What is the meaning of a Political Ideal? To different persons, it has a different meaning and there’s really no suitable answer to this vexed question if we search for it from a whole host of politicians. Therefore, let us take an individual case, a man from the North East whom many in the North East look to when trying to find an example of what it means to be a politician. And since we are talking about a politician in the North East there is no better example than the most formidable of all, – Dr. Hemanta Biswa Sarma of the BJP, and the Chief Minister of Assam.
Barely five and a half feet tall, yet Hemanta towers over every other politician in the North East. In a certain sense, the development of Assam is his foremost achievement, particularly in the field of education – he once was the Minister of Education, and he brought major improvements in the functioning of that department, and with it the development of the State, education being the most essential ingredient in the development of a State, and to be sure, he had genuinely sought after development of the education sector when he was in charge, but now things have changed.
We are seeing him as a politician in the political sense now i.e. after his taking over the reins of the State as the Chief Minister the political “sense” has changed. For that is what it appears to be – he would have never uttered what he has uttered if he was the education minister. He was too educated. He has certainly diminished over what he was if we judge the man now.
Here, if we can pause for a moment from the narrative, and draw our attention to the latest news and reports: we have a very confused Hemanta providing a reason for why the NDA did not succeed in the North East. His latest crack at the failure of the NDA to do well in the North East is anything but Hemanta the education minister, but definitely it’s anti-thesis.
A WhatsApp post doing the rounds states, “Hemanta Biswa Sarma states, that in Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur, a particular religion opposed the NDA.” This is hardly the talk of an educated individual, leave alone the talk of a former education minister – and never before the words of a Chief Minister. We are reminded at once of the happiest, finest, strongest, most courageous period of Hemanta’s life; the period when mainland politicians saw him fit to lead the State of Assam and hopefully pull the entire North East with him in the process; the period during which he did look like a regional leader instead of just the leader of a State and a half. What has taken over him now?
In stating what he did on WhatsApp, Hemanta has made it abundantly clear to one and all, guardedly and openly, depending on one’s inclination, that the results have shown that not only in the North East has there been this outright display of keeping religion away from politics, but even in Uttar Pradesh, above all States the same sentiment expressed itself in a most belligerent manner, and Ayodhya, and India does not want that religion to be confused with politics.
It was a pan India phenomenon and Hemanta, with that intellectual perversity (if I may pardon the word) that he has acquired from being the education minister to becoming the Chief Minister, has, with tongue in cheek, probably made an outright assertion against the mixture of politics with religion. One can appreciate his audacity. Who knows what chance events came up that instead of shouldering the responsibility of being a regional leader he chose instead to confine himself to within the boundaries of Assam, because that is what this statement appears to some.
Indeed, in a sense Hemanta has made a clear statement that as a politician he is not interested in anything beyond Assam’s borders, and to think I had at one point of time, in an article I had written, projected that he was the next best leader after Modi. But that was then, now, barely a year later, and with everything that’s been going on in religion and politics, there are those that interpret Hemanta’s statement (on WhatsApp) as a guarded praise, a hidden applause, an admiration of the determination of the strong-headed citizens of the states he has referred to. And also, a praise of their dogged willpower and faith to be sure, of the citizens of these States, and this is certainly quite in order, quite tribal.
As for me, I see in his statement a sense of despair, a deepest despair that he is done and dusted with this mixture of religion in politics, and he wants nothing more than to hang his boots and redeem himself from religion. This hidden admiration, if that is what it is, that Hemanta has brought home, of the evangelical freedom that the tribal populations of the three states possess is nothing short of appreciable.
Hemanta has done well to boldly and beautifully admit this to the nation on their behalf, for there have always been and still are many slanderers of the sensibilities of the people of the North East, and perhaps Hemanta has performed no greater service to us than to have had the courage to state the obvious fact of the independence that we in the North East boldly and proudly proclaim on so few ears.
At least he has made an unequivocal statement that holds good for all those well constituted, joyful souls in the North East, who are still regarding their unstable equilibrium between atheist and believer – in truth, Hemanta has done them the greatest service, he has necessarily raised an argument in support of the choice they should make – the subtlest and most educated among them would surely have found in his statement a stimulus to reset their lives. It is precisely such ‘contradictory’ statements that seduce one to a better existence.
But why as one might reasonably ask, why did Hemanta come up with such an out of place statement and remark, who are we to him and who is he to us? Was he serious in saying what he said? Some of us may be tempted to theorise on this statement of his and desire the opposite thinking that he was stating it as a joke, as a kind of an epilogue and a satyr, or even as a desire that he inherently believes that this faith is what everyone in Assam should acquire. And if my opinion is anything to go by, I am inclined to believe that this is what he meant because he once was the education minister. Education, we all know, leads one to a greater desire to test one’s place in a rigid caste system from which there is no liberation from one generation to the next.
More than any other ordinary man, Hemanta knows that education has been the launching pad for every individual among the lower castes, and that one’s deliverance from a rigid caste system can only be accomplished through education, and that having been filled with education one no longer is bound by the gruesome earthly seriousness and misery of that system, overcoming at long last the anti-scientific ascetic grouping system of humans. This achievement of Hemanta, to draw our attention to these truths or untruths, is worthy of the great lesson he has learnt.
Hemanta who was once pitted as the leader of the North East, now sees for himself that his great efforts are strewn beneath him in tatters, and seeing it all he has learnt how to laugh at himself and his failed efforts. Because now a terrible lesson has dawned on him, that politics has that unenviable ability to convert sense into nonsense. It can negate everything one has learnt.
Is this statement of Hemanta, a secret laughter of superiority against those who were initiating the attempt to make India into a one religion State? Is it the ultimate triumph of freedom over dictatorial tendencies? One could wish that it were, because the statement made clearly admires the independence that the people of the North East cherish. For what would development be if not that men were free?
It is abundantly clear that Hemanta sees and admires this deep-rooted faith in the freedom of choice that the people of the North East possess which their brethren in the rest of the country lack. A politician always tries to confuse what is said and what is meant just as an artist conceives and represents himself while creating confusion in the mind of his viewers. What then is the “political ideal” of Hemanta? In the case of the statement he made on WhatsApp, everything else excluded, it means something here and something else there, or so many things that it amounts to nothing whatsoever.
If we eliminate the rest of the country from what he said, and take the statement only in the opinion of the people of the North East, his statement does not stand nearly as meaningful in any sense to deserve any attention at all, but if we eliminate the people of the North East from what he said and view it from an angle of the rest of the country only, he is painting the North East as a contrast to the rest of the country which is a well-known fact already, and therefore deserving of no attention as well.
At this point I can no longer avoid giving a first provisional statement of my own hypothesis concerning the “Political Ideal” of Hemanta, based on what he has said on WhatsApp. I feel there is the veiled attempt to portray himself as the valet of some morality or religion, quite apart from the fact that as a politician, seasoned and out to make the most, he appears to be a cunning flatterer of the old guard and the newly arrived powers.
