Dangers of demagoguery

Keki Daruwalla

Negativity about the ‘other’, ‘gair’, as we dub them, comes fairly easy, especially with individuals who are immature. Just look back at Tudor England. Till Henry VIII had the crush on Anne Boleyn, no one hated the Pope. The Pope was the living Father of the Church. Bad, immoral Popes like the Borgias, accused of incest, manged to flourish in Rome. Once the English realm turned against the Vatican, denouncing the Pope became a national pastime, and the word ‘Papist’ became the vilest of abuse. People like Thomas More, who refused to denounce the Pope and accept the King of England as the head of the Church, were beheaded. Cardinal Wolsey escaped the fate by dying of sickness earlier.

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Now we have the spectacle of the American President calling Haiti and countries from Africa ‘shitholes’. He has even questioned the 14th Amendment which gives people born in America the right to US citizenship. It speaks of a mindset smeared all over with racial overtones. By implication, slightly farfetched, he is also sneering at poverty, at the poor, the already downtrodden whom he wants to put further down. We have only to recall what he said about the Mexicans a year earlier, using words like ‘rapists’ and ‘drug smugglers’ for them. He wanted to build a wall, just as the Israelis have built one against the Palestinians, so that the Mexicans wouldn’t find it easy to cross over into the paradise that is the United States. To quote the exact words in his ‘candidacy announcement speech’ of June 16, 2015, he said, “I will build a great wall and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I will build it inexpensively. I will build a great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” In the same speech, he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He followed that up by saying “I can never apologise for the truth. I am not a racist. I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

Leaders need to be careful with words. Remember our Deputy Minister Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti dividing the Indians into legitimates and illegitimates?

The political stage worldwide has been taken over by seemingly strong men who speak directly to the public. The public also consists of waiters, car and cycle mechanics, shoeshine boys, low-paid temple pujaris and primary schoolmasters, butchers and bakers. Hireling lumpens , who provide the ballast of political protests, are also a component of that abstract aggregate we call the ‘public’.

In a democracy, a direct line to them is almost a direct line to divinity. It is proving to be a direct line to power in any case. So we see the spectacle of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Victor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, ruling the roost unchallenged in their countries. Such leaders often tread at the edge of law. Erdogan, an Islamist to the core, who blamed the “handful of Zoroastrians in the Middle East,” for the botched coup against him, was even invited to India.

The no-holds-barred war against druggists in the Philippines has taken a toll of 7,000 people — 1,400 deaths are officially acknowledged. None of these leaders can be accused of whipping up national paranoia, the way the Nazis did against the Jews. But Hitler managed to hypnotise Germans into believing how ‘evil’ and unwanted the Jews were or else how could the Eichmanns and the camp commandants at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald and other camps slaughter six million in gas chambers.

In a review article in the Times Literary Supplement, Charles King has stated, “In the new age of strongmen of politics, leaders around the world seem cut from the same pattern, regardless of the nature of the political system that produces them… They speak directly to their constituents and claim a mystical ability to discern the people’s wishes. They are the good tsars, the incorruptible princes, the embodiments of renewed national greatness…”

I have written about the Rohingya earlier. The Myanmar army has at last conceded that they had murdered 10 captured Rohingya! This is laughable. Conservative estimates claim about 7,000 were killed. The Pope went to commiserate with the Rohingya. The Indian Prime Minister went to Myanmar to discuss the security threat from the Rohingya!

(The views expressed by the writer are his own)