Hollow Leaders

A century ago, T S Eliot wrote about the hollowness of his countrymen in a poem titled The Hollow Men. The World War I had led to a lot of disillusionment with the collapse of powerful empires and the savagery of the war itself which unleashed barbaric slaughter. The generation that survived was known as the “Lost Generation.”

Before the war, Western civilisation was sustained by certain values and principles given by religion, the Enlightenment, and Victorian morality. The war showed that science and technology, which could improve life, had actually produced machine guns, gas warfare, and mass death. Religion became hollow. People became hollow.

“We are the hollow men,” Eliot’s poem began. The civilisation looked sophisticated from outside, but it was empty inside.

There is a lot of religion today in the world. My country has allegedly become so religious that it decides what you will eat, wear, which god you will pray to, and even the language for communication. The ultimate irony is when the difference between the right and the left vanishes.

Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerala, has all along been a Marxist who did not believe in gods. A few years ago, his partymen and his police together took two women to Sabarimala just to subvert the tradition of that temple which does not let women in the menstruating age visit the deity Ayyappan who is a confirmed bachelor. Vijayan was supposedly leading a Reformation Movement in Kerala.

This same Vijayan recently organised a Global Ayyappa Sangamam [Meet] to promote spirituality. The reason: religion has become the only effective tool in today’s India for garnering votes. The Prime Minister has been doing that successfully in the last eleven years. But the PM is a hardcore right-winger. Vijayan is supposed to be a hardcore leftist who braved bullets while leading rebellions against unjust sociopolitical systems including religions.  

One of the many miracles that PM Modi has worked is this disappearance of ideological distinctions. The Left can be Right too. More than 250 Congress MLAs and MPs left their party to join Modi’s BJP. And they were paid handsomely too. Congressmen, Communists, and the Nationalists of the BJP are now like the creatures in the climax of George Orwell’s classic fable, The Animal Farm. The capitalists and the socialists look alike, think alike, and speak alike in Orwell’s fable. In today’s India, the right and the left and the centrists are all alike: hollow men with no values or principles.

Vijayan has reasons to betray the values he upheld staunchly for decades.

In the notorious SNC-Lavalin case of 1995, Vijayan is still waiting to be acquitted. The renovation works of three hydroelectric projects in Kerala were given to Lavalin, a Canadian company, though India’s own BHEL quoted much lower rates. The ostensible reason was that Lavalin would donate INR 93.8 crore to the Malabar Cancer Centre. But the hospital received only INR 8.98 crore. Where did the rest of the money go?

The case went on for many years until it was pushed to the Supreme Court where it is languishing for years, which cannot happen without the support of the top men in Delhi. The hearing was postponed more than 40 times!

Vijayan’s son Vivek Kiran was summoned by the Enforcement Directorate in Feb 2023 but the news reached the media only recently. What happened to the summons? Why did nothing happen to Vivek Kiran? The answer lies again with the top men in Delhi whom Vijayan visits occasionally.

The Customs department of Trivandrum International Airport made a great seizure of gold smuggled in using diplomatic channels. Nothing happened, however. No investigation, no arrests. Vijayan’s family members were supposedly involved in the smuggle.

Vijayan’s wife was associated recently with a INR 1.72 crore scam related to the Exalogic Consulting Company. Once again, the case performed a vanishing trick that would put Houdini to shame.  

Political observers in Kerala say that the Right BJP managed to win a seat in the last Lok Sabha election with the help of Vijayan’s Left footsloggers.

The latest collaboration between Modi’s Delhi and Vijayan’s Kerala is the PM-SHRI affair. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal said an emphatic NO to the central government scheme which is meant to indoctrinate young students with RSS ideology. Now Vijayan has buckled on that too, though the deal hasn’t gone all the way yet because of a coalition partner, the CPI.

In short, the left is right and right is left in Vijayan’s Kerala. Forget ideals and values and principles. T S Eliot returns to remind us that what began with a bang is going to end with a whimper. The spiritual, ideological bang boomed a decade back promising us some utopia. What we are left with now is corruption everywhere, even in our divine affairs as well as our leftist rebellions. 

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025