THE UN-GANDHIAN FROM RALEGAN SIDDHI

This obsessive TV brand icon is an absolute anti-thesis of all that is Gandhian. His relentlessly aggressive, crass rhetoric and body language is transparent evidence

Manoj K Jha Delhi

There have been several appalling outcomes of the orchestrated Anna movement, but not many of us have been able to perceive in its entirety the kind of impairment it has caused to the psycho-social and political health of the nation. A hyperactive media has only facilitated the movement in generating a collective sense of being under siege, wherein one is literally being coerced to feel that the rest of the world comprises cheats and crooks, and is inherently hostile.

This 'siege mentality' has engulfed a large tract of the public sphere, and this has only been helped by the incessant follies committed by the political class. This siege is being intensified with each passing day by a group of megalomaniacs who regrettably call their theatrics "Gandhian".

The central icon of this group, which loves to be referred to as "Team Anna", is Anna Hazare himself. A person clad in spotless white dhoti and kurta dawns with cut-and-dried simplicity on TV screens almost every day – an image that rolls up as a typical textbook case of how a hypnotising agent himself has got hypnotised by the very mechanism he and his associates had programmed and put in place. This first-ever political hypnosis in our times is getting further amplified by a circle of the hallucinating bunch around the icon.

Besides, Team Anna together with a section of media are profusely supplying 'mind-altering ideas' so that the spectrum of available choices remain restricted to 'for or against' Anna. One could have avoided getting dragged into this smirch and also evaded taking cognisance of this horrifying spectacle, but that is not available as an option anymore, given the near fanatical coverage by the media on a regular basis. More than anything else, one is prompted and driven to react also because this "imagined national movement" by Team Anna is being showcased as "Gandhian". Nothing could be more brazenly vulgar than this, that the manufacturers of this movement are seeking legitimacy in the name of that great crusader whose life and politics was never exclusivist.

I believe that I am only one among the millions who grew up to adore and admire Gandhi – his persona and politics – and never really cared to examine what we liked more in him. There comes a temptation in almost everyone's life at some point to emulate him, draw upon some of his principles in life, but, then, the inherent moral frailty becomes too obvious. It is probably in view of that eternal dearth of moral uprightness that not even a few have been able to come close to even the shadow image of that Mahatma.

We understand that it was Gandhi who made it possible for the ordinary masses to demonstrate courage and the strength of character so that they never had to submit to injustice and tyranny in any form anywhere. It must be recalled that while he was passionately engaged in mass awakening, his language never displayed ideas and expressions of enmity, malice or hatred. He is known to have repeatedly said that whenever you have truth on your side, it must be shared and communicated with love, otherwise the messenger as well as the message gets lost.