Opinion Coarse discourse

There has been widespread and much-deserved condemnation of the low and steadily deteriorating standards of electioneering for the five assembly polls. The terms of discourse and debate are foul,even abusive,more often than not. All parties are guilty,but the two principal contestants,the Congress and the BJP must share the bulk of the blame. Unless the rot is stemmed and reversed,what is going on today might magnify manifold in April-May 2014,when the stakes will be the control of the 16th Lok Sabha.

Remarkably,Rahul Gandhi,vice president of the Congress and “crown prince” of the ruling dynasty,has already received a mild rebuke from the Election Commission for the “tone,tenor and content” of an election speech he delivered after rolling up his sleeves. He said that an officer of the Intelligence Bureau had told him that Pakistan’s intelligence agencies were “in touch” with the Muslim victims of the recent communal riots in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh. Ironically,these luckless Muslims,still languishing in makeshift relief camps,were as enraged as anyone else.

For his part,Narendra Modi,the three-time chief minister of Gujarat and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate,who is a past master in angry polemics,was served a show-cause notice by the EC on his description of the Congress’s election symbol,the human hand,as “khooni panja (murderous paw)”.

Such ugly and objectionable remarks,by even responsible leaders,were perhaps to be expected. But what has taken me by total surprise is the reaction of some second- and third-rank Congress leaders to iconic melody queen Lata Mangeshkar’s endorsement of Modi. They are angrily demanding the withdrawal of the Bharat Ratna,India’s highest civilian award,deservedly given to her years ago. One Congress worthy pontificated on a TV news channel — debates on elections on these channels are even more hysterical than orations at election rallies — that but for “Maharashtra and Mumbai,no one would have heard of Lata. Why then was she praising Gujarat’s chief minister?” Make of this nonsense what you can.

Having witnessed all elections since the first one in 1952,and having covered most of them for the newspapers and a news agency I have worked for,I can testify that never before have I heard such rubbish as has become routine today. Of course,there were exchanges among rival parties and candidates in the past too. But even the sharpest ones were in parliamentary language,sometimes spiced with humour.

One such took place in what is now Kerala,but was then called the state of Travancore-Cochin. Much more than now,it was a stronghold of the Communist Party of India,then in one piece. Jawaharlal Nehru seldom used the word communist in his election speeches there. He simply pointed to the CPI’s flags fluttering all round and asked his audiences: “What is this foreign flag doing here?” Irate communist leaders,backed by fellow travellers,cried hoarse that their flag was not the flag of the Soviet Union but that of the “workers of the entire world”. But this made no dent in the impact of Nehru’s remark. The Congress won the state.

When election results started coming in,a jubilant Jagjivan Ram,the Dalit leader and a senior minister in Nehru’s cabinet,declared: “The wind that has blown in Travancore-Cochin will soon cover the whole country.” A junior socialist leader retorted: “Don’t talk of Cheen and Cochin; talk about India”.

The classic,of course,is Indira Gandhi’s one-liner before the 1971 general election that made her supreme in the Congress and the country: “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao; main kehti hoon garibi hatao (They say get rid of Indira,I say get rid of poverty).”

A brief word needs to be said about the national honours,the Padma awards and the Bharat Ratna. These are not the gifts of the government of the day that enjoin the winners to be ever loyal to it. This slavish practice ended with the Rai Bahadurs and Khan Bahadurs of the British days. Sachin Tendulkar,the latest recipient of the Bharat Ratna,hailed by a billion-plus Indians as the “god of cricket”,should take note.

Let me tell the ignoramuses something about what wise men thought of the Bharat Ratna in a better era. The legendary scientist,Nobel laureate C.V. Raman,was among the first four recipients of this award when it was instituted in 1954. Around the same time,he was also made a national professor. A year later,he received a letter from a deputy secretary in the Union ministry of education,asking him to submit a report on the work done by him as national professor.

Raman picked up a hammer and a chisel,used them to break his Bharat Ratna into pieces,wrapped these in the deputy secretary’s letter,and sent it to Nehru.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.