To Mrs G, with love from NDA

Testimony to this was provided by a political worker who remembered her because she had asked her twice about an injury to her hand. By a small child who said he had heard that she loved children and he wished she had been around to love him too and by sundry peasants and pedestrians all of whom had only good things to say about the late Mrs G.

If this were not hagiography enough the commentator of this Bollywood style, tear-jerker of a profile, went on to inform us that her popularity was not confined to the sub-continent’s moth eaten borders but a worldwide phenomenon. A BBC poll established that she was considered greater than Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth. He could have explained that this was almost certainly because more Indians voted in the poll than anyone else but chose not to.

The documentary’s purpose was to exalt our former prime minister, on her eighteenth death anniversary, and the government of the man she once chucked in jail could not have done a better job. The documentary was only the prelude. Doordarshan then proceeded to telecast every last detail of the memorial ceremony at her former residence. With the cute attention that sports commentators pay to movement we were told Sonia Gandhi and her son had arrived and were now walking slowly to the spot where Mrs Gandhi was gunned down, that they were now proceeding to place flowers on her samadhi and that they were now walking to their seats.

Every movement they made as they sat themselves down on the floor was also shown after which Doordarshan’s camera fixed itself on their faces for what seemed like forever.

History in slow motion and adulation so total that nobody mentioned the E word. Quite the opposite. When a lady commentator, who was a familiar TV face in Mrs. Gandhi’s days, described where the ceremony was being held she said that this had been Mrs Gandhi’s house between 1964 and 1977 and then between 1980 and 1984 without mentioning those years in between.

Or that the men Mrs Gandhi jailed during the Emergency were the very ones who now ruled India. If Sonia Gandhi had paid Vajpayee to anoint her his heir he could not have done better.

Remember please that the vast majority of India’s voters are—largely on account of the policies of Mrs Gandhi and her family—either illiterate or semi-literate. So it is possible to meet voters who are not even sure who is ruling. Less than a hundred kilometres from Udaipur I remember going to a village in which nobody knew the names of any of India’s prime ministers.

Only one woman vaguely knew who Rajiv Gandhi was because ‘‘wasn’t he the one they killed with a garland’’. In such a country an adulatory documentary of the kind Doordarshan showed last week amounts to saying Vote Congress, Vote Sonia.

If Doordarshan intended only to commemorate the event it could have produced a real profile instead of hagiography. What would have been wrong with analysing objectively Mrs Gandhi’s achievements and failings? What could possibly have been wrong with mentioning not just the Emergency but also that it was in her reign that the Kashmir and Punjab problems got created. And, that it was she who nationalised the banks, centralised political and economic power and gave us 20 years of economic growth so slow that the world left us far behind. Is any of this untrue? Is it not also true that had she been wiser she would have noticed when she became Prime Minister again in 1980 that China and all of Southeast asia were changing their approach to economics and governance and that, perhaps, India needed to think again.

In fairness to Mrs Gandhi it also needs to be said that with all her flaws she remains in India’s public memory a giant of a leader if only because most of those who followed have been such little men. This does not take away from the fact that the India she left behind was a second rate, shabby country in terminal systemic decline.

Had the men who replaced her been bigger of vision they would have taken the drastic steps needed to rectify things. Instead, they just carried on along the same road she built so we remain a second rate, shabby country in systemic decline.

But, one of them—I speak of our current prime minister—will be remembered at least for being big of heart. In Indira Gandhi’s days Doordarshan would never have made an adulatory film about a political leader who had dared, even mistakenly, to oppose her. And, here, we have Atalji forgiving her for jailing him. If that is not bigness of heart what is? If only he would also stop mimicking Mrs G’s style of governance he would not only be doing us all a favour but might end up being remembered for more than just being big of heart.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com