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By:

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.

Principled Hypocrisy

Few spectacles are more unedifying in a democracy than elected representatives rejoicing at what they believe to be their own country’s humiliation. Yet that is precisely what parts of India’s Opposition and its left-liberal entourage have chosen to do. The alleged guilty plea of Nikhil Gupt, who admitted in a U.S. federal court to his role in a failed assassination plot against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York, has been greeted by parts of the Opposition and the left-liberal ecosystem with barely concealed glee. Social media erupted in declarations of national embarrassment.


It does not bother these entities that Pannun is no benign dissenter but a designated Khalistani extremist under Indian law who has openly advocated the break-up of Indian sovereignty, issued threats linked to civil aviation, praised mass violence abroad and urged intimidation of Hindus worldwide.


This selective indignation is striking. These same voices that lecture endlessly on due process and warn against believing confessions extracted at home now accept a foreign prosecution narrative with uncritical enthusiasm.


More troubling is the open delight expressed by some elected representatives, who rushed to frame the episode as proof of moral collapse at the top. The impulse was not to assess evidence or consequences, but to celebrate what was framed as a blow to the ruling party. In matters of foreign policy and national security, such behaviour is not brave dissent but sheer civic irresponsibility.


Democracies require opposition. They also require a minimum consensus that the country’s external posture is not a partisan toy. To cheer what one assumes to be a failed covert operation, whether real or imagined, is to signal abroad that India cannot speak with coherence even when its security is at stake.


The hypocrisy deepens when compared with the indulgence shown to extremist rhetoric overseas. In Canada and elsewhere, Pannun has been platformed as a legitimate commentator while his calls for violence are sanitised or ignored. That a man who praised terror tactics and issued threats could be treated as an expert by sections of the foreign media should disturb anyone who claims to care about liberal norms. That Indian liberals choose to overlook this while posturing as guardians of democracy is revealing.


What India witnessed instead was national schadenfreude. In their obsession with opposing Modi, some critics have drifted into opposing India’s stated interests, even contradicting the official position of the state they represent. Hatred of a leader has metastasised into disdain for the country.


India’s left-liberal cabal prides itself on its cosmopolitan credentials, wearing globalism as a badge of moral superiority. a politics so consumed by hostility to Narendra Modi that it has lost the capacity to distinguish between holding power to account and rooting against the country itself.


A mature democracy argues abroad with care and disputes at home with responsibility. What it does not do is cheer midstream at allegations that might weaken its own hand in matters of national security.

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