Insults have been flying around aplenty around the recently concluded elections in the Indian state of West Bengal. Narendra Modi’s “Didi O Didi” jibe has been looked upon as a factor instrumental in the defeat of his party at the ballot. Likewise, his loyalist Dilip Ghosh’s suggestion, when Mamata Banerjee’s foot took the brunt of a heavily closing car door, that she should exchange her sarees for bermuda shorts, was properly seen as an instance of obscenity at its most outrageous.
And, yes, Banerjee has not been far behind either. She has used the term “goonda” in referring to the men who came down from Delhi to ensure that she did not get a new term in office as West Bengal chief minister.
Politics is, we have been led to believe, the art of the possible. Quite right, but then there are all those moments when politicians pull it down to a level that leaves the general masses in a state of disbelief. Back in 1961, at the elections in West Germany (it was yet a Cold War era), Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his CDU followers would not hold themselves back from referring to Willy Brandt (at the time mayor of West Berlin and future chancellor) as the “bastard mayor.”
Brandt had not known his father, for he was born out of wedlock. But when Adenauer tried conveying the message that the “bastard mayor” should not be chancellor, it was politics at its lowest point. One certainly recalls Winston Churchill’s jibe at Mahatma Gandhi – “a half-naked fakir” -- which surely did not endear Britain’s wartime leader to either Indians or people outside India. Churchill often made disparaging remarks about his political opponents. He insulted Clement Attlee thus: “An empty cab drew up before 10 Downing Street and out of it stepped Clement Attlee.” Churchill was mocking Attlee’s diminutive appearance.
It all reminds one of the insult which Morarji Desai hurled at Indira Gandhi when she became India’s prime minister following Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in 1966. He called her a “chhokri,” a mere slip of a girl. Other Congress leaders, who had apparently believed they would be able to dominate Indira, mocked her as “goongi gurya” -- a dumb doll. The dumb doll was soon to put an end to their manipulations.
And speaking of insults coming from politicians, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had scant respect for the scholarly Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, whom he described as the showboy of the Congress. He could not stomach the fact that Azad, a Muslim, was part of the Congress, a party he considered a Hindu organization. There is the instance of Jinnah shaking hands with Gandhi and Nehru when they arrived for a meeting with him but pointedly refusing to greet Azad. Some years later, it would be the American John Foster Dulles insulting Zhou Enlai by walking away even as the Chinese leader approached him, hand outstretched, at the Geneva conference in 1954.
In the period before the creation of Pakistan, when the Muslim League and its camp followers referred to Jinnah as Quaid-e-Azam or “great leader,” Maulana Maudoodi’s Jamaat-e-Islami, opposed to the Pakistan concept, denigrated Jinnah as Kafir-e-Azam, or “great unbeliever.”
Insulting opponents has been a trait with some politicians in the United States. Looking down on opponents has varied. As Richard Nixon was unwilling to take Hubert Humphrey’s bait for a televised debate between them in 1968, Humphrey put a spin on the Richard the Lionheart honorific of yore and taunted Nixon as Richard the Chicken-hearted. Nixon of course remembered how John Kennedy had bested him on television in 1960 and was not ready to go down that path again.
And, yes, there was Lyndon Johnson who delighted in mocking the influential Senator J William Fulbright, an opponent of his Vietnam policy, as Senator Halfbright. Johnson was less than kind when he referred to House minority leader and future president Gerald Ford as a person who could not chew gum and walk at the same time. In more recent times, Donald Trump outraged nearly everyone with his constant references to Hillary Clinton as Crooked Hillary and in his campaign for re-election last year called his rival Sleepy Joe. He did not spare Marco Rubio, who for him was Little Rubio during the 2016 primaries.
Let the garrulous Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union not be forgotten. Apart from his shoe-banging at the United Nations in 1960, there is the ultimate insult he threw at his foreign minister Andrei Gromyko when he told a visitor that if he asked Gromyko to sit on a block of ice all day, Gromyko would do it without demur.
President Eisenhower, asked in 1960 if he could refer to any policy initiative undertaken by Richard Nixon during the latter’s eight years as vice president, said he would need a week to think it over. It damaged Nixon, though when Nixon finally made it to the White House in 1969, an ailing and dying Eisenhower apologized for the comment. Pakistan’s first president Iskandar Mirza carried insult to levels of high crudity when he made it known that he would like to shoot the Bengali politician Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani “like a dog.”
And many were the times when conservative politicians based in pre-1971 West Pakistan abused liberal Bengali politicians calling for autonomy for East Pakistan as traitors and secessionists. President Nixon and Henry Kissinger delighted in using unprintable expletives about Indira Gandhi, especially after their meetings with the Indian leader in Washington in 1971.
In September 1965, as the Indian delegation led by Sardar Swaran Singh walked out of the UN Security Council in protest at Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s incendiary remarks, the Pakistani foreign minister resorted to using expletives against them. Years later, as prime minister, Bhutto cheerfully denigrated his right-wing political opponents as “the beards.”
Jibes can prove costly in politics, as Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have learned. It was a lesson George HW Bush learnt in 1992 when he referred to the Clinton-Gore team as Bozos. He did not get a second term as president. In 1964, Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan was dismissive of his former army colleague, the respected General Azam Khan, when he said the latter’s head was full of “bhoosa” or cattle feed. Azam Khan at the time was campaigning for Ayub’s opponent Fatima Jinnah at the presidential election. Both Ayub and Azam are dead, with this difference: Ayub Khan is almost forgotten by his country and Azam Khan remains respected by people, not least in Bangladesh, where he served as a much-loved governor of East Pakistan in the early 1960s.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.