Shoe Shine Sycophancy

A police officer’s act of cleaning UP chief minister Mayawati’s shoes was a sad reflection of our national pastime of prostrating before those in authority
Mail Today Sunday Review, February 13, 2011
FROM mythical Ram to mischievous modern-day politicians, Indian rulers have always had a foot and footwear fetish. For every king Ram, there is a prince Bharat desperate to do ‘pada and paduka puja’ (foot and footwear worship), and to carry the lord’s footwear on the head in full public display to assert his loyalty in no uncertain terms. Not far away from Ram’s Ayodhya, N.D. Tiwari, the then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, had carried Sanjay Gandhi’s sandals during the Emergency in 1976 at a public function in Lucknow. Another satrap, Shankarrao Chavan, is also said to have done a similar deed at the Mumbai airport when he too was chief minister during those dark days. Oldtimers of Chandigarh remember a latter day president of the country picking up the shoes of the same man who wreaked terror during the ’70s. Well, the Emergency and the years leading up to it were surely abnormal with the then Congress president, Dev Kant Baruah, insisting that India and Indira were interchangeable notions. But the rot that set in then in the Indian political psyche, hitherto ennobled by the Mahatma’s sacrifice and Nehru’s idealistic modernism, is now eating into the nation’s soul. Every party has its chappal-bearers or groupies who make it only because they ingratiate themselves with the leader. Only last year, a Maharashtra minister, Ramesh Bagwe, happily carried Rahul’s sneakers as the young Gandhi climbed on to a platform to shower flowers on Ambedkar’s statue.

So a personal security officer’s act of wiping UP Chief Minister Mayawati’s shoes last Tuesday pales into insignificance on the Great Indian Sycophancy scale. After all, personal security officers or PSOs have always been valets with weapons for feudal Indian politicians. In the last Himachal Pradesh assembly elections, in fact, the Gandhi family, the fount of all footwear worship, had gifted a police officer guarding the family with a Congress ticket to contest the polls. Not long ago, a major political controversy erupted in Kerala over a list of Congress candidates getting manipulated by a caretaker at 10 Janpath. THESE gifts only reaffirm the faith of the devout in their divas, be it Sonia Gandhi or Mayawati. It is not for nothing that O. Paneerselvam keeps falling at J. Jayalalithaa’s feet. Amma picked up this tea-shop-owner-turned-first-time- MLA to be the chief minister of one of the most important states in the country when she had to choose a successor after a Supreme Court ruling forced her out of power in 2001. Her sole test was loyalty and nobody could beat Paneerselvam. He stooped and bowed and prostrated before her, and as if this was not enough he carried her picture on the breast pocket of his khadi see-through shirt — a real badge of honour indeed.

The AIADMK, founded by the matinee idol, M.G. Ramachandran, had actually introduced the phenomenon of face-down sashtanga namaskaram, or lying prostrate till the annoyed leader asks the follower to get up. Even the old rationalist M. Karunanidhi enjoys this sickeningly ingratiating act. Worse is the story of those who claim to have graduated during the ‘total revolution’ of Jayaprakash Narayan. There was absolutely nothing democratic about Lalu Yadav holding durbar at the Rail Bhawan with fawning Bihari journalists translating his Bhojpuri jokes for the rest of the crowd. Lalu had earlier plumbed great depths of patronising the obsequious by giving a Rajya Sabha seat to Brahmadeo Anand Paswan, who wrote the infamous Lalu Chaalisa, and nominating Anwar Ahmad, who used to make mouthwatering kebabs for him, to the Legislative Council. APOLITICIAN from Kochi is supposed to have made himself indispensable to former Kerala chief minister K Karunankaran’s kitchen by bringing in freshly caught thiruta, or grey mullet, an estuarine fish. Now, his detractors claim that the regular supply of the delicacy to 10 Janpath helped the politician become a Union minister. Gratifying the leader’s sensual pursuits has always been a tough task undertaken only by those with special abilities, as in the case of an Uttar Pradesh politician. A mere All India Congress Committee member to begin with, this man with an extraordinary talent to whet his master’s appetite and then to keep on adding to the leader’s amorous conquests, hopped parties and went on to become one of the most important political fixers of our times.

For sycophants normally don’t stop at mere sloganeering, they do whatever they can to make their master happy. The slain minister Pramod Mahajan’s unique ability to win over friends and foes with his “irresistible charm” may not strictly fall under the purview of sycophancy as practised by Congressmen. But many Sangh Parivar activists always held that Mahajan had an amazing knack of being the leader’s lieutenant, be it L.K. Advani during the Rath Yatra or A.B. Vajpayee when he became the prime minister. One of Vajpayee’s last controversial deeds was to elevate the Maharashtra leader to the status of Lakshman to Advani’s Ram. From Indraprastha to New Delhi, the seat of power never saw the uprooting of the older order. Even the transfer of power of 1947 saw all the old feudal ills papered over with a layer of modernism with even many of the old maharajas getting elected to the ‘People’s House’ or Lok Sabha. It is only natural that court jesters would also live on not just in cabinet rooms, but in war rooms and board rooms.