Two recent ill-tempered national debates are the catalysts for this essay on society‘s flawed leaders who have fallen from grace. The first contentious wrangle sprung from the controversy that followed Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s promotion of the fiction that it was at Mahatma Gandhi’s instance that ‘Veer’ Savarkar wrote those cringing, ingratiating mercy petitions to the British colonial rulers. Unwittingly, almost six decades after his death, the skeletons in the cupboard of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar have come tumbling out before the unforgiving gaze of the media and the public. 

Given the honorific of “Veer” for his involvement in the murder of three British officials, for which he was banished to the Andaman cellular jail in 1911, the Defence Minister’s outrageous lie blaming the Mahatma for prompting Savarkar’s groveling mercy petitions has actually drawn attention to Savarkar’s many infirmities which were hitherto under wraps. P Sainath, among others, has claimed that Savarkar was a small-minded, insecure man who wrote and arranged for the publication of books eulogizing himself -- the ultimate in self-congratulatory chicanery.

The second controversy that went “viral” was generated by the head of the BJP IT cell. Possibly as a tit-for-tat response to the public defiling of the Hindutva icon, Savarkar, the IT head who is the living embodiment of cock and bull, and specializes in hitting below the belt, put out on social media a collage of photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru with the despicable intent of portraying the first Prime Minister as an immoral debauch. The sordid mind of the purveyor is evident from the fact that included among the pictures is one of Nehru hugging his sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit on her return from the USSR. The man’s diseased psyche is clearly unable to distinguish between affection and lasciviousness, but sadly in today’s fractious environment, his obnoxious smear has takers.

Amidst the toxicity of the current debates, deafeningly amplified by an omnipresent media, one remembers a less censorious but arguably more hypocritical world when leading political figures, the rich and the famous, were largely judged by their actions in the public arena. Back in the1960s and 70s, the press was fearfully hesitant to intrude into the dark recesses of their private lives, with the news often moderated before being put out for public consumption. By making a fetish of fencing off the private from the public persona, the news outlets were often guilty of muffling the misconduct of politicians and celebrities.

To cite from personal experience, a Minister in charge of the government organization where I was employed, was notorious for his obsession with ladies of the night. In those days of laissez-faire for the political class, his self-indulgent forays were not conducted in the stealth of night but in broad daylight. Ever so often, his victims would travel with him by train or road on official tours, with the top brass of the organization, to their eternal shame, in attendance. It was rumored that some officials were procurers, and were officially rewarded for aiding and abetting the Minister’s libido. But for all his criminal delinquency, he was left unscathed.

The laissez-faire and sheer liberty that the high and the mighty still enjoy in the country is the legacy of those promiscuous days and is the reason why nobody demands that politicians display even the basic virtues expected of an ordinary citizen. The fact that there are 233 out of 540 members in the current Parliament with criminal records is actually an indictment of an asymmetrical, iniquitous society that has done precious little to curb the depredations of the powerful. The media, in particular, has played a stellar role in this conspiracy of silence. The dark secrets of our leaders remained largely hidden from sight.

This was so across the world until historical revisionism yanked the halo off the consecrated icons, exposing their shenanigans before the world. In this age of skepticism where nothing is sacred, society’s bigwigs -- dead and alive – have come under the scanner. Their legacy is being perpetually subjected to the forensic scrutiny of the grave-diggers -- historians, researchers and journalists. Many a world-acclaimed hero has been damaged by the probing lens of the revisionist historian.

Take the case of Winston Churchill. To quote John F Kennedy’s brilliantly evocative tribute, in the dark days and darker nights of World War II, Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” However, revisionist digging has brought to light the fact that Churchill’s most renowned broadcasts during the war were not delivered by him. An actor, Norman Shelley was hired to impersonate him and fooled millions of listeners, the harsh conjecture for this subterfuge being that Churchill was much too drunk to deliver the speeches himself. So much for Churchill’s uplifting oratory! Over time, his racism, his antipathy to India’s independence, his pre-war sympathy for fascism, his contempt for the Labour movement have come to light and shown him up as an elitist prig at heart.

