What price our dead netas?

Jug Suraiya
04 November 2013, 02:12 PM IST

Sardar Patel is caught in an unseemly tug-of-war between the Congress and the BJP. While Patel belonged to the Congress party, BJP's PM candidate, Narendra Modi, is trying to lay claim to the Sardar's brand equity as part of the BJP's electoral campaign.

Modi has publicly pronounced that if Patel, instead of Nehru, had been made the first prime minister of India, the country's history would have been very different. This was an obvious reference to Nehru's alleged 'softness' on the Kashmir issue and his left-wing, Russia-inspired ideology which made him follow socialist policies which some claim adversely affected India's economic growth. In contrast, Patel is projected as a strong leader, with a right-of-centre economic views in keeping with Modi's own business-friendly 'Gujarat model' of development.

Modi wants to don Sardar Patel's 'Iron Man' mantle. In order to do so, the Gujarat CM has tried to show that, thanks to its Nehru-Gandhi dynastic fixation, the Congress has sidelined other party leaders such as Patel.

To prove his point, Modi said that, until this year, the Congress-led UPA government had ignored Sardar Patel's birth anniversary, and had not taken out newspaper advertisements to mark the occasion. In this – as in several other statements he has made on development figures and on historical events – Modi got his facts wrong. Congress spokespeople were quick to point out that the government's publicity arm had, in fact, over the years spent Rs 8.5 crore on advertisements commemorating Patel's birth anniversary, a sum far in excess of what the BJP-led NDA government had spent under the same head when it held office.

This might have left Modi red-faced except for the fact that the Congress has spent far more on commemorating the birth anniversaries of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi than on Patel's anniversary, thereby revealing the family bias the Gujarat CM has accused the party of. Over the past four years, the government has spent Rs 21 crore on advertisements on Rajiv Gandhi's birth and death anniversaries, and Rs 14.5 crore on Indira Gandhi's anniversaries.

It is often pointed out that our netas cost the taxpayer a lot while they are alive, what with the free, and often luxurious, housing and all the other perks that they enjoy. But it seems that even after death our netas – or at least some of them – can continue to cost us almost as much as they did when they were alive.

Whose interest does it serve for the government of the day – whichever it might be – to shell out huge sums of public money – your money and my money – to bring out such commemorative ads?

The stock answer to that from political parties would be that the nation should remember, and suitably revere, the memory of our national leaders who have contributed so much to the country's history.

Certainly no one, of any political persuasion, will begrudge the contribution made to India's history by Sardar Patel, who played a pivotal role in shepherding the princely states into the national fold at the time of Independence.

The contributions made by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi are more open to question. But the argument that we need costly advertisements to remember our lost leaders is itself highly questionable.

Instead of expensive, meaningless ads which nobody looks at and which serve no purpose apart from that of sycophancy, wouldn't it be much better to spend the money on establishing a village school or a primary health centre, named if necessary after the person being commemorated?

All netas worth their patriotic salt would approve of such an idea. Sardar Patel certainly would – a point that all those trying to appropriate his legacy would do well to remember.