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All politicians, without exception, use propaganda and punishment as a double-edged knife to wound their opponents. So, it’s not a question of “when” or “if”, but “how” these instruments are used. I reckon Adolf Hitler, who used both levers viciously, from vengeful murders to Goebbelsian untruths, is at an extreme end of the spectrum. No wonder he met a vicious end. At the opposite end are leaders like Nelson Mandela, who were calm, subtle, and moderate in deploying propaganda/punishment. Small wonder that Mandela enjoys near-immortality.
Now politics mimics physics, with every action instigating an equal and opposite reaction.
Still not fully convinced, are you? Here are four examples from today’s politics (not some artifact of distant history): Nawaz Sharif’s repeated returns to power in Pakistan, anybody? What about Jeremy Corbyn’s miraculous lift in last year’s UK polls? Or, Mahathir’s and Anwar Ibrahim’s upset win in Malaysia? And, Lula’s astonishing bounce in Brazil?
But why peep over our borders when perhaps the most stunning resurrection of a persecuted politician happened on our soil.
But then the Janata government committed a cardinal political sin. Within two months of being in office, it pulled out Justice JC Shah, a former Chief Justice of India, from retirement to inquire into the “excesses committed during the Emergency”. Indira, along with her son Sanjay Gandhi and political aide Pranab Mukherjee, disputed the legality of the Commission and refused to take oath. Justice Shah lost his cool and reprimanded her. A bumbling government arrested Indira amidst screaming newspaper headlines. She was jailed, but the flimsy charges were dismissed in court; her “V moment” arrived as she was pronounced “not guilty”.
She rode an elephant to Belchi, an obscure village in Bihar where 11 Dalits had been shot and burnt alive. Then she took her most audacious plunge, standing for a by-election from Chikmagalur, Karnataka, coining the mesmerising “ek sherni sau langur; Chikmagalur bhai Chikmagalur” (one lioness versus hundreds of monkeys, this is the battle of Chikmagalur). She won, but the government used its brute majority to expel her from Parliament. Her popularity soared, leading to a landslide victory in the 1980 General Elections, winning 353 seats out of 542 in Lok Sabha.
Now, under Prime Minister Modi, while there has been no Shah Commission-like “mass public trial”, his government could be making the error of using excessive prime time propaganda against its principal political opponent, Rahul Gandhi, trying to make him the fall-guy for everything! Here are a few egregious examples:
I can go on and on; there are a million such examples, dozens of them every day, in which prime time TV shows don’t focus on the big news of the day, but try to invent something utterly silly to make Rahul Gandhi the fall-guy. What they ignore is that such an excessive propaganda misadventure could backfire, as it ends up giving the “halo of the political underdog” to its hapless victim.
Beware the lessons of political history.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)