We're all fekus: Modi, Advani, Sonia & ambivalence to power

R Jagannathan
Firstpost.com

The Narendra Modi-LK Advani standoff, where the former pushed his case for leadership of the BJP strongly, and the latter tried to block him by staying away from the BJP meet in Goa, could have ended only one way: with real power winning.

The purpose of making this observation is not to speculate on the intra-BJP power tussle, but to focus on the traditional Indian ambivalence to the acquisition and exercise of power.

Indian and western attitudes to power are almost diametrically opposed: we want power, but we want to pretend we don’t really care for it. Even when we have power, we want others to think it isn’t there. This is the reason why all political parties shy away from the prospect of holding internal elections, preferring the bogus route of top-down “consensus-building” even when there is no consensus. Our political parties don’t want to know who is really powerful by asking their people to vote; they want to pretend consensus will emerge from somewhere.

Also Read:LK Advani resigns from all posts in BJP

Nothing illustrates this better than how people in power have behaved. Among them, Advani, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Sonia Gandhi and Modi.

Advani wants to be PM, but even if that seems unlikely now given his age, he wants to be the power that decides who will be the next PM. This is what explains his current sulk. If he truly believed there were better candidates than Modi, all he needed to do was propose an internal vote in the party where all candidates who thought they should be PM nominees could have contested and the best man would have won. Mumbling good things about Sushma Swaraj or Shivraj Singh Chauhan is hardly the way to go about it.

Advani falls squarely in the Indian norm of being uncomfortable with formal power. He would prefer to fight covertly.

Even in the 1990s, when he was the obvious face of the party, he unilaterally announced Vajpayee as the party’s nominee for PM. We know this was practical politics, since Advani, as the spearhead of the Ayodhya movement, may not at that point of time have been able to cobble a coalition together. (Today, we have even BJP-baiters such as Digvijaya Singh shedding fake tears for how the party treated Advani).

Vajpayee, for his part, never loosened his hold on power after that. Detractors – like Govindacharya – had to be shown the door despite their preference for Advani. Advani displayed an Indian ambivalence for power, Vajpayee, despite his bluff exterior, proved stronger.

However, even Vajpayee had to bow to Modi’s stronger powerplay in 2002. It is possible that if Vajpayee had wanted he could have asked Modi to go. But this is mere speculation. The truth is in 2002 Modi was the hero and absolute power in the Gujarat BJP – and Vajpayee knew that. This is why he allowed Modi to continue by merely asking him to make an insincere offer to resign. Power recognised power.

In the recent power struggle, Modi used the power of the grassroots to make sure the top leadership of the party fall in line on his pre-eminence. Again, Modi is not ambivalent about power. If he has it, he will use it.

Now, to Sonia Gandhi. Despite being born in an Italian family, she declined the prime ministership in 2004 for two reasons. One, she knew that as PM she would be very vulnerable politically. Anything going wrong, especially on foreign policy or corruption, would have been instantly laid at her foreign-origin door. By not being PM, she could exercise power without responsibility – which is even better. This is the prime reason why she opted out, not some vague idea about sacrificing all for the party.

Secondly, she had been in India long enough to realise that Indians are suckers for sacrifice of power. Nothing gets you more brownie points than pretending to not seek power. This is why she apparently told Rahul that “power is poison” and this fakeness is one thing Rahul has learnt from his mother. Even though everyone and his aunt knows he will be PM if Congress lands up with 225-plus seats, he deflects every question about his ambitions by claiming that is the wrong question to ask. If he doesn’t want power, why does he even want to be Vice-President of the Congress? He could join Aruna Roy and work for the poor directly.

Modi breaks the Indian mould on power and this is one reason everyone is uncomfortable with him. We want him to pretend he does not want power, we want him to put on a show of great humility, we want him to be everything he is not.

The real “feku” is the person who claims he or she doesn’t want power and then works for the exact opposite.

However, there is still the question: what explains the Indian ambivalence on power? Why is India different from the west?

I believe that philosophers both in the west and in India grappled with the transient nature of life and power and came to opposite conclusions: the west saw power as being very important given the certainty of death. We came to the conclusion that since everyone ultimately dies and cedes power, the best approach is to attain power over one’s thoughts and actions, and not seek raw power itself. We sought power over oneself, over one’s ambitions as more important than seeking power over others. And when it became clear that you needed power to achieve anything in public life, we developed this hypocritical way of seeking power.

The west has sought immortality by building institutions and physical structures (statues, guidebooks) that will outlive them while Indians tried to achieve immortality by denying the importance of human institutions and focusing entirely on ideas and thoughts.

Western religions thus give huge importance to holy books and historical figures like Christ and Mohammed, while Indians – at least till recently – paid more attention to passing on learning rather than revering one book or one prophet as the last word.

Our spiritual leaders – from the Buddha to Gandhi – sought power over their own thoughts and actions. This is why every generation has to rediscover Gandhi and Buddha for itself from scratch.

This is not the case in the west.  Western political and spiritual leaders sought to perpetuate their thoughts and ideas through institutions, whether through long-term institutions such as the Catholic Church or by conquest and elimination of rivals. At any point, there is only one dominant idea – the most powerful one. It is either capitalism or communism – never both.

In the west, for one idea to win, another has to be dethroned. In India, two opposing ideas can coexist since our belief if that both could be partially right.

Uncertainty and doubt are inimical to power and its perpetuation.

The rise of Modi is an interesting challenge to Indian notions of power. His attitude to power is more western even though he speaks in the Indian idiom –  and we are responding negatively to what he stands for. We speak negatively about personality cult when it is apparent that every Indian party – from Congress to BSP to AIADMK to SP – thrives on the same cult.

Nobody in the west would be surprised with the idea that the most powerful person should rise to the top. Only we like to tut-tut about it.

Maybe, we are all fekus.