Mythmaking In Life and Death

HISTORY, WHEN TAKEN OUT of the exigencies of punditry, is a strange judge—only if we don’t abandon the habit of invoking history to authenticate our political preferences. Or it may be that we look back to appreciate the past through the prism of the present, certainly when the present rages against our political beliefs. History can only oblige. Evaluation in retrospect is invariably coloured by the ideas and attitudes of the moment, and it is most evident in the time of transitions.

It’s not that death makes a person larger than the life he or she lived. It’s that death does more than sentimentalise the perspective of the living. It makes mourning a political rite. And more so if the biography of the departed has enough passages in it to be pitted against the politics the mourners despise. It’s the gaze of the living that exaggerates the dead—and turns history into a suitable script.

Take this. In the glossary of American leadership, Jimmy Carter can’t be more than an anodyne entry. If political analysis is a character study above all, then the former peanut farmer was a throwback to the gentle era. There was something unobtrusive about the president as America stood still—economically and in terms of foreign policy—during his term, marred badly by the Iranian hostage crisis. His one-term presidency made the corrective storming of Reagan inevitable. Carter lived long enough to make his own presidency a hazy memory.

Obituaries fortified his legacy as a historic nostalgia. In death he regained what he lost while in power. It was not a spontaneous posthumous transformation. It was reputation rebuilt by political compulsion. In the Trump era, defined by brashness and narcissism of the presidential character, Carter is lyrical normalcy, so soothing to the assaulted liberal sensibility. If the rise of Carter began post-presidency, with a Nobel Prize thrown in, death at 100 made him a gentle reminder of what America could have been without a Trump. It’s the shadow of the 47th president that has softened the image of the 39th. The draft of history’s judgment has already been prepared by the political pieties of the present.

Something similar happened when Dr Manmohan Singh died, though it must be said that his legacy as an administrator was heftier. A prime minister born out of his benefactor’s ‘No’ in a melodrama staged in the Central Hall of Parliament, Dr Singh was the most dutiful as a ruler. He was the Selected One, and came with a formidable backstory as an implementer. The dutiful technocrat was at his historic best when he served his first master, PV Narasimha Rao, the guru of India’s economic liberalisation. It was his gentle solidity amidst chaos and corruption, and his unwavering loyalty to the family that awarded him the job, that made Dr Singh a middle-class favourite. Like Carter to some extent, as history raged around him, he remained calm, unobtrusive.

The Singh legacy multiplied in death: what was denied to him while he was in power was showered on him as a kind of gratitude in retrospect. What made the appreciation a prologue to mythicisation was the political context: Wish we had a Dr Singh today instead of you know who. It was the repudiation of an India Dr Singh presided over that made a Modi possible in 2014, and in 10 years, the Singh era looks so remote. Dr Singh retrieved and consecrated in popular conscience is also a liberal rejection of the political culture that came after his exit from office. Judgment must be written before history makes up its mind.

It’s not the dead alone that benefits from the pieties of the present. As Joe Biden stumbles his way to the exit, attempts are being made to turn a very ordinary presidency into an extraordinary one. In the portraiture of eager liberals, he is already a historic figure towering over a world convulsed by wars and autocracies. Literally forced out of a second race by his own party grandees, he is being recast as the last of the gentlemen pols in a Trumpified America bereft of old decencies. Make Joe Great Again is a project necessitated by the fear of Trump. The invention of a non-Trump even at the cost of creating a glorious golem for posterity is perfectly in tune with the times.

Let history wait. Mythmaking is a political endeavour.

American leadershipDonald TrumphistoryideologyJimmy CarterJoe BidenManmohan SinghPolitical beliefs