12 November 2013, 04:08 PM IST
Ridicule, not criticism, damages the reputation of a politician. A gaffe-prone one attracts it as surely as night follows day. That is the dread prospect facing Narendra Modi today. In his Patna rally, he got his history and geography wrong. He mixed up the Gupta and Maurya dynasties, wrongly named the river on whose banks Alexander fought his last battle and located Taxila, an ancient seat of learning, in Bihar when in fact it is in Pakistan. These gaffes made newspaper headlines and went viral on Twitter and Youtube. That detracted attention from what he wanted the media to highlight: his diatribes against Nitish Kumar and the Congress-led government in Delhi. The Bihar chief minister's point-by-point rebuttal of Modi's factual inaccuracies generated whoops of delight among the BJP prime ministerial candidate's critics even as they turned his supporters ashen with embarrassment.
But it is Modi's latest gaffe that has sent alarm bells ringing in the party's leadership. In a speech in Kheda, he confused Shyama Prasad Mukerjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh, who had died in India in June 1953, with Shyamaji Krishna Verma, a Gandhian freedom fighter from Gujarat, who had established the India House in London and had died in Switzerland in 1930. Modi promptly apologised for the blunder – that a BJP spokesperson described, in a masterly understatement, as a 'slip-of-the tongue' - but the deed was done. None of this is a reflection of his scholarship. Few, if any, of our politicians today can lay any claim to it. But it does reflect his blind-folded trust in the information fed by his speech-writers. And that, in turn, casts a shadow over his political acumen as a whole.
However, trust Modi to not let that happen. He is far too pickled in politics, far too familiar with its hurly-burly, to allow himself to be overly concerned about the fall-out of his gaffes. He will brave this latest storm of ridicule as he has braved others: with his unstinted faith in his own prowess that neither the quibbles of his critics nor the squabbles of his party's leaders can shake, let alone shatter. As he has shown in his home state, he is his own man, determined to meet adversity through his well-oiled propaganda weapons, if possible, or with methods that would make those within his own fold who care for political correctness quake in their sandals and chappals, if necessary.
For those who follow Modi's itinerary above and beyond partisan interests, the larger question is: why does he tie himself up in knots when he steps into the mine-field of history? That is not his forte. And the controversies he generates – about Sardar Patel and Nehru and Maulana Azad – make little or no sense to Indian voters, especially young voters, who are as cheesed off by them as they are cheesed off by Rahul Gandhi's incessant references to his family members. How does the exact relationship between Nehru and Patel matter to them? Why should they be bothered about whether or not Nehru attended Patel's funeral? (He did, contrary to what Modi said.) And why drag in Chandragupta, Alexander, Taxila, Shyama Prasad Mukerjee et al in the election campaign?
Voters want those who aspire to lead the country to fry other fish: jobs, education, health and sanitation facilities, ecological concerns, venal exploitation of natural resources, security, class, gender and regional disparities and so forth. They have had enough of political rivals who merely take pot-shots at one another. That might ensure television coverage. But it does not ensure a robust debate on how our political class intends to address the grim challenges that grip our country's attention.
All the same, Modi's insouciance about the aftermath of his gaffes must not be stretched to the limits of recklessness. Someone should tell him about how much Sarah Palin's ignorance about history and geography jeopardised the Republican party's chances in the US presidential elections in 2008. And someone should whisper in his year how a gaffe by a politician in our day and age can cost him dear. Here is an example. In August this year, the leader of the Opposition in Australia, Tony Abbot, criticised prime minister Kevin Rudd with the following sentence: "No one, however smart, however well-educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom." He in fact meant 'repository.' The linguistic faux pas cost Abbot dear.
Repeated over and over again, historical faux pas, much like false and misleading facts, spell danger to India's most energetic, charismatic, outspoken and controversial public figure. No suppository can purge it from his system.
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