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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Manufactured Martyrs

The attempt by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) to turn activist Sonam Wangchuk into the next Anna Hazare has exposed how manufactured symbolism cannot compensate for the absence of genuine public outrage. What began as a grievance over the NEET paper leak, one of India’s gravest examination scandals in recent times, has drifted into an exercise in political pageantry, where the cause has been eclipsed by its chosen mascots. Wangchuk’s indefinite hunger strike was plainly meant to recreate a...

Manufactured Martyrs

The attempt by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) to turn activist Sonam Wangchuk into the next Anna Hazare has exposed how manufactured symbolism cannot compensate for the absence of genuine public outrage. What began as a grievance over the NEET paper leak, one of India’s gravest examination scandals in recent times, has drifted into an exercise in political pageantry, where the cause has been eclipsed by its chosen mascots. Wangchuk’s indefinite hunger strike was plainly meant to recreate a familiar script where an allegedly unassuming public figure embraces personal sacrifice and a reluctant government buckles under mounting moral pressure. But history does not repeat itself on command. Anna Hazare’s fast in 2011 succeeded not because fasting possesses mystical political powers, but because it rode a tidal wave of public anger against corruption. Millions identified with the cause. That equation is conspicuously absent today. The platform that ought to have belonged to students who suffered from the NEET paper leak, or to parents whose children bore its consequences, instead became crowded with the usual constellation of professional activists, ideological campaigners and political fellow travellers. The faces dominating the stage were not those most directly affected by the scandal. A movement demanding educational accountability gradually came to look like another gathering of Delhi’s permanently aggrieved activist class. Even Wangchuk appeared to sense the contradiction. During the protest he reportedly lamented that while he was observing an indefinite fast, many around him were happily eating meals, urging at least a token one-day fast in solidarity. Successful protest movements depend upon authenticity. Once the public begins suspecting that an individual is being deployed less as a leader than as a moral accessory for someone else’s ideological project, sympathy quickly evaporates. Nor does Wangchuk arrive without controversy. Questions have been raised over the cancellation of the FCRA licence of SECMOL, the educational organisation associated with him, and over allegations regarding subsequent foreign funding arrangements. Critics have also challenged aspects of the carefully cultivated public mythology surrounding his achievements, from the origins of the ice-stupa concept to the popular belief that he inspired the protagonist of 3 Idiots. These matters deserve scrutiny on their own merits rather than hagiography or character assassination. The greater failure here surely belongs to the protest’s organisers. The CJP has mistaken optics for momentum and symbolism for public sentiment. Instead of allowing the victims of the NEET scandal to speak for themselves, they attempted to manufacture another national conscience by placing a familiar face at the centre of the stage. Political legitimacy cannot be outsourced to celebrity. Nor can mass movements be assembled from social-media influencers and habitual protesters. Anna Hazare became powerful because the public chose him. Attempts to manufacture his successor merely underline how rare such moments really are.

Appeasement Politics

Every generation of the Congress party produces its own small heresies. Some are tactical, others merely foolish. Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal’s latest remarks declaring Tipu Sultan as the moral and historical equivalent of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj belongs squarely in the latter category. It is not just bad history but bad politics masquerading as ‘secular’ virtue.


Sapkal’s claim rests on a fashionable syllogism that as both men fought foreign powers, therefore both embody the same ideals of bravery, tolerance and national resistance. Chhatrapati Shivaji’s idea of Swarajya was not merely freedom from foreign rule but a carefully constructed political ethic, combining military pragmatism with a striking - by early-modern standards - religious pluralism. He protected shrines across faiths and grounded legitimacy in consent rather than conversion.


Tipu Sultan was, by contrast, a ruler of genuine ability but narrow vision. He fought the British bravely, died defending Srirangapatna, modernised his army and experimented with administration. None of this is in dispute. What is persistently airbrushed out by Congress spokesmen and so-called ‘liberal’ commentators is the other half of the record. Tipu’s reign was marked by forced conversions, temple destruction and brutal repression in regions such as Malabar and Kodagu. Contemporary accounts, later historians and even sympathetic chroniclers record campaigns of coercion that targeted non-Muslim populations with little restraint.


To note this is not to indulge in communal polemic but to insist on historical honesty. Tipu Sultan, by all accounts, was a complex personality. He was also deeply religious in a way that shaped policy. His establishment of a theocratic order ‘Sarkar-e-Khudadad’ and systematic disadvantaging of non-Muslims within and beyond his kingdom place him far closer to Aurangzeb than to Shivaji. Occasional temple grants or symbolic gestures were tactical concessions, and not evidence of tolerance.


Yet India’s lifetime liberals, desperate to defend a secular halo at any cost, treat Tipu’s record as an inconvenience to be edited out. They scoff at ‘right-wing history’ while practising a far cruder form of selective memory themselves. A tyrant’s token does not erase a trail of coercion. Nor does opposition to the British automatically confer moral sainthood.


The entry of Asaduddin Owaisi, invoking anti-colonial martyrdom and even Mahatma Gandhi, only sharpens the problem. Resistance to empire is not a blank cheque. History is full of rulers who fought foreigners while oppressing their own subjects. Mature politics can hold both truths at once.


Sapkal’s remarks also reveal the limits of Congress’s minority-appeasement reflex. By insisting that Tipu and Shivaji are the same, the party insults both history and Maharashtra’s political culture. Shivaji Maharaj is a civilisational symbol whose legitimacy rests precisely on his refusal to reduce power to faith. To equate him with a ruler whose statecraft was inseparable from religious coercion is to hollow out the great Maratha ruler himself. The deeper embarrassment lies in the fact that the Congress still equates secularism with flattering minorities and sanitising inconvenient figures. 


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