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Journalism of Courage
Both are tubby figures. Both are seemingly committed to fighting those who repress vast sections of the Indian people. There the similarities end and the stark contrasts begin. Mayawati and Indrajit Gupta could not be more dissimilar in their backgrounds, their political behaviour and their administrative styles.
During her recent six-month spell as UP Chief Minister, the diminutive Mayawati had IAS bureaucrats and senior police officers quaking in their polished boots because she was so obviously and imperiously in command of UP’s administration. She would brook no opposition from mere pen-pushers and babus. There was no malingering, no hesitation in issuing orders and seeing that they were carried out. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to empower the Dalits and unite them behind her own Bahujan Samaj Party and to direct the state’s resources towards improving the social and economic condition of the Dalits.
Mayawati’s determination to uplift the oppressed should not be underestimated as she is driven by a burning resentment, a deep fury against the social tyranny of the caste-ridden UP village of her childhood. Now that she has given the Dalits of UP a scent of power and a sense of political importance, however ephemeral, Mayawati and UP’s Dalits can no longer be taken for granted.
A man who is taken for granted in his domain is Union Home Minister Indrajit Gupta. Officials in his ministry routinely ignore, block and contradict his plans. He seems in awe rather than in command of his ministry’s bureaucrats.
The Communist leader who used to make thundering speeches in parliament about the rights of the oppressed now regularly opts for the overblown security scenarios presented by his bureaucrats rather than for the pleas for protection from police brutalities made by the humble citizens of this country. He has been co-opted into becoming a bureaucrat himself. Coddled as an apparatchik within the conformist democratic centralism of the CPI for over five decades, Indrajit Gupta’s transition to a bureaucrat could not have been too difficult.
Like so many other CPI and CPI(M) leaders — including Jyoti Basu, Somnath Chatterjee and also some of the relatively younger ones — from upper-middle class backgrounds and educated at Cambridge or London Universities, Gupta has smoothly slipped into being part of the conservative establishment of the country. He has been such an upright Home Minister that Bal Thackeray’s mouthpiece, Saamna, has written editorials in praise of him.
Politics through bureaucratic intervention has become so much of a mainstay for the communist parties that their leaders make very little effort personally to seek the support of the masses, particularly in the rural areas. However symbolic and superficial their tours may be, veterans of other parties do make a greater effort to `keep in touch’ with the general populace. LK Advani, during his paranoid and incendiary rath yatras, splutters and coughs while inhaling the dust of the Indian road but persists in rousing the tribal instincts of some of the crowds he addresses in remote hamlets. Catch a Jyoti Basu or an Indrajit Gupta doing something so uncomfortable and undignified to counter Advani’s rustic rallies. It is much more comforting to fly between Delhi, Calcutta and London to confer with pink trade unionists and students.
No wonder the oppressed castes and classes turn to a Mayawati, to a Laloo Yadav or a Mulayam Singh, who do provide an emotional salve, if nothing else, for the long-standing social brutalities of this nation. Mayawati and the Yadavs may be corrupt and self-seeking but they echo the hurts of the Dalits and the OBCs. There is a fire in the belly of these leaders and an emotional commitment to battling against social indignities. The Guptas, Basus and Chatterjees have no emotional driving force, no fire in the belly to convert their intellectual commitment to social justice into a people’s movement.
