Just Like That | Power and loyalty: The wheel of history

In this game, ideology is usually a public stance, to be used to justify any stand. Its erosion is a private accommodation to be invoked at the right time for the best results. An oft-used proverb sums this up: Chadhte sooraj ko sab salaam karte hain (Everyone salutes the rising sun). To proffer unquestioned loyalty is then not difficult, for what is the point of half-measures? Once again, Tulsidas puts his finger on the pulse: Samarath kar nahin dosha gusain, ravi paavak sursari ke nahin (The powerful can have no faults; they remain as pure as the sun, fire and the Ganga).

Ironically, powerful leaders, although originating from this same milieu, fall for this self-serving and transient genuflection. Thus, when their decline commences — as inevitably it must — they are still taken aback by how quickly sycophants turn hostile. When entrenched, they forget that the original demonstration of reverence towards them was never absolute in the first place, but only expedient, conditional on their remaining powerful, and transferable if they are not. Nirad C Chaudhuri cynically, but truthfully, wrote that for an Indian, “the more thoroughgoing his external and interested servility, the more complete was also his emotional disaffection”.

Our recent democratic narrative is full of such examples. When Jawaharlal Nehru was still prime minister (PM) but ageing, his political obituary was written two years before his death in a best-selling book by American journalist Welles Hangen: After Nehru, Who? His admirers were now already looking beyond him.

His daughter, Indira Gandhi, experienced this too. At the peak of her power, she was hailed as a goddess. Congress president DK Barooah proclaimed “India is Indira, Indira is India”, and Cabinet minister PC Sethi publicly said that he would give his very skin to make chappals or slippers for her. However, after imposing the Emergency in 1975, when she abjectly lost the election in 1977, many of her most ardent supporters immediately dropped her. When she became PM again in 1980, the same lot, with no sense of guilt, were at her feet again.

After her assassination, when her son Rajiv Gandhi stormed to power with the largest majority in Indian politics, the adulation he received was tumultuous. Nothing he did could be wrong. However, within a few years, when he seemed vulnerable over the Bofors allegations, his critics, even in his own party, grew exponentially. PV Narasimha Rao, foreign minister under Rajiv, was often the butt of jokes by the PM’s inner coterie. The story — perhaps apocryphal — goes that one of them, Mani Shankar Aiyar, while going up the steps in South Block met Rao coming down. It was then that Rao with his innate wisdom supposedly remarked: “Mani, the people who you meet on your way up are the same people who you meet on your way down.”

In the interregnum, between the possibility of LK Advani and the reality of Narendra Modi’s rise, loyalties in the Bharatiya Janata Party somersaulted. But then, PM Modi would also know that loyalty and power are ephemeral, and the same could happen to him one day. It is the wheel of history, and powerful leaders should never forget the lines of Ali Ahmad Jalili:

Humne dekha hai zamaane ka badalna lekin,

Unke badle hue tevar nahin dekhe jaate

(I have seen this world changing but yet,

The change in their attitude I cannot accept)

Pavan K Varma is author, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). Just Like That is a weekly column where Varma shares nuggets from the world of history, culture, literature, and personal reminiscences. The views expressed are personal