Death of Humour and Rise of Sycophancy in India

Front pages of Newspapers in Delhi on Modi's birthday

Yesterday the newspapers in Delhi (and many other places too) carried full page photo of Narendra Modi to celebrate his 75^th birthday. It was sycophancy at its zenith in the history of India’s print media. At no other point in the country’s history had the newspaper industry stooped so low.

The first Prime Minister of the country was a man who encouraged the media to be critical of him. Nehru appreciated cartoons that caricatured him mercilessly. Criticism, particularly in the press, helped Nehru keep his ego under check.

Shankar’s Weekly was the best cartoon magazine of those times. Launched in 1948 by K Shankar Pillai, the weekly featured political cartoons, satire and humorous articles. It criticised politicians mercilessly by caricaturing or satirising them. Nehru was a prime target. And the PM wasn’t upset. On the contrary, he appreciated Shankar Pillai’s efforts to make the nation, particularly its political leaders, think outside their traditional boxes, using humour. “Don’t spare me, Shankar,” Nehru said at the magazine’s inauguration. Shankar’s kind of humour without malice could help the politicians to keep their pompousness and self-centredness under check, Nehru opined.

Shankar shut down the publication in 1975 when Indira Gandhi became pompous and self-centred beyond the remedy that satire and humour could provide. Ironically, Mrs Gandhi wrote a letter of appreciation to Shankar on the occasion of his magazine’s death.  

In the editorial of the last issue, published two months into Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, Shankar wrote that “dictatorship can never endure humour. The people may laugh at the dictator; but that’s not permitted. Throughout Hitler’s reign, Germany did not produce a good cartoon or comedy.”

In India now, cartoons have become selective. Instead of diminutive cartoons, pompous images of the Prime Minister fill the front pages of prominent newspapers and magazines, with a festoon of high accolades. Weekly magazines like Open have dedicated almost a whole issue to sing the glories of Narendra Modi. S Prasannarajan of Open hailed Modi as “The Most Shared Invocation in a Democracy.” Modi is the Redeemer, if not the God, of democracy, according to that journalist. 

Swapan Dasgupta of the same periodical has acclaimed Modi as the Messiah of the Hindus. “What Modi has sought to achieve is to give Hindus a conscious sense of empowerment,” Dasgupta writes. “The sense of being taken for granted, compared to the special privileges given to the religious minorities in the Constitution, has been addressed quite spectacularly.” We should at least appreciate this journalist for the candidness of his parochialism.

The very title of P R Ramesh’s article in Open is: The Redeemer. There are others too, like Suhel Seth, singing hosanna to Modi in the same issue of the magazine. By the time you arrive halfway through Open, you are convinced that Narendra Modi is the name of the last incarnation of Vishnu hitherto. Modi is born with a divine mission: to exterminate all evil from the country, if not the world.

Julius Caesar was accused of ambition for much lesser reasons. And punished gravely.

A friend of mine commented in response to my yesterday’s post on Modi – Modi @ 75 – that natural justice will definitely catch up with everyone, even those who claim to be divine incarnations. I too have faith in that sort of justice.

Let me end this with a cartoon from Shankar’s Weekly, which was shut down half a century ago by a Prime Minister who was much less pompous and self-centred. This cartoon shows Nehru prescribing a medicine (remedy) of his choice to the nation. A boy who tries to say that the medicine is bitter is being hushed by an elder.