Brand Bapu: Is it time to find a new mascot?

Insults are not new to Gandhi, the father of the nation. Of late, however, the tone has become frontal, and abusive. The recent desecration of Gandhi’s statue in Champaran, of all the places, came as a rude shock. As independent India progressed in years, a generation arrived mid-way that wished to be more ‘practical’ and with less regard for ethical and moral considerations. This is the mind-set that saw functional merit even in the

Emergency, via the myth-making of trains running on time and justifying forced vasectomy as the panacea for India’s population woes and underdevelopment. This stock was always there to ridicule Gandhian aphorisms that undergird India’s socio-political moral fabric. However, this urge for the pragmatic over the ethical was still muffled and seldom found centre-stage veneration.

Amidst all the Gandhi-bashing, one wonders, and this is a question worth engaging with, whether ‘Brand Bapu’ has outlived its appeal and relevance? But first, let’s briefly recount how and why he became India’s most formidable brand.

Gandhi weaved the ethical core of the new nation through his charkha and the philosophy of non-violence. When colonialism and its expansionist bandwagon looked unstoppable under the dubious rationale of “civilising the barbarians”, Gandhi invoked Satyagraha that critiqued the gigantic macho-industrial-capital regime and its brute force. And that too by the sheer force of appeal to the conscience of the oppressor.

He dressed skimpily, like the teeming millions he wished to represent and identified with. He espoused the principle of Satyagraha not as a narrow, cunning political strategy to defeat opponents but to create a moral canopy for the oppressed and the subjugated world over.

More importantly, he articulated an epistemology of non-violence that did not need an enemy; rather, through it, he laid out the principles of a moral-ethical way of living. The Gandhian talisman was meant to be an antidote to the vile of the world that celebrated the immediacy of the pragmatic. It imagined the impossible, beyond the world divided in binaries and barriers.

Politics for Gandhi was not any vocation, but a moral act to lead an ethically correct public and personal life, leading to Sarvodaya, welfare for all. In a time and age when we are inventing and fighting imagined enemies, it is hard to think Gandhi was leading a movement against the British Raj, but not against the British People. Gandhian Satyagraha upheld the profound philosophy of humanism without getting trapped in the temporality of the idea of an enemy.

Hence this question becomes pertinent: Why this sudden distancing from Gandhi? Even by those who began their journey with Gandhi’s poster as a backdrop in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan.

Are we tired of Gandhi? Is it too drab and dull to carry on with this mascot, of an old man who was “devoid of good looks”, “far from handsome”, “the ugliest man”, “skinny little bloke with a funny face”, and, of course, “the half-naked fakir”, as Churchill described him when he decided to wear just a piece of loincloth as “several millions of Indians” did?

Or is it too morally taxing to live and operate under his piercing, interrogating eyes? Has Gandhi become too much of moral baggage in our body politic today? Has the pragmatic triumphed over the ethical? In a world besieged by brands celebrating feasting, who would like a brand that was largely about fasting? That he fasted for the poor and the dis-privileged and in search of truth and justice sounds perhaps too preachy, irritating and cumbersome today, amidst the hedonistic race where all that matters is the end gain. No one bothers much about the means and its cultural sanctity to attain that end. Gandhi, understandably, therefore, is not an easy brand to pursue. It may embarrass, inconvenience, even repudiate and pose uncomfortable questions.

Yet, it is this moral force attached to Brand Bapu that compelled the visiting British Prime Minister to get down from the JCB bulldozer and spin charkha at Bapu’s ashram. To announce Gandhi irrelevantly (and Gandhi would surely have loved that) would require a Himalayan effort to address those civilisational questions he so consistently posed and worked all his life to find answers to. Bapu is a brand of soul force; for a better, more compassionate and humane world.

It is in the interest of our own existence that we remain steadfast to Brand Bapu. It takes pain, suffering and inexhaustible patience to carry on with these ideals in today’s time, but a true satyagrahi cannot fall for the easy route. Brand Bapu reminds us just that -- the need to take the difficult path of truth and justice amidst a sea of hyper-seductive, techno-narcissistic props masquerading as progress and development.

(The writer is a Sociologist)