In the days when politics was less furious and more humane, kings had two special sources of guidance: the court fool and the court prophet. The fool served as a genial reminder to the king of the vanity of power-wielding. The court prophet keep the king mindful of his accountability to an authority higher than himself. Globally, the fool and the prophet became gradually anachronistic in the aftermath of democracy. The last serious fool and genuine prophet we had in politics were Raj Narayan (died on 31 December, 1986) and Jayaprakash Narayan (died in October 1979) respectively.

I feel for Narendra Modi for three reasons. First, he is admirable in several ways. Second, he is my Prime Minister. Third, he takes his role, alas, too seriously. He flies, by instinct, in the face of Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean. If Aristotle is right, a serious and zealous man stands in danger of becoming a fanatic. A fanatic is one who forgets that he too is a human being; all roles and titles being ad hoc plumages. The gau rakshaks, for example, are dead serious; like the moral vigilantes in the American Bible belt, who lynched those they thought were moral offenders. Read Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. The one thing you cannot doubt is his earnestness. He believed he was creating a new humanity. “Those who think,” he said, “that National Socialism is only a political movement, know nothing about it. It is even more than a religion. Its goal is a new creation of man.” In comparison, Modi’s project of ushering in a new India is less earth-shattering.

Political messiahs failed catastrophically all through history for not counting the cost that their pursuits inflicted on fellow human beings. Yes, Alexander conquered and baffled the known world. But at what cost? Peter the Great and Napoleon too did. Hitler nearly. Again, at what costs? The thing to note is that all of them ended up as victims of their own projects. They came to grief not because their goals were not great, but that they flew in the face, as Victor Hugo says in Les Miserable, of the logic of history. They deigned to be more than human.

Modi appears to harbour a similar awareness. In his election speeches he sounded poignant that he did not have a single day of rest in five years. He worked eighteen hours a day. These are indisputable facts. But what is overlooked is that this metaphoric self-immolation is no proof that his project has any historical ultimacy. If the logic of history holds, not even Modi can know the shape of the new India he is out to craft. Life is not even a jig saw puzzle. Or, if it is, it is one without a form into which the pieces are to fit. As Hegel argues, while it is given to individuals to initiate actions and revolutions, it is given to none to steer their projects to intended destinations. Man may want to play God; but he will not be God. He knows it; and it makes him desperate. We see this desperation reflected in the eagerness to eradicate from Modi’s India all effective opposition. Surely, this is not a democratic sentiment. It is, at best, a psychological need, stemming from the insecurity that stalks the faltering steps of those who play God in history. The only way to keep history under leash is by eliminating alternatives and competitors. This is nothing new. We don’t have to go to Stalin’s Russia for examples. At home, Mrs. Indira Gandhi enunciated the TINA factor in politics. Modi’s is only a more aggressive variant of it.

All of us are familiar with its local editions. A professor takes his profession so seriously that he and his professional role become one. His earnestness shuts him out from the larger world of fellow humanity and renders him stiff, stolid and ill-at-ease with the world of normal life. Rudolf Eichmann said he would leap laughing into his grave at the thought that he exterminated millions of Jews. He was no monster, as Hannah Arendt testifies in Eichmann in Jerusalem. The death of his conscience coincided with the complete fusion of his conscience with his political mission; something that Modi unwittingly echoes in saying that he is a BJP worker first, and Prime Minister second. It baffles logic that the oath of allegiance to the Constitution can be taken with this order of loyalties and Modi’s stated allergy to secularism.

Hence it is that the court fool and the court prophet are desperately needed. Laughter is a way of relating to reality which, but for the anaesthetic of laughter, is too unpleasant to face. Prophecy is a way of speaking truth to power. Truth, said Michel Foucault, is a function of alterity. Only ‘outsiders’ to the establishment are free to speak the truth. The margadarshak mandal –comprising Advani& Co.- was expected to perform a similar role. Their plight proves that truth cannot be institutionalized even on the margins. Consequently, we heard no truth-speaking from the mandal. Truth can only be imported into the establishment from the outside. That was the stellar role of the media. God save democracy, when the Fourth Estate the institution of secular prophets, if you like settles down in covetous coziness as obsequious courtiers to the establishment. Humour and prophecy are conspicuously absent in the political domain today. Modi’s new India will be poorer for it. One of the saddest lines in world literature is King Lear’s lament, “And my poor fool is hanged.”

The curse of absolute power is that it breeds blindness to truth subsumed in lived realities. But truth will prevail, no matter who struts on the stage of history, monarchies and kills with looks, as Shakespeare’s Richard II puts it. The legacy that one may leave to posterity, if at all Modi is mindful of it, has to be in harmony with the logic of history. And that logic wills that no man shall be a master of history. All are, in the end, playthings in the hands of what Hegel called the cunning of reason that guides history. Those who presume to be creators of history discover too late in the day that-

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” -Oman Khayyam.