My first interaction with Rajya Sabha Chairman and Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar was both pleasant and surprising. He was then the Governor of West Bengal. I was to speak in Kolkata at the renowned institution, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, run by the creative and ever-energetic Jayashree Mohta. The lecture was on my latest book, ‘Adi Shankaracharya: Hinduism’s Greatest Thinker’. A day before the event, Jayashree called me excitedly to say that Governor Dhankhar had confirmed his presence at the talk, but because of other commitments, would stay only for a few minutes.
My talk was online, on a big screen put at the Birla Academy. Dhankhar, Jayashree told me later, did not leave early, as he had said, but stayed on for the entire lecture, which went on for over an hour. She was surprised and I was glad, and I regretted the opportunity to thank him personally.
Sometime after this, when he had become the vice president (VP), there was a function at his residence where he was launching a new book by Dr Karan Singh on Hinduism, to which I was invited. This was the first time I was physically meeting Dhankhar Saheb. But I was taken aback by his warmth. He referred to me and my books more than once while speaking at the launch, and at the tea that followed, he not only talked with me at great length but also asked his official photographer to take a picture of us together, and directed his staff to arrange a separate meeting with me later.
I mention the above incidents to show that the vice president is a pleasant and unassuming person, with a lively interest in subjects beyond the usual ken of politicians, a keen sense of humour and a ready and hearty laugh. I was surprised, therefore, that he took such umbrage at TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee’s caricature of him, and dubbed it as an insult to his high constitutional office.
Banerjee’s mimicry of Dhankhar was done not on the floor of the House—where it would have been objectionable and contempt of the Chair—but outside, where MPs suspended from both Houses of Parliament had gathered in protest. At one level, the attempt by both the Speaker and the VP (as chair of the Rajya Sabha), to end the cacophonous vandalism that has become routine in our Parliament, is justified. But at another, it is a well-established tradition that the responsibility to run the House lies primarily with the Treasury benches.
The mass expulsion of such a large number of MPs for their insistence that Home Minister Amit Shah make a statement on the very serious breach of security in Parliament on December 13—with potentially lethal consequences—was not unreasonable. In fact, presiding officers of both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha should have themselves endorsed this request. The anger of Opposition MPs thus had a context.
In any democracy, satire on politicians is par for the course. In our own country, eminent cartoonists like K Shankar Pillai (1902-1989), routinely lampooned political leaders, including, most prominently, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In fact, the popular publication, Shankar’s Weekly, had 400 cartoons on Nehru, none of which could remotely be called complimentary.
This tradition—and freedom—to satirise politicians, was continued in the iconic cartoons of R.K. Laxman, Unny and Abu Abraham. In fact, Abu became famous for his audacious cartoon during the Emergency—which somehow escaped the draconian censorship laws then—where he showed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, signing an Ordinance, without even reading it while luxuriating in a tub at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Fakhruddin was holding a constitutional post but was not spared for having become a rubber-stamp President, who just did the bidding of PM Indira Gandhi.
In other genuine democracies, particularly the UK and the US, no high political office is insulated from the excoriating lampooning by writers, cartoonists and stand-up comics. In India, the advent of stand-up comics started as a professional and highly popular genre around 2010, with pioneers like Vir Das and spread like wildfire. In a way, the Indian stand-up comics were only following a well-established theatrical tradition, where, for instance, in the 14th century Jaydesvara Bhattacharya’s explosive play, Hasyarnava Prahasanam, fearlessly mocked the king and his inept courtiers. More recently, we have classics like Srilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (1968), and O.P. Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri, which were fearless and scathing satires on the politically powerful.
I am perturbed, therefore, that our politicians have become so thin-skinned about jokes cracked at their expense. PM Narendra Modi himself, on the floor of the House, mimicked Rahul Gandhi, and while Rahul himself and the Congress may have found it distasteful, no one else took it as an assault on the democratic Opposition of the country and considered it a harmless—even funny—episode.
Why then is the BJP as a whole so upset about Kalyan Banerjee’s caricature of Dhankhar? Even more surprisingly, having known to some extent the Vice President himself, I am a little taken aback by his outraged reaction. To all our politicians—on either side of the political spectrum—I would recommend what Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the most well-known poet and satirist of the Enlightenment Era, said about satire. He said that it is a ‘holy weapon left for Truth’s defence, terror of Folly, Vice and Insolence’.
Democracy, and the freedom to poke fun at public figures, however high they may be, are not antithetical. My request to Hon’ble Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar is to take such incidents in his stride, and not as an insult to the high constitutional post he occupies.
The author is a former diplomat, an author and a politician. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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