Friday morning I was campaigning in a Chennai suburb in Alandur Assembly constituency where I am contesting a byelection being held simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls. The large convoy of a hundred vehicles of an AIADMK candidate contesting the Lok Sabha seat within which my Assembly segment is one of the six segments, happened to cross the path of our two vehicle convoy. The police accompanying the other convoy rushed to divert me to a bylane. I alighted from my vehicle to see if I could go and greet the other candidate on his campaign. But I was asked not to do that since police feared workers of the other party could get provoked on seeing a rival party's candidate.
I was sure that nothing of that kind would happen and still believe that two candidates (who are not even direct rivals) could exchange courteous greetings and move ahead along different chosen paths. But not just the police, party workers, even members of the public believe that such things may not happen. Herein lies the seeds of all hate speeches that are currently a debating issue in contemporary politics.
Over the years, we have been conditioned to believe that persons professing different political ideologies cannot be asked to break bread together without creating special conditions for their coming together. This is because our democracy still has all the trappings of a monarchy. Two politicians with differing political viewpoints are constructed as two monarchs fighting a territorial battle all the time. Their respective followers are imagined to be their armies ready to pounce on one another and butcher each other. The more the personality cult is built and nurtured about different leaders, this role fixing as kings, queens, bishops, pawns and soldiers gets accentuated.
And hate speech is nothing but a manifestation of a lethal weapon like a sword or spear or rifle or cannon which would have been used in a monarchy but thankfully cannot be used in a democracy. Hate speech substitutes for the artillery. The personality cult that dominates our politics brings along with it all totems of tribal culture such as burning of effigies of rivals as practised in black magic of early civilisations.
The modern manifestation of hate speech is not merely in words but also in mere gestures and actions which need no words. For the last three decades and more, MGR and Karunani-dhi and later Jayalalithaa and Karunanidhi have established the most undemocratic practice of boycotting the assembly to avoid seeing each other face to face. (They never failed to visit the lobby of the house to sign the registers periodically so that the allowances are duly collected by them despite absence from the house.)
Hate actions only meant waste of public money as evidenced by the series of construction-deconstruction-reconstruction activities unleashed by Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa. Jaya wanted to build a new assembly and secretariat demolishing the heritage site of Queen Mary’s college. Rival Stalin and DMK led a students' movement that stopped that move. Jaya immediately conducted a bhoomi puja for the new assembly at a site in Kotturpuram. Karunanidhi, on coming to power, used that site to build the Anna memorial centenary library diverting funds from all other libraries. He went on to build a new Assembly and secretariat complex on Anna Salai and Jaya, on returning to power, converted it into a multi specialty hospital. All these mutual hate driven policy actions only drained public money and wasted much of the judiciary's valuable time in litigation over these issues.
Direct verbal attack on rivals has always been part of the politico entertainment culture of most parties. Fourth grade speakers euphemistically called approved speakers of the parties always indulged in slander, obscenity to ridicule the rival political leaders. It is actually the print media and the electronic media that have sanitised the political scenario and made these parties look respectable by their censorship of such regular public speeches, which if printed or televised on a regular basis, would expose the political parties' true colours. Insinuations against Jaya in unprintable vulgar terms were a regular pastime with several DMK platform speakers. Decrying Karunanidhi on the basis of his caste all the time, an AIADMK paper run by a loyalist (now one of the several education barons AIADMK politics created), even said in a very abusive manner that a cat that shared Karunanidhi's prison cell became pregnant.
The fundamental issue is that such slander, abuse and hate speech and gestures are all endorsed by the highest leadership all the time. In my journalistic career of 40 years, I do not recollect a single instance of any top party leader taking disciplinary action against a speaker for hate speech against the rival party's leaders. While the top leadership in every party always pays lip service by saying in general terms that they condemn any hate speech, there had been no specific action. I have a lurking suspicion that they enjoy such abuses against the rivals on the sly.
This election season is seeing a new transformation. This change is similar to what happened in commercial film making. Traditional commercial cinema always needed a goody-goody heroine and a sexy vamp to titillate the audiences. This changed by the late '90s and the heroine and the vamp got merged in commercial cinema just as the villain became the hero in many films. In politics now, hate speech so far reserved for fourth level speakers has been taken over by the top leaders themselves. While the South took the lead in the earlier methodology, the North now seems to lead in the transformation of top leaders taking over hate mongering. South is fortunately yet to catch up on this.
How do we react to this trend? I think that I would rather tolerate hate speech between different parties than actual bloodshed between the cadres, because this, perhaps, gives them psychological vent for their violent mindset. That would not justify the existence or perpetuation of hate speech. But doing away with personality cult in politics alone will lead towards removal of hatred in politics. In other words, we need to democratise our democracy, still burdened with all trappings of monarchy.
