Whose honour is it anyway?

Whose honour is it anyway?

Books by politicians with a race yet to run tend to work as astute image builders. The most successful example of this season is by Nicholas Sarkozy, the French Interior Minister and front contender for President in the general elections of 2007. His recent book Témoignage (Testimony), has become this French summer’s hottest book since its publication on July 17th. Because Sarkozy is only just firing first volleys towards capturing The Élysée Palace, he ensures that he’s a good read. He piles on sucker punch criticism of his political rivals and heaps scorn on French socialism. He calls his countrymen, the very same who are lapping up his book: “racine” (rabble). He says that France needs a market economy makeover and the French need to speak English, the language of global commerce. Sarkozy, who is half Hungarian, and just over fifty, also admits to enough infidelity to be called the French JFK. His wife has been playing too but they recently reconciled over coffee and their new concordat was televised and broadcast nationally. Now isn’t that so right for the age of GPRS to tell you where you are and the internet to tell you where you’re going?

In India, at the bullock cart pace of another time, we’ve had the iconic “Discovery of India” written so elegantly in a freedom fighting prison cell (1942-46, Ahmadnagar Fort), that it helped to make its author India’s first prime minister. A thinking man’s prime minister at that, a pandit in the old fashioned sense, a man of letters. So much so, his successors still occupy centre-stage in our political firmament, without, as it were, having had to write another line over these six decades or more. Unless you count captions to photographs as revealing in any way. And while television sound bytes do have their uses but a book truly has those hundreds of pages in which to dress yourself up properly and get the lighting just right.

But when the political memoir is designed as epitaph it ends up largely talking to itself. It waxes and wanes and mumbles and stumbles but all the while the muttering preoccupation with legacy issues and the historical record grows louder. These ruminations, even as they tantalise with promises of the “inside story” end up vainglorious and hamstrung. Blame the rigours of official secrets acts and the coy desire to seem alluring if you like. But the authors convince themselves that even their vanilla versions will help promote their “great man” image. But, in practice, the naked truth proves different. Without the aroma of present or future power, the ruthless momentum of time and tide erode the very banks of historical relevance. Nobody, as Mr. Rhett might have put it, actually gives a damn.

If it’s any consolation, please realise that history enjoys being cruel to friend and foe alike. It has a way of stripping down pretensions, skewering hagiography and exposing every legacy to the test of time and watching most of them crumble. It is the power and glory equivalent of being sent to New Delhi’s Coronation Park. There, enclosed by today’s Model Town colony, dozens of Raj era statues in regalia and robes, face about every which way, quite deserted. They have nothing to do but stare through elephant grass from behind locked and rusting gates.

But do we, as the audience at a safe distance from such daring aspiration, always read it right? How often have we written off a political albatross only to see it resurrect as yet another Phoenix. Defeat and irrelevance in this game is a relative business. While there is life there is possibility. If you were a politician this would be your credo. And while there is possibility there is need to impinge on the public eye.

Sarkozy apart, are we not approaching our own general elections in 2008? And don’t our talking heads speak oracular thoughts about anti-incumbency? And in the heaving scrum of parties and peoples who might bob to the top after all? Right. The pollsters need to get to work with their pie charts. The political analysts need to air their elliptical views. The astrologers mean to divine, of course. We need to see for ourselves what we can. It is early days yet perhaps, but the far-sighted can see, beyond red herrings or moles or even chinkaras for that matter. After all, the big thing about building your image is not appear to be doing so.

(750 words)

Saturday, 5th August 2006
By Gautam Mukherjee
CEO, Indus Overseas
Also published in The Pioneer on Sunday 6th August 2006

This and all original essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2006 by Gautam Mukherjee. All Rights Reserved.