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
44 comments
Read more

Coming-of-Age Poems

Lubna Shibu Book Review Title: Into the Wandering Multiverse Author: Lubna Shibu Publisher: Book Leaf , 2024 Pages: 23 Poetry serves as a profound medium for self-reflection. It offers a canvas where emotions, thoughts, and experiences are distilled into words. Writing poetry is a dive into the depths of one’s consciousness, exploring facets of the poet’s identity and feelings that are often left unspoken. Poets are introverts by nature, I think. Poetry is their way of encountering other people. I was reading Lubna Shibu’s debut anthology of poems while I had a substitution period in a section of grade eleven today at school. One student asked me if she could have a look at the book as I was moving around ensuring discipline while the students were engaged in their regular academic tasks. I gave her the book telling her that the author was a former student in this very classroom just a few years back. I watched the student reading a few poems with some amusement. Then I ask...
8 comments
Read more

How to preach nonviolence

Like most government institutions in India, the Archaeological Survey of India [ASI] has also become a gigantic joke. The national surveyors of India’s famed antiquity go around finding all sorts of Hindu relics in Muslim mosques. Like a Shiv Ling [Lord Shiva’s penis] which may in reality be a rotting piece of a Mughal fountain. One of the recent discoveries of Modi’s national surveyors is that Sambhal in UP is the birthplace of Kalki, the tenth incarnation of God Vishnu. I haven’t understood yet whether Kalki was born in Sambhal at some time in India’s great antique history or Kalki is going to be born in Sambhal at some time in the imminent future. What I know is that Kalki is the final incarnation of Vishnu that is going to put an end to the present wicked Kali Yuga led by people like Modi Inc. Kalki will begin the next era, Satya Yuga, the Era of Truth. So he is yet to be born. But a year back, in Feb to be precise, Modi laid the foundation stone of a temple dedicated to Kalk...
12 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...
15 comments
Read more

The Life of a Courtesan

  Book Review Title: The Last Courtesan: Writing my mother’s memoir Author: Manish Gaekwad Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 185 Writing the biography of one’s mother who was a courtesan is not quite a pleasant task. Manish Gaekwad undertakes that arduous task in this book and does a fairly eminent job with it. ‘Courtesan’ may not be quite the exact translation of ‘tawaif,’ which is what Rekha, Gaekwad’s mother, was. A courtesan is essentially a sex worker whose clients are wealthy men. But a tawaif is primarily an artiste, a singer of ghazals as well as a dancer. Sex is part of that job, no doubt. When a woman sings lines like Apna bana le meri jaan / Haye re main tere qurbaan [Make me yours, my love / I am your sacrifice] to a man, sex becomes a natural climax of the show. Rekha is a tawaif. She tells her own story in this book. The author writes the narrative as if his mother is telling him her life’s story. Towards the end of the narrative, Rekha asse...
4 comments
Read more