How do you galvanise emotions in a society reeling and slumbering under the pall of a totalitarian regime?
Vladimir Putin shows the way. Create an emotionally distractive and gripping narrative from the past with dollops of fear-mongering, ‘saviour cults’, and the plausible gratification of restored national pride into the admixture, and voila!
Xi Jinping too, does it brilliantly. Kim Jong-un does it, less brilliantly. Saddam Hussein did it reasonably well. Muammar Ghaddafi overdid it. Heck, even Imran Khan is attempting to do it ad nauseam.
To assume that each of these authoritarian leaders did not have popular support at any time, would be wishful thinking. In fact, they may still have loyal believers, long after each has gone, as the saying goes ‘One man’s terrorist (or any other adjective of ignobility), is another man’s freedom fighter’!
Sadly, with citizenry, facts are often not the reality, perception is. Authoritarian leaders know this conundrum, and they are the masters of the perception game. It is this devious art of stitching a compelling narrative (often full of lies), that successfully legitimises authoritarian regimes the world over. The pattern is spookily similar, across all countries, with all such leaders.
Irony dies a thousand deaths when Putin repeatedly peppers his justification for the war (yes, he’d prefer the term ‘special military operation’) on Ukraine, with repeated allusion to Nazis. Putin seeks to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine from Neo-Nazis. Seriously? The only country in the world, other than Israel, to have a Jewish President (Volodymyr Zelensky) and a Jewish Prime Minister (Volodymyr Groysman) simultaneously, is Ukraine! An outstanding integration and achievement for a community of less than 300,000 Jews, in a country with a population of 44 million.
But does that mean there were no societal faultlines – of course there are, as they are in any democracy which panders to unfiltered opinions. Indeed, the rise of the right-wing (again a common feature in most democracies) did lead to the passing of certain legislations (passed before Zelensky’s term) that could be considered to be glorifying Nazi collaborators, stray anti-Semitic incidents etc., but to suggest that Nazis are running Ukraine is simply outlandish.
If the Nazis did have a grip on Ukraine as Putin claims, then how come the Jewish duo won the electoral sweepstakes? And why would the extreme right-wing parties only be able to garner 2% of votes, as they did? Conflating Nazism and the purported ‘genocide’ on the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk would require an even more creative leap of imagination, on interlinking the unrelated. But Putin viciously crafted just that.
Putin invoked subliminal but very powerful emotions that still wound the Russian psyche and connected the unrelated dots to churn out a highly inflammable Molotov Cocktail – a recipe of untruths and half-truths, but overall, great toxicity.
The real reason for the rote Nazi allusion is therefore nothing to do with actual Nazis in Ukraine, but the fact that nothing births more hatred and anger amongst the Russians than the bloody and horrific memories of the 900-day siege of Leningrad, believed to have killed almost 1.5 million Russians by starvation, stress, and exposure.
The culprits in that most destructive siege had been the Nazis, and ergo, linking that haunting memory to the odd anti-Semitic attack in Ukraine, and a powerful Nazi-redux script, is made ready, pronto! Putin picked, chiselled and amplified a barely existing base of ostensible anti-Semitism in Ukraine, and galvanised Russian emotions and justifications for the Ukrainian invasion. Manufacturing fear was at the heart of Putin’s efforts. Nazism is just a ploy.
It is important to understand that Illiberal and intolerant regimes are not always wrong about what they posit from the past – it’s just that they are selective, and never truly explain their own intent. American novelist Margaret Mitchell famously said, ‘Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, but those who are selectively obsessed by it, are bound to be corrupted by it’ – herein lies the curse of economising with the truth!
National leaders always have the choice to either cherry pick the ‘inclusive’ and harmonious pieces from the past to heal and ‘normalise’ reality, or deliberately choose the divisive and polarising instances (selectively) to suggest a ‘rescripted’ understanding of history. The canvas of history is vast enough to offer a menu card of legitimate choices, and the chosen route and agenda of the leaders becomes apparent with the choices they make.
Nation-building in a multicultural and multireligious society is a deliberate, constant experiment, in the exercise of choices. To reduce this precious experiment in democracy to strains of exclusivism or hierarchy, and therefore towards majoritarianism, is to fall short of the hallowed spirit of dignified leadership and statesmanship.
Across our Line of Control, another increasingly unhinged leader, Imran Khan, punts his winning appeal to past-bashing, expletives, name shaming, gladiatorial grandstanding, amplifying the religious card (Riyasat e Madina, Amr bil Ma’aroof etc.), and above all, locking the idea of nationhood to his own cult – classic vileness of putting electoral stakes before civilisational, even constitutional morality.
The subtext of such insecure leaders’ constant fearmongering is that without them, doom is guaranteed. The Indian political adage of TINA (there is no alternative) also gets a generous shot of political testosterone. Khan’s incredulous spiel can take such ridiculous spins as ‘foreign funded conspiracy’, with silly statements like, ‘The letter that I have is proof and I want to dare anyone who is doubting this letter. I will invite them off the record’.
Such pedestrian remarks may cut ice with blind cadres, who refuse to question the propriety of such puerile statements, let alone the veracity of the said letter. In such sliding democracies, there is a market for ignobility and crassness, often wrongly perceived as topical necessity. The Oxbridge education and past exposures of Imran Khan that ought to suggest otherwise, are gleefully surrendered at the altar of electoral considerations, knowingly. Hate is a more powerful political currency than love, and slimy leaders know it well.
India too, should ponder seriously and ask itself hard questions about the trajectory of its own experiment in democracy. The acid test would be in ascertaining the dominant sense prevailing (inclusion or discrimination), as perceived by the ‘others’, or those who do not compose the many majorities.
Ask a Naga, a Kashmiri, an Adivasi from Gujarat, a Schedule Caste person from Tamil Nadu if they feel more empowered, included and prospered (or diminished) in recent times? This myriad diversity of the unseen and unimagined ‘others’ may or may not reflect the stereotypical image of an average ‘Indian’, as electorally conceptualised.
Don’t ask but check the actual statistical status of the so-called majority in terms of their socio-economic parameters, social development goals, or various other indexes of tangible progress. An honest assessment beyond the context and ready justification of partisan logics, will speak its own unadulterated truth.
A truth that can unfortunately be buried in the legitimate processes of electoral democracy, which like the stock market, reflects manufactured sentiments, and not necessarily facts.
Indian political conversation must talk the language, aspirations and conversations of the future over the past, facts over perception, inclusivity over exclusivism, equity over hierarchy, and above all, reflect the leadership choices that befit the civilisational-constitutional morality, and not an attempted rehash of the same.
The past must be allowed to rest, or it will keep getting invoked selectively and viciously to create distractive partisan advantages. The nation will never benefit from the same.