Congress, BJP and the christening culture

Manish Thakur & Nabanipa Bhattacharjee
Manish Thakur, IIM-Calcutta and Nabanipa Bhattacharjee, University of Delhi

Notwithstanding last month’s Chintan Shivir in Udaipur, sycophancy refuses to leave the company of the Indian National Congress. Days after this event, the Ashok Gehlot-led Rajasthan government came out with full-page advertisements in major Indian newspapers about an urban employment scheme — the Indira Gandhi Shahari Rojgar Yojana. Likewise, the Congress-led government of Chhattisgarh under the chief ministership of Bhupesh Baghel is busy advertising the Rajiv Gandhi Kisan Nyaya Yojana.

Much has already been written about the Congress leaders’ obsessive and rather endless commemoration of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Observers have repeatedly pointed out the anomaly of naming an airport in Hyderabad and an Indian Institute of Management in Shillong after former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Not only are such acts of christening an affront to diverse regional icons inhabiting the length and breadth of this country but is also revealing of the moral bankruptcy of a political party of more than a century of history behind it. Is its pantheon of leaders and ideologues so narrow that the Congress party has to take recourse to the Gandhis alone? Or is it indicative of the deeper malaise permeating its political culture which compels even some of its able mass leaders to display public subservience to the Gandhis? Is it not ironical that at a time when Rahul Gandhi keeps chanting the mantras of India’s pluralism and diversity, the names of the Gandhis continue to be prefixed to an array of programmes, institutions and organisations?

In fact, by going for the naming spree, either by choice or compulsion, after the Gandhis, the Congress has lent enough grist to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) propaganda mill which views it essentially as a loose grouping of sycophants and opportunists — who are mere seekers of power and forever subservient to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty — without any firm ideological convictions. Besides, it imparts the BJP the same naming rights, albeit on a broader ideological ground. So, the BJP feels emboldened to name a sports stadium in Goa after Syama Prasad Mukherjee even as Goa’s liberation (1961) happened full eight years after the former’s death in 1953. It is the same logic that animates the naming schemes after Bharatiya Jan Sangh’s ideologue Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya. The increasing public visibility of VD Savarkar is part of the same narrow christening discourse. Arguably, the Congress's critique of the BJP’s politics of renaming lacks conviction, for its own iconography hardly goes beyond the Gandhis. Evidently, the BJP is the natural beneficiary of the Congress’s refusal to admit non-Gandhis in its repertoire of veneration despite the attempts of the G-23 to ask a set of searching questions about the grand old party’s present and future.

The treatment meted out to the first non-Gandhi Prime Minister of the Congress — the late PV Narasimha Rao is a case in point. Rao’s biographer Vinay Sitapati has documented the political ploy and conspiracy behind, for instance, Rao’s cremation in Hyderabad and not in Delhi. Even today, after persistent demands coming from various quarters, the airport in Hyderabad has not been named after Rao. Contrast Rao’s contribution to governance and nation-building to that of Kamala Nehru to India’s freedom movement. The country is dotted with institutions and roads named after the latter against which the former’s presence pales in insignificance. Should not the Congress be taking a hard look at its ingrained culture of sycophancy that is denting its image in popular imagination? And it is this culture that helps Prime Minister Modi address Rahul Gandhi as shahzada (prince), thereby not unfairly deprecating the one-family-centric feudal ethos of the Congress.

In any case, as a nation we should certainly think of naming airports and other public facilities by drawing from a pool that is not confined to politicians. For example, there are instances in the world where airports have been named after musicians: John Lennon at Liverpool (United Kingdom), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at Salzburg (Austria), Franz Liszt at Budapest (Hungary), Frederic Chopin at Warsaw (Poland) and Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim at Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Likewise, the painter Il Caravaggio lends his name to the airport at Bergamo (Orio al Serio), Italy, not to mention the Leonardo da Vinci airport at Rome-Fiumicino, Italy. Interestingly, there is an airport named after a cartoonist, Charles M. Schulz, Sonoma County Airport located in Santa Rosa, California, in the US. Schulz was the popular creator of Peanuts series of cartoons and had lived in the county for 30-plus years. The airport’s logo even features Snoopy in his full flying-ace get-up.

One way of getting out of this acrimonious competitive politics of naming is to expand the very pool of celebrities to choose from. After all, there is no reason to confine the idea of greatness to the domain of politics, statecraft and governance alone. A civilised society has an obligation to commemorate all those who have contributed to the continued refinement of our manifold concerns of humanity: musicians, artists, novelists, painters, actors, playwrights, film-makers and the like. Naming an airport in Gorakhpur after Munshi Premchand, or after Kuvempu in Mysuru or after Bendre in Hubballi will be as appropriate as that after Charan Singh at Lucknow or Lal Bahadur Shastri in Varanasi. Once we are capacious in our understanding of contributions of people belonging to different walks of life, our myopic understanding of politics is likely to change for the better. We are very likely to realise that both C Rajagopalachari and Subramania Bharati contributed equally to a delineation of the idea of India, though to two different fields. Howsoever spectacular the contributions of the Nehru-Gandhi family may have been, India is too vibrant and diverse a country to be homogenised under its name. Needless to say, such an understanding will serve Congress as well. It is time Congressmen and Congresswomen consciously contain the debilitating virus of general servitude towards the Gandhis.