While Modi’s Mother India metaphor explains much of what
is wrong with the country, India is not and should never become Rahul’s
beehive.
It is astonishing, wondered George Eliot, what different results one gets by changing the metaphor. More astonishing is what those results tell us about ourselves. Last week, Rahul Gandhi talked of India as a beehive bristling with enterprise. Promptly, Narendra Modi shot back that the metaphor insulted the idea of Mother India.
The Gujarat chief minister won instant approval from his followers, more so because madhumakkhi ka chattais apparently a colloquial reference to trouble mongering. Politicians have the liberty of twisting perceptions to suit their purpose. But the buzzing analogy and the street-smart spin it inspired — however off the cuff they may seem — also reveal a lot about how we perceive our entitlements and duties as Indians.
Agencies.
Mother India, as the popular perception goes, is an avatar of Mother Nature. Much like the quintessential Indian (or any) mother, she must provide unquestioningly for her billion-plus children. The prototype is common enough in Indian narratives, including those of Bollywood, where the mother will go to any extent – from routinely skipping meals at the very least to sacrificing herself to prostitution and worse – to nurture her children.
But while her needs are negotiable, her dignity is not. It must be restored in the end with the children paying back their debt to her and avenging every insult. Indeed, they must prove worthy children. That is the idea of Mother India our patriots, poets and politicians love to invoke.
In reality, things rarely come full circle. We take Mother India for granted. We mindlessly dam and drain the water from her rivers and aquifers without even considering the possibility of her ever running dry. We douse her fields with chemical pesticides assuming that the land will absorb all the poison and still yield as much. We greedily destroy her forests and still demand that her skies keep raining as much. We litter and pollute every nook and corner of the country in a way no filmi villain ever defiled any mother.
While Mother India suffers her worst fate every day at home, we are ever prompt to give call to arms to avenge insults and injuries – more imaginary and perceived than real – heaped on her by outsiders (read neighbours). That is the idea of citizenship – the liberty to wantonly plunder the nation’s resources and resort to irresponsible jingoism – the metaphor of Mother India seems to inspire in most of us.
The beehive, dripping with honey as it is, is not half as mushy. Of course, the idea of a queen bee is so central to the concept of a beehive that it has fired the imagination of many Sonia detractors. To them, the beehive metaphor implies that every Indian must serve a certain queen bee. But whether or not the junior Gandhi made that case, the life of a queen bee in a beehive is far from enviable.
Instead of enjoying any so-called regal dynastic power, the queen bee’s sole purpose in a hive is to mother bees. In fact, her very life depends on it. The day she trips, she is smothered to death by the other bees and replaced by a new queen (just another working bee on a diet of superior honey called royal jelly). Clearly, the working bees do not live in a tyranny of Regina. Besides, there is a shelf life to this office of power.
But, of course, the new Congress vice-president was comparing the country to the hive itself. That demands the unquestioning lifelong service of every bee, ergo Indian. The singularity of purpose — as opposed to the confusion and complexity Rahul sought to convey — is rather intimidating.
The queen must lay eggs to live. The workers must tend to the eggs, fetch honey and defend the hive at the cost of their lives (each bee can sting just once because it kills the bee). The drones must die mating with the queen or be expelled from the hive to die at the end of every mating season. This precise and unforgiving arrangement is reminiscent of a totalitarian system which India evidently is not.
Yet, a beehive is also far more democratic than India may ever be. Every time a hive gets overcrowded, a bunch of worker bees leave it with a queen to set up a new home. Scout bees fly out individually to look for good sites. Each reports its findings by performing a waggle dance. The better the quality of a site, the longer is the dance. Then all of them visit the best rated options and vote with another bout of dance. Once the majority of scout bees back a particular site, the rest, including the queen, accept that consensus.
It is unlikely that Gandhi was referring to that highest form of democracy, though there was quite an attempt at waggling in the Youth Congress. In fact, as Manish Tewari eagerly explained, the heir-very-apparent was talking about the “energy, diligence, cohesion, focus and unity of purpose” exhibited in a beehive. But it still makes for a lazy metaphor, for India is not an equal society. No worker bee is ever denied its equal share of honey. Otherwise, who knows, they might well object to the exclusive royal jelly diet of the designated queen.
While Modi’s emotive metaphor of Mother India is what the country should strive to grow out of, Gandhi’s beehive it is clearly not and may not aspire to become. Even in an ideal democracy, can we demand that every citizen must conform to a single idea of productivity (and much else) to qualify for her equal share of fortune and justice? What keeps India going is her generous appetite for dissent. It is also her best bet against superfluous analogies and the ones who draw those.
No comments:
Post a Comment