• Valson Thampu

Rahul Gandhi undertook Bharat Jodo Yatra to open outlets of truth (mohabat ki dookan) nation-wide. It is more precise and relevant to consider this as an initiative to effect a shift from politics of theatre to politics of truth. All the more so, given that today the soul of India is being polluted with post-truth politics. The Mahatma would have denounced this as perverse evil. Untruth is the highway to the cult of oppression and the annihilation of freedom.
There is something of rare beauty in the Rahul-Priyanka relationship. They complement each other. And Priyanka is the ever-faithful sister, who knows, if none else does, the worth of her brother. If the Sangh camp had the courtesy to listen to women -at least to this one woman, Priyanka, who knew Rahul best- they would not have blundered by Pappu-fying Rahul. They damned him before they knew him. The simple English word for it is prejudice. And prejudicial ascriptions perforce boomerang; for they short-change the truth. We may not believe it, but we do say: Truth alone triumphs. One of its implications is that truth, if degraded and outlawed, will return to plague its tormentors. This is not mere moralistic naivete, but the logic of history.
The practical opposite of truth is not falsehood but theatre. Because there is an irreducible core of godliness in every human being, outright falsehood won’t work in public life. That is as true in politics as it is in religion. The way out of this irksome reality is to substitute truth with something that can pass for it. We know that handy ‘something’ in two major manifestations. In secular life it is theatre. In religious life it is hypocrisy. By its word meaning, a hypocrite is an actor. And actor is one who passes for who he is not. As Jesus would have said, they praise me with their lips, but their heart is not in it. It is make-believe piety. In the political context, there is far less need to be hypocritical. Unlike in religion, there are no objective criteria or dogmas in politics; especially when politics is assumed to be the art of the possible, or a sphere of expediency.
Propaganda is the gospel of politics-as-theatre. Propaganda erects a fortress against truth by manufacturing expedient ‘truths’. The diabolic truths thus manufactured and foisted on the people are such that they have to be protected from factual examination by the people as well as rational interrogation by the thinking elite. So, freethinkers are labelled urban Naxals in politics-as-theatre. The compulsion to do so is obvious: evidence-based thinking in the face of an avalanche of untruth disrupts the theatre of mendacious politics. In theatre -of politics and religion like- it is appearance, not truth, that rules the roost. Appearance is, alas, a brittle thing. Banking on it is like building a mansion on thin ice. It can only afford an abode of insecurity. Viewed through the hollow eye-sockets of insecurity, the world around seems teeming with enemies.
Contrast this with the power of truth, of which Gandhiji is our national exemplar. Where the proponents of politics-as-theatre see enemies and infiltrators, Gandhi saw Advaitic oneness. The irony today is that the more Hindu a politician passes for, the more dualistic he tends to be! Dualism is the womb of enmity. If you and I are ‘that’, or the Ultimate Reality, where is the scope for enmity? Jesus taught that enemies must be loved because he knew that enmity is a lie. No one who cares for truth can see fellow human beings as enemies.
Violence punctuates politics today. Violence has its appeal; and it is unhistorical to deny it.
Being a student of the Bible, I imagine India through the image of the Promised Land: a land flowing with milk and honey. ‘Milk’ and ‘honey’ symbolize nourishment and sweetness, respectively. Human beings cannot live by milk alone. What milk is to their body, honey, or sweetness, is to our humanity. Those who have been denied the honey of life know, alas, no other mode of self-expression than that of aggression. They revel in untruth, though inwardly gnawed by the sour-grace psychology of truth’s inaccessibility. To see this in perspective, the paradox of truth must be reckoned. While truth appeals to one and all, it is not given to everyone to practise it, which calls for a high order of development in one’s humanity. You can’t read Gandhiji’s autobiography -The Story of My Experiments With Truth- without realizing this all the way through.
Only the humanly evolved can do the sort of politics that safeguards and enriches our humanity. We must expect sub-human politics from poor specimens of humanity. The blunder we commit today is that of expecting figs from thorns. Macho politics is the contemporary euphemism for the thorns that we are made to believe will yield succulent figs. It tries to dull our present-day pains by proffering gains in the distant future. The present becomes the awaited future, but the palliative never arrives.
It is against this backdrop that the political culture the Priyanka-Rahul combine embodies becomes a symbolic alternative to the power-rippling macho politics of the Parivar. It is a combination of love and truth. Love and truth are inseparable. Truth guards life against infections of falsehood. Love nourishes the substance of life. Only then will the Promised Land of life flow with milk and honey.
So, the entry of Priyanka into electoral politics completes the political hybrid that is urgently needed at the present time. And from where else should this new beginning kick off, except from Kerala? Seen symbolically, though, Priyanka’s electoral debut is not a Kerala event alone, but a national one. And the voters of Wayanad have good reasons to be proud of being the political laboratory for politics-as-truth-and-love. We have had a spell of India as a theatre of Modi’s macho magic. Maybe, the time’s come for India to try her hand at becoming a land flowing with milk and honey. Who knows?