The other day I was invited for a debate on a major national TV channel on the issue of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Ms Mayawati, installing her statues all over the state, apart from those of Jyotiba Phule, Periyar Ramaswamy, B.R. Ambedkar and Kanshi Ram.
The accusation of the majority of the panelists was that installing one’s own statues at the expense of the state was not only wrong but also unethical, immoral and illegal.
Majority of the panelists and almost all the middle class-upper caste students and others in the audience were clapping down any balanced argument. Anybody who attacked Ms Mayawati was being applauded.
Much of the audience came from Noida-Uttar Pradesh and termed the installation of the statues as politically immoral. Sadly, that there were no dalits or slum dwellers who vote for Ms Mayawati to give their opinion on the issue.
We have to debate whether the installation of statues should be seen as a legal issue or is it more a moral and political question.
Some enthusiastic lawyers have taken the issue of Ms Mayawati installing her own statues to the Supreme Court through a public interest litigation (PIL). But can the courts intervene and curb the expenditure incurred by the Centre and states in advertising their achievements and schemes with huge photographs of the Prime Minister, Chief Ministers and Cabinet ministers?
Publicising one’s own image while in power, through photographs or statues, has a common objective of influencing the masses for the sake of votes in the future, or to perpetuate one’s own image among the masses. Both forms of publicity have a common objective and involve spending public money.
We should, here, take note of the portraits of the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers put up in government offices as soon as they assume office. Undoubtedly this is also meant to perpetuate the image of the person in power.
The question is not what the Western democracies practise and how we imitate them. Someone might point out that the portrait of the American President is put up in all federal offices and the portrait of the British Prime Minister is put in major government offices. And, therefore, what we are doing is also right. This is mere imitation and we should discard such approaches and evolve our own democratic practices.
So let us look back and see who started the installation of statues across the country. In my remote village of rural Telangana, Papaiah Pet of Warangal district, there was a statue of Mahtama Gandhi. This was said to have been installed by one of the tehsildars with state money.
Gandhi was not a person in power, hence he can be compared only with other stalwarts, like Ambedkar. Did any government agency install an Ambedkar statue till dalits started putting up his statues in the 70s and 80s in their own mohallahs?
During the Congress regime, governmental agencies started installing statues of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. After the death of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, their statues were also installed across the country. They were not leaders who emerged from social service. During the regime of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), statues and portraits of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar and Swami Vivekananda were installed in various places.
Ms Mayawati has showed courage and confidence in installing her own statue along with those of Lord Buddha, Phule, Ambedkar, Periyar and Kanshi Ram.
If Indira Gandhi was the first upper caste woman leader who got power, Ms Mayawati is the first dalit leader who got power. She has her own iconic image. Of course, she is an “un-Hindu” woman icon in the tradition of Kanshi Ram. The fact is that even if she does not install her own statues, the Bahujan people will install her statues. She knows that and that’s why she is undeterred. There is a counter cultural dimension in her scheme of things. Uttar Pradesh has the most conservative Hindu cultural base, with Ayodhya, Benares and Mathura built by the Hindu kings way back in history. Kanshi Ram wanted to create counter Buddhist-Ambedkarite rationalist cultural centres that would have equal visibility.
After Bodh Gaya, Nagpur Deekshabhoomi, the Bahujan Parks that Kanshi Ram established near Lucknow, what Ms Mayawati is building in Noida and other places are going to carry forward what I prefer to call the “post-Hindu nationalist image of India”. Once these centres are built, nobody will be able to touch them.
As a politically shrewd person, Ms Mayawati knows that once she puts herself in that iconic lineage, nobody would be able to change it. Even after her political career is over, she will have her own following.
Since the Hindu base is weakening in the country, the counter cultural base will increase. This is third-generation dalit-Bahujan counter culturalist campaign. It was started by Ambedkar, taken forward by Kanshi Ram and now Ms Mayawati is expanding it further.
Ms Mayawati’s cultural parks are going to be the “un-Hindu” historical centres. They should worry the Hindu forces and the Sangh Parivar more than the Congress. But the Congress is talking more about them than the BJP or other Hindutva forces. Ms Mayawati’s image will keep growing as long as the Congress, the BJP and the Samajwadi Party keep on attacking these cultural centres.
The BJP knows that once they begin a discourse around these Buddhist-Ambedkar cultural centres, their own Hindu cultural nationalism will get undermined and the Bahujan-Buddhist cultural nationalism will occupy centrestage.
All the Hindu temples and Buddhist viharas in India, as well as many churches and mosques, were built with state money and they provide the cultural base of those religions. Then why should certain hegemonic caste-communal intellectual forces make an issue out of the dalit-Bahujan cultural centres that keep coming up with images of their own heroes in the country? The educated and politically-aware dalit-Bahujan forces know what makes them raise this bogey beyond its need. A party like the Congress would serve itself better if it stops politicising these cultural parks and takes up other issues.