Skip to main content

Post-truth leaders of India

 

Kochi edition 9 Oct 2021

These days my mornings invariably mock me with the images of Modi and Yogi on the front pages of my newspapers. Gasconade about the progress of Uttar Pradesh under the BJP. Day after day. About women’s safety and children’s health and public hygiene and clean governance and… The Yogi government spent Rs 160.31 crore on television advertisements alone in the financial year of 2020-2021. The print media ads are extra.

Why on earth does the UP government advertise itself in Kerala and that too in local language newspapers? I understand that the same propaganda takes place in other languages too. Gasconade is a language by itself, I know.

The Modi government spends much more, naturally. National level gasconade has to be one up on local levels. In his first term as PM, Modi spent over Rs 5000 crore on gassing. I haven’t managed to get the figures for his second term yet. The graph below will help you to project the figures.


Modi and Yogi are India’s own post-truth leaders just as much as Trump was America’s. Trump promised to “make America great again” while Modi and Yogi are spending huge sums of their respective revenues on showing how they are making India/UP great. The facts may be absolutely the opposite. That doesn’t matter. Post-truth leaders as well as their followers have little to do with facts. In fact, post-truth leadership does not just disregard facts but holds facts in contempt.

Dreams run post-truth leadership. An effective post-truth leader invites people to a parallel world that has little to do with factual reality. Slogans are enough here. Hollow promises are powerful. What really sustain post-truth leadership are the emotions of the followers. Emotions seldom need truths. They create their own truths.

When Donald Trump tweeted a video with a title, ‘Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches,’ it was taken up by hundreds of thousands of fans and supporters. The video was real but the perpetrator was neither Muslim nor a migrant. Before the facts were unearthed by sensible people, the harm was done.

Trump was a post-truth leader. America threw him out eventually.

Indians, however, seems to be happy with gasconade with its dreams and promises. Of course, some good things happen too. But such good happenings don’t really matter as much as the grandiosity of the dreams and promises.

What if all the crores spent on gasconade were used for keeping petroleum prices and cooking gas prices under check? What if the money was spent on building better hospitals and schools and other such necessary establishments or infrastructure? No, in post-truth leadership gasconade plays a gigantic role.

A charismatic leader creates visions which promise a viable and better alternative reality. A post-truth leader creates emotional hallucinations with gasconade.



PS. This blog is participating in The Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa campaign.

 

 

Comments

  1. PratibhaOctober 9, 2021 at 9:55 AM

    We are heading to a massive catastrophe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 9, 2021 at 10:05 AM

      Huge nations have a way of returning to sanity. Let's hope for something better than a catastrophe though with the present leaders the hope seems a bit misplaced.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanOctober 9, 2021 at 9:30 PM

    Hari OM
    A word that could apply as much to Boris Johnson and even to Scott Morrison. The whole world seems to be under delusion at the moment. There will be a correction...eventually. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Manali DesaiOctober 10, 2021 at 6:46 AM

    'A charismatic leader creates visions which promise a viable and better alternative reality. A post-truth leader creates emotional hallucinations with gasconade.'
    Such compelling words

    ReplyDelete
  4. sadvika annamOctober 12, 2021 at 11:18 PM

    A thought proviking post.

    ReplyDelete
  5. beingFabOctober 13, 2021 at 5:23 PM

    Things we thought impossible or unbelievable earlier are actually happening today. Every day we hear of something that churns our insides - sad state of affairs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tina SequeiraOctober 15, 2021 at 9:37 PM

    I don't know whether to laugh or cry reading your post. Dunno where we are headed...#MyFriendAlexa #TinasPicks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more