Shashi Tharoor: 'Media has brought giants down to size'

At a recent discussion in Crossword bookstore in Mumbai, Dr Shashi Tharoor spoke on a wide range of topics -- from Nehru and the concept of India to the lessons we haven't learnt from modern history and just why it is impossible to have heroes in our times.

In this series of videos, we bring you excerpts from the conversation between Tharoor and senior journalist Anil Dharker.

It isn't very often that an Indian politician makes for great listening. Dr Shashi Tharoor, however, is a welcome exception.

The charming member of Parliament who was in Mumbai recently, where he was in conversation with senior journalist Anil Dharker, spoke on two of his favourite topics -- India and Nehru -- on which he has also authored books.

Even as the topic for the day -- Recaptivating the history of India -- seemed a tad vague, Dharker and Tharoor ensured the discussion was lively and didn't go all over the place.

Dharker spoke about being 'an absolute admirer' of Nehru and suggested that had it not been for him, democracy wouldn't have been able to flourish in the way that it did.

While Dharker said the concept of India -- at least geographically -- didn't exist till the British, Tharoor countered pointing out that the 'civilisational sense' of India was very much prevalent long, long before colonisation.

Tharoor added, however, that there is also 'the contemporary idea of India' in which Nehru has played a very large part.

"What is striking about Nehru's contribution," Tharoor said, "is... he could so easily have gone the other way. Given all the challenges of the country... why could he have not done what ... (Gamal Abdel) Nasser did or (Josip Broz) Tito did and (said) I need a firm hand to sort this mess. Instead he said 'Let's do it through democracy'."

He then went on to narrate instances of Nehru's respect for democracy.

"(Nehru) would attend (Parliament sessions), subject himself to impertinent question by the factious members and subject his cabinet members and senior officials to respond to (these questions). The entire habit that the government is accountable to the elected representatives of the people began with Nehru.

"Once at a press conference he made an intemperate remark about a judge. Before the end of the day he wrote a grovelling apology to the judge and then wrote a letter to the Chief Justice of India apologising for having inadvertently insulted the judiciary, because he wanted to convey to the people that no one was greater than the law and the institutions were more important that individuals."

In the video above, Tharoor talks of how Nehru got his way without imposing himself on his colleagues.

Nehru, Tharoor said, was also conscious about the temptations of dictatorship.

During the elections held under the Government of India Act of 1935, Modern Review, a publication in West Bengal carried an anonymous article warning people of Nehru's 'demagogic inclinations'.

"Much later it was discovered that the anonymous author of this article was Nehru himself. He was so conscious of the need to make people aware that the temptations of dictatorship must be resisted," Tharoor said.

Watch what Tharoor had to say in the video above

Dharker then asked him to speculate on what India would have been under Sardar Patel. Tharoor spoke about the differences Patel had with Nehru, but pointed out that despite the differences, the two leaders worked together as a team. Watch the video here!

Earlier in the discussion, Tharoor reeled out a list of names of first generation of independent India's leaders who were giants in their own right.

Dharker cornered Tharoor and asked him, somewhat rhetorically, if he could list out names from contemporary India just as easily.

As Tharoor wriggled out of the spot, he also pointed out that "ours is not an age of heroes anywhere in the world".

"Partly the immediacy of public media has brought giants down to size. You're seeing them in your living rooms every day.
 
"One could argue that no one could be a hero if you're seeing them so much every day on your television screens; they're being attacked in the newspapers, in the sensationalist media, in the TRP-chasing Breaking Newswallahs. Who is allowed to develop a myth of great stature (in such times)?" he asked.

"This may be one of the features of our era that nowhere in the world is there a larger-than-life figure. And if you find one, it's probably because you haven't had enough time to bring him down.

"Look at Obama. He was actually hailed a messiah and was elected on the huge wave of popular admiration. Today he is down 30 per cent in the polls in his country. He has been brought down to size.

"This, I am afraid, is true in almost any democracy.

"The only place you have larger-than-life figures now are in the non-democracies because they are not being brought down every day and the media is only used to project them.

"Even in China, which is an autocracy, the kind of stature that say Mao enjoyed, none of the later leaders have acquired that kind of standing.

"Times produce their own heroes, but this is not a time for heroes.

"But that is all right too. In a contemporary democracy you are talking of a system of the people by the people for the people, which has to stand up to the intrusiveness of the cameras, take lumps from the opposition from coalition partners so on.

"You are not looking for heroism. You're looking for competence, effectiveness. Perhaps that is increasingly the yardstick with which we are using to judging people."

As the discussion moved on, Dharker observed that the sophisticated, educated and erudite Tharoor is perceived as something of a misfit in Indian politics.

Tharoor agreed that the educated Indian middle class looks at politics with some amount of disdain.

He joked that unlike in the US, where people expected their politicians to be clean with no past records of misgivings, in India the average Indian family "expects politicians to have a standard of conduct that they won't tolerate in their own families or neighbours. You expect politicians to be sleazy and corrupt and venal and unprincipled and uneducated...'

"But if we do that," Tharoor said, "then it's our own fault. One of the reasons that someone like me should go into politics was precisely because our country has room for all kinds of people to speak in the national political space."

He also pointed out that while the last eight (or so) American presidential elections have seen candidates from either Harvard or Yale, the same doesn't necessarily hold true in the Indian context.

Dharker asked Tharoor to talk about his experience contesting elections from Kerala.

Tharoor, who contested the general election in March 2009 as a candidate of the Congress party from the Lok Sabha constituency of Thiruvananthapuram, was criticised for being an 'elite outsider' who didn't speak the language of the people.

Tharoor went on to defeat his nearest rival P Ramachandran Nair by a margin of about 1,00,000 votes.

Watch Tharoor talk about how he managed to swing public opinion in his favour in the video above.

In the final segment of the discussion, Dharker asked Tharoor to list out the lessons from modern history that we haven't learned.

Tharoor said that one of the lessons "we haven't learnt enough is the great importance of freeing our economy sufficiently to generate jobs for people".

"My biggest worry we are producing 10 million people entering the workforce every year as they come of age and we don't have 10 million jobs on the street."

Tharoor suggested that the way out is "to have an economy that grows sufficiently and particularly in those sectors that can absorb unskilled, semi-skilled and minimally skilled labour". Tourism, he pointed out, employs "more than five times the people than (other) industries do".

"We also have to recognise that a lot of our labour laws protect the small percentage of people who actually have jobs rather than encouraging investment that will create new jobs for people who don't have them. We need to grapple (with such situations)."

Finally Tharoor also spoke upon the issue of education, pointing out that 72 per cent students drop out by the time they reach the eighth grade -- sometimes for the want of basic issues such as decent toilets.

"Education for poor Indians, rural Indians and Indians who can only afford government schools requires serious prioritisation. That's another lesson we have not learnt so far," Tharoor said.