A Modi come Jaitley

Why the city slicker swears by medieval machismo SAGARIKA GHOSE THE INDIAN EXPRESS Monday, December 02, 2002

THE telegenic Arun Jaitley is the BJP’s modern symbol. On the face of it, he seems extremely modern. He is often in a suit and tie. He always looks freshly bathed. He speaks English. He’s a Supreme Court lawyer. And his clear voice is reasonable, market-friendly, TV-friendly, future-friendly, and comfortingly globalised. Yet the best buddy of wonderful Arun Jaitley is none other than the horrible Narendra Modi. How confusing! Now what on earth can Amiable Arun have in common with Nasty Narendra?

Modi spews vicious rhetoric. He is determined to yank India back to a war zone where we must all rush towards the ghost of Mahmud of Ghazni with trishuls held aloft. Modi’s peddling medieval machismo. He has no truck with the future. What would Modi do in Davos? What would Modi do in a university campus? Modi is bad history and Jaitley is (supposedly) the bright future. Yet Jaitley flies to Ahmedabad almost every alternate day. Nice Arun Jaitley, Reasonable Jaitley, is Sancho Panza to Modi’s Don Quixote.

Why is Jaitley enslaved to Modi? The answer goes to the heart of the BJP’s dilemma. The BJP faces a crisis of modernity. It has no idea how to pull off the balance between being ‘Hindu’ and being ‘modern’. It doesn’t know how to make possible the emergence of the ‘modern Hindu’ or indeed the ‘modern’ Indian. The BJP — obsessed with blind nationalism and anti-national elements — is opposed to the very thing that millions of youth, women and Dalits are craving: modernity. Modern human rights, modern debate and a modern education. Instead of creating modernity, even supposedly forward looking politicians like Jaitley are waltzing with anti-modernists like Modi.

Take the example of Arun Shourie. Outward looking, disinvesting, foreign educated Arun Shourie. Yet why is it that Shourie, who is ‘modern’ in his economic plans, becomes primitive in his political beliefs? Why does he advocate some cuckoo cultural philosophy when he is trying so valiantly to make the economy more modern and rational? Shourie’s economic plans stand in sharp contrast to his rather patriarchal and conservative social agenda.

Take the computer savvy Hyatt hotel patronising Pramod Mahajan. He too has not understood the true meaning of modernity. Modernity, after all, lies not just in technology and sharp suits. Surely modernity also lies in creating a progressive society. Surely modernity lies in creating a diverse society where women, Muslims, Dalits and youth are given equal opportunities and all our talents are not buried in a plethora of empty high Hindu rituals and foolish prejudices. But because even the best politicians like Jaitley are so paranoid, prejudices have become newly fashionable.

Jaitley was always a brilliant lawyer. He is exceptionally well informed. Jaitley will not denounce Modi for his retrogressive rhetoric. Jaitley will not use his education to argue for a progressive society. Instead, Jaitley will add his own voice to Modi’s rhetoric because he is so convinced of his own irrelevance and the irrelevance of modernity. Alas! Modernity is becoming irrelevant at the time when we most need it. All over the world, after the French revolution, those who called themselves bourgeoisie spoke up for universal rights. In our own history, upper caste reformers of the 19th century campaigned for widow remarriage, to ban sati and rescue Hinduism from obscurantism.

• Where is the spirit of social reform in today’s educated leaders, particularly those like Jaitley who are uniquely placed to lead the younger generation?
• Why are they instead proliferating a social conservatism by which Hindu ‘virtue’ is to be measured by yardsticks like glittering rituals, the thickness of sindoor and a bewildering denunciation of Muslims?
• Why will politicians like Jaitley not rise in Parliament and instead of banging on about the foreign threat to the Hindu rashtra make a speech on how young politicians like him are committed to an egalitarian society?

Jaitley will not make such a speech because his alter ego is Modi. Jaitley is economically progressive but socially conservative. Jaitley’s alliance with Narendra Modi is indicative of a cultural revolution let loose by the present ruling dispensation. This is a revolution by which the affluent and the educated have become anti-modern. A revolution by which it is fashionable to have a mind as narrow as your trousers.

• Ekta Kapoor wears tiger skin miniskirts but produces soap operas venerating women as Hindu doormats.
• Matrimonial advertisements for scholarly IIT graduates demand brides from specific castes.
• Mumbai, citadel of new India, has been a prisoner of the Shiv Sena for well over three decades.
• College graduates model high fashion clothes but prefer to have their marriages arranged by their parents.
• An Infosys employee in the US, supposedly on the cutting edge of economic modernity had to go under a cloud of sexual harassment.

In sharp contrast to Raja Rammohan Roy who used his education and his social privileges to reform society, Arun Jaitley is using his education to make Modi fashionable.