forms but it is most lavishly done when others are paying for it. Major and minor deities of the Union and State governments in the Indian Union have been indulging in obscene self-promotion using public funds under the guise of public advertisements -- an excuse so absurd that mostly those who have made money from politics are able to defend it with a straight face.
Last month, the Supreme Court banned the use of photographs of political personalities, including chief ministers, in any government advertisement funded by public money. The Supreme Court, situated in New Delhi, has exempted three positions from this guideline -- those of the Indian Union’s prime minister, president and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Incidentally, all these three positions are manned by individuals who are ordinarily resident in New Delhi to execute their jobs.
Of these three “exceptional” positions, the one of the prime minister is the most overtly political one. How photographs of the PM do not promote “a personality cult” but those of CMs do is something best known to the learned judges. But this discriminatory gradation between the position of CM and PM did not go unchallenged by several-times CM of Tamil Nadu and DMK President M Karunanidhi.
This present-day federalist and previously a votary of secession from the Indian Union (before the democratic republic outlawed certain kinds of aspirations from being expressed democratically) correctly reminded us that the under the constitution’s federal structure, CM and PM have equal status. The words “chief” and “prime” are almost synonymous.
What Dr Karunanidhi has called out the creeping set of formal and informal counter-attacks that seek to undermine the federal contract between the different groups of people in the Indian Union.
Idiotic analogies like PM being the family-head/elder brother and CM being younger brother are not only false, but deliberately mischievous as they try to obtain popular consent for a discriminatory concept that has no place even in the highly-centralised Indian Union constitution.
This false hierarchy between the PM and the CM is entirely made-up, just like the myth of Hindi being the national language (It’s not. It’s an official language, so are many others. There’s no concept of a “national” language in the Indian Union. The Gujarat High Court has ruled that as far as giving public notices in Gujarat is concerned, Hindi is a foreign language). CM and PM are more like departmental heads of a multi-department institution, where departments have differing functions.
If anything, the state governments are far more relevant to people’s everyday lives than the Union government at New Delhi. With the present government’s slogan of “cooperative federalism,” its time to admit this and start a larger debate about the ways and means by which states can take back the powers that have slowly been grabbed by New Delhi from the states, ever since the transfer of power from the British to the Congress, from London to New Delhi.
In fact, similar to the American system, it may not be a bad idea to introduce state supreme courts as the final court of appeal on matters and subjects on which the states and not New Delhi has absolute jurisdiction. These include all things in the “state list” of the Indian Union constitution, like agriculture, land, public health, etc.
But why stop at media and why stop at photographs? Aren’t names on foundation stones and inauguration plaques also representations of the same perverse mentality that seeks short term fame and long-term immortality using public funds?
Apart from characters (and their lackeys) whose photos and names adorn pages, billboards and stones, the only support for such things must come from the same mindset that lauds the British for “building” the railways, never mind that they were built to transfer troops to quell rebellion (the non-Gandhian type) and loot materials out of the hinterlands to ports. And of course, brown people’s sweat and blood built it and paid for it.
Some have argued that such pictures add “legitimacy” to a public message. But isn’t that purpose served by the ever-present Ashok Stambha -- the four lions that brown people have been taught to publicly heed and respect, unless they want to receive “special” treatment from the government. The New Delhi satraps who ride the beasts during their long or short rule, know only too well that the East India Company and the British monarch’s also represented itself in the subcontinent through decorated lions, on seals and passports.
The pose of the beasts has changed, their numbers have increased. The species remains the same - Panthera leo. Does Panthera leo bite any less ferociously as it did before August 15, 1947? The victims know. They have always known.