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India snorting
The night before he was to take his father?s ashes to the Brahmaputra, Rahul just got a little sad, snorted some cocaine and heroin off a 500 rupee note and passed out.
On the face of it, as Atal Bihari Vajpayee said, Rahul Mahajan is just a youth who made a mistake. The night before he was to take his father’s ashes to the Brahmaputra, Rahul just got a little sad, snorted some cocaine and heroin off a 500 rupee note and passed out. Perhaps Vajpayee is right. Perhaps the fact that Rahul Mahajan, son of an RSS pracharak, is currently India’s most famous drug abuser is simply the error of a directionless youth. Back in Ambejogai in Maharashtra, when the late Pramod Mahajan was pulling his family up by the bootstraps and spending his mornings in the shakha, cocaine and heroin must have been the last things on his mind. But why did the ideals of the Sangh parivar (however fiercely contested they may be) not pass from one generation to the next? The Rahul Mahajan drug case is yet another example of the BJP’s tortured tryst with modernity.
Pramod Mahajan was an example of an important new phenomenon within the BJP. The pracharak as corporate networker. The resourceful Hindutva soldier who strove to push his cause through big money and big contacts. Someone as comfortable with Hindutva rhetoric and anti-modern speeches on minorities as he was in the salons of those commanding hefty corporate and political power. Pramod Mahajan, the talented politician, was as resourceful, as much of a deal maker, as much of an urban party animal as dear old K. Sudarshan, sarsanghchalak of the RSS, could never hope to be.
Yet, to be sure, the spirit of the Sangh parivar ran deep in the veins of the Pramod Mahajan family. He belonged to that community of Maharashtrian Brahmins for whom the RSS was second nature, for whom Hindutva was the unquestioned way of life, for whom the RSS’s ideals of austerity, simple living and charitable works was the default mode of being. The fact that Pramod Mahajan’s son became a drug addict shows how, in many ways, the BJP, the so-called ‘party with a difference’, the party of Bharatiya sanskriti, the party rooted apparently in the realities of India, was completely swept off its feet by the new economy. The self-appointed upholders of Old Bharat proved far too frail when buffeted by the high winds of New India.
In the NDA years, the resourcefulness of Pramod Mahajan was to the fore. He may have had to resign from ministerial berths because of allegations of his contacts with business houses, but he worked tirelessly for the growth of his party. His resourcefulness became exciting for the BJP. The sheer novelty of what he represented — the monied, smart-talking, problem-solving fund raiser — was galvanising and refreshing for a party of sleepy small towners steeped in conservative Hinduism. So much so that Vajpayee subsequently anointed him as ‘Lakshman’ at the Mumbai silver jubilee celebrations even though the NDA had been driven out of power largely because of the perceived failure of Mahajan’s India Shining slogan.
In fact, the declining moral quotient of Mahajan’s lifestyle, juxtaposed with the Sangh’s insistence on morality above all else, illustrated a stunning paradox. During the NDA years, Vajpayee, like the blind Dhritarashtra, refused to see how the BJP was failing — notably exemplified in the persona of Mahajan — to grow naturally into the new Indian economy. The BJP was failing to grow organically into a modern identity and Mahajan reflected more than most an ersatz modernity.
A modernity of five-star hotels and branded footwear and snappy suits without understanding that the modern mind, above all, is sceptical and blasé about money. Indeed, the NDA years marked a curious refusal by the BJP to even build on its own identity. When the party of so-called Bharatiya sanskriti ruled India, did we see a single gala festival celebrating Indian culture and tradition? Was there, for example, a festival showcasing modern adaptations of the Mahabharat or Ramayana or operas based on great Hindu works? Nope.
All the NDA organised was the ICCR literary festival, ‘At Home in the World’, designed to chiefly felicitate V.S. Naipaul, who is not known for his love for India.
The other cultural festivals organised by the NDA were the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas occasions, again designed to felicitate NRIs. A party known for its Hindu identity took few steps to popularise Ayurveda, to standardise it, to modernise it, to bring it upto global standards. Nor was the BJP, the party of ‘Hindi’, able to innovatively take up the cause of Hindi language and literature to really strive to create a talented pool of writers and poets in Hindi.
The BJP’s relative intellectual bankruptcy led it to get overexcited at the visit of V.S. Naipaul to the BJP office, almost as if he was the only intellectual to step into those portals. The BJP’s failure to develop a life of the mind, to develop a depth of vision of itself, has made it uniquely vulnerable to the Five-Star hotel.
Mind you, the Five-Star life is good news for those who can afford it. It is certainly not a symbol of decadence as the Left and RSS hypocritically proclaim.
Let’s face it, the good life is a fundamentally important part of new prosperity. Outraged laments about money are tediously dishonest because most practitioners of India’s new economy are talented, energetic and enormously hardworking individuals who earn their money honestly and have every right to spend it legitimately at whichever pleasure spot they choose. Indeed, it is precisely the moral posturing and moral policing of the Sangh that is the flip side of the almost obscene decadence of Rahul Mahajan.
It is because the Sangh parivar has failed to understand modernity, precisely because modernity is considered the evil forbidden fruit, that morally depraved indulgence and binges co-exist alongside hypocritical adherence to puritanical values. Former spokesman of the RSS Ram Madhav is an engineer by training. When he was appointed, he was supposed to be the suave English-speaking face of the RSS, someone who signalled a new transparent chapter in the relations between the secretive RSS and the outside world. Ram Madhav is no longer the spokesperson of the RSS and the Sangh’s failure to create more individuals like him or foster a climate in which perhaps people like him are given the freedom to invent a kinder, better, more improved RSS, shows that the Sangh’s identity is well past its sell by date.
No wonder it’s difficult for a young blade like Rahul Mahajan to find solace in the writings of M.S. Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar. Rahul Mahajan did not follow Pramod Mahajan into a political career, not just because he’s more inclined towards the good life or perhaps because of the father complex, but also perhaps because the ideology that his father upheld was simply not attractive enough to a young person no longer obsessed with ‘minorities’ and ‘Hindu rage’.
Rahul Mahajan illustrates the deep schizophrenia at the heart of the Sangh parivar. A suspicious secretive organisation forged in the last century will never take the BJP into the new world. Instead, a more healthy embrace of new India, of reforms, of a tough State, of an open honest espousal of the educated middle-class, as opposed to the quota-conscious, dynasty-obsessed UPA, should be the BJP’s leit motif.
The more the Sangh retreats into a paranoid shell of misguided moral puritanism, the more it attacks Valentine’s Day and fashion shows, the more it will be let down by individuals like Rahul Mahajan. India Shining will then be revealed as nothing but India Snorting.
The writer is Features Editor, CNN IBN
sagarika.ghose@gmail.com
