New Sycophancy Credo: Let's Do It Privately, So That It Doesn't Go Viral And Embarrass The Boss

Prostrate before them but ensure that your action remains in private domain and does not go viral on media

What do you do when a person you seek a bribe from tapes the act, shares it on social media and gets ridiculed for his/her misdemeanor?  Punish him/her for indiscipline and betrayal.

This is exactly what Mayawati, the czarina of Dalit politics in the country, did in the second week of January after Sangeeta Chowdhury, her party candidate from Atrauli (Aligarh) constituency for 2017 assembly elections, uploaded photographs of her and her children touching feet of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo.

Mayawati has cancelled Chowdhury’s nomination for violating party ‘discipline’. The action reeks of the worst kind of hypocrisy from a politician who has always encouraged the most servile kind of sycophancy from her party cadres and officialdom whenever she is in power.

Remember June 2003 when it was widely reportedly how a senior bureaucrat from Uttar Pradesh held her slippers during a flight from New Delhi to Heathrow airport in London and another tied the laces of her mentor, the late Kanshi Ram?

The denial of nomination to Chowdhury proves beyond doubt the longevity of the truism that ‘more the things change, the more they remain the same’. The difference is that the proliferation of social media – Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn etcetera– in the recent years has made sure that such overt display of flattery and its promoters receive enough brickbats.

Be it rejection of Chowdhury’s nomination or the recent episode where former Union Minister V Narayanasamy was seen holding the slippers of Rahul Gandhi or the YouTube video where a Samajwadi Party leader is seen shouting ‘Mulayam Singh Yadav zindabad’ while being beaten by anonymous policemen who hid their identities under helmets – sycophants seem to get the goat of the chatterati. The art of servility no more goes unreported and unchallenged.

The incidents also prove that the charge of the sycophancy brigade has continued unabated and despite the social condemnation, the promoters – ‘lone-wolf’ outfits and family-owned enterprises in particular – are unlikely to heed calls for course correction too soon.

There is a likelihood that the politics of patronage will continue behind the cloak of democracy for years to come. It will not stop unless the masses force political parties to adopt internal democracy (not the cosmetic kind) and end perpetuation of rule by one individual, family and caste configuration.

It will continue unless political parties allow their ordinary cadres to occupy the highest positions, which happen to an extent only in the space occupied by the so-called extreme right and the left.

But sycophancy is not new to Indian polity. It has been a way of life for close to half a century. The rot set in immediately after Indira Gandhi split the Congress of yore and named her faction Congress (Indira).

“India is Indira; Indira is India’ became the slogan for votaries of the new Congress. The 1971 India-Pakistan war and subsequent liberation of Bangladesh won Indira the epithet ‘Durga, the invincible’.

For years afterwards, her party went to the electorate chanting, “Jaat par naa paat par, Indiraji ki baat par, mohar lagegi haath par(our vote will not be guided by caste or creed, but will go to Indiraji on the hand symbol).” During emergency (25 June 1975 to 21 March 1977), she was hailed as the ‘only man’ in her cabinet.

In early 1970s, the emergence of Sanjay Gandhi as the number two in the Congress and Indira Gandhi’s government further reinforced fawning in Indian politics as leaders like Bansi Lal, Vidya Charan Shukla, Ambika Soni and Sanjay’s Doon School buddies crawled before him to do his bidding.

Such was the grip of Sanjay Gandhi on the party and his mother that a car mechanic like Arjun Das rose to be the ‘third son’ of Indira Gandhi and called the shots in the corridors of power. Sanjay Gandhi doled out national resources to his cronies and brother Rajiv Gandhi’s family (Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka became office-bearers in Maruti Technical Services Private Limited and shareholders in Maruti, a company floated by Sanjay Gandhi which did not produce a single car for many years).

Doon School dropout Sanjay Gandhi became the visionary for legions of Congress (I) fans. His sterilisation drive, demolition of slums, and manufacturing plans of a people’s car (with zero result) were hailed as the hallmark of a genius not just within the Congress but in the academia and the press which crawled when they were asked to bend.

This is how Piare Lal, a writer, described the younger son of Indira Gandhi in his book World’s Wisest Wizard: A Psychography of Sanjay Gandhi’s Cosmic Mind:

Sanjay is a man with broad shoulders. His waist is like that of a lion. What a broad chest! About 36’ when empty. When full it takes a very good expansion – say -three to four inches. His lips are naturally red. Roses are blooming on his round and smiling face. Sometimes he uses spectacles also. They enhance the beauty of his facial features. Sanjay’s smiles are extremely sweet and they go on for miles and miles. They make everyone happy all the while. His eyes look like the shining pearls of lotus. His ears look like pearls shells.

It would not be an overstatement to say that emergency embedded obsequiousness and dynasty in Indian polity. So much so that even Lalu Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan and Mulayam Singh Yadav, who grew out of anti-emergency protests, have resorted to furthering these vices in their family concerns.

We have read about bureaucrats holding spittoons for Lalu. Even Mayawati and Kanshi Ram, who espoused the cause of downtrodden in the initial years of the BSP, later cheered self-promotion and propaganda for image-building. What else does the installation of Mayawati’s statues in parks across Uttar Pradesh signify?

Kanshi Ram never disapproved of his secretary Ambeth Ranjan’s Sant Charit Varnan which eulogised him as a saint free of all worldly desires and vices. Neither he nor Mayawati ever frowned when Hindi poet Nagarjun wrote sometime in 1998:

“Dalit god Kanshiram

Gives mighty speeches

That leave all speechless

And set the Dalits’ drums beating.

Hail the Dalit god!  

Terrified in the Centre of you

Mayawati, your disciple

Is declaring war

On sage Vishwanath

Lord, the Centre is apprehensive.

Hail, the Dalit god!

The message from Sangeeta Chowdhury and V Narayanasamy episodes is loud and clear. Sycophancy is okay but not the trolls which follow their publicity. There will be no course correction on the part of Mayawati, Lalu Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, J Jayalalitha, Rahul Gandhi and others.

Prostrate before them but ensure that your action remains in private domain and does not go viral on media.