Qamar Waheednaqvi
SENIOR JOURNALIST
If Narendra Modi is “God’s gift” to India (as Vankaya Naidu believes), then Jayalalitha was ‘goddess of power’ for her supporters! That is the embodiment of a great deity. If in the last four and a half years we have seen the rise of a new and diverse species named ‘Bhakta’, for which Modi is a ‘great’ man, then we also witnessed Tamil Nadu’s rampant tide of emotions due to Jayalalitha’s illness and her demise. However, there is a big structural difference between worshipers of ‘Modi devotees’ and Jayalalitha!
Jayalalitha for her supporters was not just a politician, But she was their ‘Amma’ their faith, their feeder.
It can be said that what is wrong if the public is so connected with a popular leader? There is the very thin line in popularity and devotion. Any man can be popular with his work, but ‘Bhakti’ needs a ‘great man’. And popularity can be decreased but ‘devotion’ is stagnant.
That is why the problem is not with the popularity of a politician, but rather with devotion. And this ‘devotion’ is not a matter of today’s or recent years. Babasaheb Ambedkar raised the question of ‘devotion’ in politics in his speech in the Constituent Assembly in 1949. Ambedkar had said that devotion in religion may give salvation to a soul, but devotion in politics brings plight and ultimately dictatorship. Ambedkar never considered Gandhi as a ‘Mahatma’
See, what’s happening around us, all single leaders have become parties all people centralized.
If we eliminate the prominent faces of Mamta Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik, Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Chandrababu Naydu, Omar Abdullah and Arvind Kejriwal out of their party’s and then see what their parties look like? If these leaders are not there, then by what means these parties will go ahead, fight elections and be able to win. Except for these leaders, neither these parties have any other leaders, neither the issue nor the basis for the party to stand. And at least Arvind Kejriwal honestly accepts that there is no ideology of his party, which is in the public interest, the same ideology is his.
There is no shortage of leaders in BJP, but where is no BJP without Narendra Modi? He may not be ‘God’s gift’ to India, everyone can have different opinions on this, but for BJP, he indeed proved to be ‘God’s gift’. But after Modi, who is the one in BJP, who has the guts to give such a success to the party? Parties like Congress, Samajwadi Party, DMK, TRS and Akali Dal are centered on a family if not a single person. Is this not the plight of democracy?
Where is the political consideration in this? Politician became diety for the people. But poor remained the same. Taking advantages, giving votes, immersed in devotion. Nothing changed for him.