The Word of Politics

WORDS LOSE IRONY IN POLITICS. What they gain is the power of leading the powerless to a world where reality is hoodwinked by ideology. Words, when applied by the winners of revolutions and the plotters of coups, attempt to create a new nomenclature of idealism—a shot at the perfect society.

The words most popular in the hoary history of political deception by language are: democratic, socialist, people’s, Islamic, secular… The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—and you know what a joke that is. From the time of the founder, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, to the current ruler in socialism’s eternal dynasty, Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un, North Korea, apart from its other official depravations, has set the highest linguistic standards in the deification of the Supreme Leader, an entity elevated to the mythical realm by lofty adjectives. In the Hermit Kingdom, Democratic denotes an absence and People’s an affront. And Kimdom became a People’s Democratic Republic nine months before 1984 was published.

Or take the People’s Republic of China. Socialism mummifies the living leaders in ornate words—from the Great Helmsman to the Paramount Leader to the Maximum Leader. In the People’s Republic, the revolution in its heyday stormed the dictionary to capture Maoism in thunderous aphorisms: the Great Leap Forward, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Bombard the Headquarters… The People’s Republic, even as it indulges the people with the Dengist credo of it’s glorious to be rich, is still too paranoid to implement the so-called Fifth Modernisation: Democracy. Mao’s children may have brought Marx to McDonald’s, but the People’s Republic dreads a future where People will bare their conscience.

And now come to the Islamic Republics and see how revolutionaries armed with the Book launched a theocracy of subversion and suppression. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, an exhausted revolution now badly damaged by bunker busters thought only clandestine enrichment of uranium could extend its life. Its direct as well as proxy wars could not terminate the enemy; they only strengthened Israel’s will to be alive amidst neighbours who dispute its very existence. And despite building the biggest Book-certified gulag, the Islamic Republic could not Islamise the civil society. God seems to have finally abandoned the Revolution.

The other Islamic Republic may not be a theocracy, but Islam is in voluntary service to a military regime with a flimsy democratic veneer. In Pakistan too, it’s the idea of the enemy that drives its doctrine of extraterritorial terror. Like the other Islamic Republic, Pakistan provoked a lethal retaliation from its democratic neighbour. And it’s as if Republics with an Islamic qualifier are more attuned to trade in terror. Pakistan makes global deals on the war on terror as well. Irony is allowed here.

THE SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST Secular Democratic Republic of India entered the conversation on the 50th anniversary of an event that repudiated the adjectives imagined by the founders. Irony had no place when a leader felt threatened by the sovereignty and democracy of the republic. The Emergency was an extra-constitutional subversion by one of India’s most popular—and indulged—leaders. Her totalitarian temptation propelled by the twin powers of paranoia and dynastic privilege, Indira, playing the endangered Mother India, denied India what the Constitution, in its elegant Preamble, promised. And she brought a foundational shift in the character of the Republic by incorporating two ideologically loaded words into the Constitution: socialist and secular.

It was yet another instance of stifling freedom by the tyranny of nomenclature when, at the darkest moment of India’s democracy, a dash of the Soviet was added to the Indian Constitution. The authors of the Constitution never intended to ideologically straitjacket the Republic. The nation-building project of the Nehru-Gandhi years borrowed its tools of progress from the Soviet factory—being socialist was a national urgency. And being secular was a necessary condition for the creation of the Nehruvian New Man, resistant to the call of the nation and religion. The socialist-secular underpinnings of the dynasty only restricted the marketplace and expanded the minority ghettos. By rephrasing the Constitution, Indira Gandhi gave official sanctity to what she and Nehru practised. The original idealism of the Republic was violated.

The 50th anniversary of the Emergency was a good time to return to the corruption of the Republic’s original character. What marks the incongruity of the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ in today’s India is a nationally audacious cultural perspective in Who Are We? Residues of socialism may still be there in the politics of development in an economically unequal republic. Secularism no longer restricts the instincts of India’s dominant religion or a people’s growing awareness of their national identity. Hence the question: Does the rephrased Preamble to the Constitution misrepresent the Republic?

Words deployed by political desperation are awfully inadequate to describe the new national spirit.

1975 EmergencyIndian ConstitutionIndian politicsIndira GandhiJawaharlal NehruRepublicsecularSocialist