A Villain’s Narrative

When the weekly mail arrived yesterday from Blogchatter’s Suchita, my imagination was tickled. Below is the prompt for the week’s blog hop which was what caught my fancy. I wrote back to clarify whether a story was required or a narrative about the intended story. Suchita responded promptly: “You can interpret the prompt any way you like….” So I take this liberty because a villain of this sort cannot be confined to a short story.

The most frightening villains are not the ones who scream hatred from balconies. They are the ones who speak rhetorically and emotively on peace, order, unity, discipline, dharma, patriotism… They do not think they are destroying freedom; they believe freedom itself is the disease.

My epic would have a villain as the King of a big nation, the largest democracy in the world maybe. He is an apparently benign villain. A king who is intelligent and crafty. The roots of his villainy lie in his traumatic childhood which was marked by poverty and hardships. The low caste into which he was born inflicted wounds on his ego which wasn’t small. Every villain has a massive ego which also carries many a scar.

My King was blessed with Himalayan ambition which pushed him up the ladder of politics. With magnanimous assistance from his religion which masqueraded itself as nationalism.

In short, my King looks like a hero for all practical purposes. More than a rags-to-riches story, it is a sweeper-to-architect epic. He knew how to use his and the nation’s gods strategically.

King genuinely believes he is building a utopia. A Rama Rajya, if you prefer. Crime has fallen in statistics. Streets are cleaner in promos. Citizens speak in one voice. Dissent has disappeared. In King’s mind, history will remember him as the architect of harmony.

There is a tragic aside to this story: this harmony is achieved by silencing every human difference. The country is a beautifully decorated prison with uniformity everywhere. But very few citizens realise that they are in a prison. And those who realise are silent. They have been silenced.

King is great in his own narrative. His dreams are great. He dreams of perfect unity, moral purity, national glory. The materialisation of that dream requires strategies such as simplifying people into categories: loyal/disloyal; pure/corrupt; useful/dangerous… us/them.

Atrocities will be committed. Without atrocities no great ruler ever created history. “History will misunderstand me now but thank me later,” King tells his subjects whenever an atrocity is perpetrated.

King never says: “I am removing freedom.” He says: “I am protecting the country’s glorious, ancient civilisation.”

He never says: “I fear criticism.” He says: “Falsehood must not weaken national unity.”

Villainy appears as heroism in this narrative. Vices arrive draped in the vocabulary of virtues. A villain’s greatest weapon is not violence but euphemism. Say “Minimum government, maximum governance” to mean anything from privatisation to centralisation of executive authority. This narrative will elevate all human suffering to heroic sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Those who are not ready to sacrifice will be labelled ‘antinational’ or ‘urban Naxals’ or ‘tukde-tukde gang’ or whatever.

Wars become surgical operations, civilian deaths become collateral damage, surveillance becomes security, and censorship becomes responsible regulation.

Citizens love all this. Not because they are all foolish. Fear, exhaustion, insecurity, economic uncertainty, desire for belonging, longing for certainty… People are driven by such simple motives. King succeeds because he offers people something intoxicating: relief from ambiguity.

King believes silence is peace. He mistakes obedience for love and stillness for harmony. He sincerely believes that he is making a great nation. That is what makes him dangerous: not his ruthlessness alone, but his sincerity.

Since King himself is writing this narrative, he will emerge as a great hero in it. As a Messiah, in fact. He even comes to believe that he is not born biologically like other smaller entities of the species. He gives himself a divine halo.

You may think this is going to be satire. No. This is an epic. Like Divine Comedy. Oppression is salvation here. 

Illustration by ChatGPT

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