No modern hero has suffered a more precipitous fall from grace than John F Kennedy. When he fell to an assassin’s bullet in November 1963, the entire world, cutting across ideological barriers, mourned, such was his youthful magnetism and appeal. As a schoolboy in Jaipur, I remember a holiday and national mourning being declared, and Jawahar Lal Nehru, the Prime Minister, addressing the nation expressing deep anguish. JFK’s brief presidency was nostalgically referred to as an American “Camelot”, a term that, ironically, was coined by his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, to describe a period of idyllic happiness. 

As it turned out, the Kennedy cult was a meretricious hoax, squalid to the extreme. His private life was a cauldron of marital infidelity, debauchery, incurable ailments and skullduggery. Kennedy’s marriage was an unmitigated disaster. Apart from regularly humiliating Jacqueline, he led a most promiscuous life, even suborning his staffers as procurers. A persistent case of gonorrhea was no impediment to his indiscriminate sexual escapades. His lovers included the legendary actress, Marilyn Monroe and the mistress of a mafia don.

But that was not all. 

Among other shockers is the revelation that Kennedy, who received the Pulitzer Prize for “Profiles in Courage”, took credit for a book that was actually ghostwritten and appropriated to soup up his image when he entered politics. Even his public standing as a talismanic democrat who stood up for the vulnerable and the weak was a sham. He pussyfooted on civil rights, the most pressing issue of his time, and was mainly responsible for an imperialist America’s destructive intervention in Vietnam.

Some of the world’s flawed heroes have bitten the dust even before they have gone to the grave by literally getting caught in the act. A scandal that rocked the sporting world involved Lance Armstrong, the legendary American cyclist, whose crimes caught up with him when he was at the peak of his professional career. The winner of seven consecutive Tour de France titles between 1999 and 2005, he now faces eternal ignominy after a doping investigation and his admission to using performance enhancing drugs. However, the most heart-rending story of a hero’s fall from grace was that of Hansie Cronje, the charismatic South African cricket captain who sold his soul for millions of dollars in illegal betting. But in 2000, he was implicated in a match-fixing scandal that abruptly turned him from sporting icon to international pariah. 

More recently, the Me Too movement which was an excruciatingly long-overdue revolt against sexual exploitation in an unequal, patriarchal society, rightfully wrecked the reputations of the high and mighty across the world. Among the victims are the high-flying governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and at home, M.J. Akbar, the once brilliant journalist who bartered away his reputation for power and pelf. Both are now in the dog-house and no tears are being shed!

Let it never be forgotten that the holders of power, particularly the political class, do everything possible to control, intimidate and prevent citizens from getting to know their dark secrets and will continue to do so, by misusing the institutions of the State. The colonial tyrants framed the Official Secrets Act and the Defamation Laws to protect the interests of the British Raj, the security of the State and for maintaining public order. Today, those laws provide a cloak of secrecy for the ruling elite, under cover of which, they go about their dirty business.

In 1988, Rajiv Gandhi’s government, smarting at allegations over the Bofors scandal, introduced an Amendment Bill in Parliament that attempted to widen the scope of the Defamation law by including new offences such as “criminal imputation” and “scurrilous writings” and shifting the burden of proof from the aggrieved to the accused. Although the Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha, the huge public outcry forced the government to withdraw the Bill. The present dispensation has gone many steps further in muzzling openness in governance. The mere knowledge of the Government possessing the Pegasus spyware -- which is the latest, high-tech version of ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ -- has had a chilling effect on all who believe in democratic freedoms.

The present Government and its ringmaster, in particular, have much to hide. The investigation by a two-judge panel into the infamous Snoopgate affair relating to the ATS’s surveillance of the movements of a young woman at the behest of a “Saheb”, was scrapped by the Gujarat High Court on a petition by the father of the woman in question, saying that it was a private matter. However, a number of unanswered questions remain, including the basic one of whether the government surveillance of a private citizen was within the law.

There is also the mystery shrouding the PM’s suspect educational qualifications. Here again, the Delhi and Gujarat universities, backed by the Election Commission, have refused to divulge any details. The nation has a right to know but will the truth ever come to light? Given today’s opacity in governance, one has to bank on the deeply significant karma postulation that what goes around comes back around!

(The writer is a former civil servant)