Mythification is not without hazards for its subject. In an ideal world, the man and the myth should be perfectly matched. The latter is destructive when it far surpasses its subject. Reality has this unpleasant habit of ripping apart fiction and laying bare the truth behind the hype.
Also, when myth-makers go silent and hyperbole dries up, you know the subject has lost sheen. There is nothing to write about him anymore. But why are we discussing myths? Well, they made a leader, and now threaten to unmake him. They were at the heart of a massive campaign before 2014 and after it with a singular agenda: Make the man bigger
than everyone, dead or alive. We identify the man as ‘the great demagogue’ here.
Five years on, glowing stories about the great demagogue have tapered off. Not long ago, every single move he made was feted as a masterstroke, each of his decisions was hailed as the hallmark of a genius and he was deemed infallible, invincible. The mythmakers cooked up incredible stories of his childhood to emphasise he was destined for glory. What a fall it has been!
Clearly, they overreached, touching the point where the chasm between the real and the imagined became too obvious. Now, it is stark. Perhaps the great man, consumed by the idea of glory and the muscular notions of the leader, overreached too.
He overpromised and overstated his own case. Cheered lustily by inveterate hero-worshippers who go by the generic name bhakt, he claimed to be the one-stop solution to all that ailed India, from the economy to foreign affairs to what not. He spoke of development as a solution to the country’s problems when his peers were stuck in
old-world populism. He spoke of jobs and growth, of less government and more governance.
His political conquests in the initial years burnished his reputation. It helped that he was clever at rhetoric and a brilliant actor too. He knew how to hold a crowd in thrall, how to drive it to emotional frenzy. He was the communicator par excellence, a sharp departure from his predecessors.
However, at some point, he started believing his own rhetoric. Soon, he was pandering to a vast loyal audience and to his own ego as well. He assiduously built a personality cult to establish himself as a titan among minnows, intellectual and otherwise. He reduced the
government to a one-man show. The hint of arrogance though understated, was written all over.
A great leader had to take grand measures befitting his status. Incrementalism of earlier days was passe; it was the course the weak took. So, in came big announcements in a torrent in all spheres. The propaganda machinery went on the overdrive to convince people it was part of a vision for the future of the country. The leader only asked for small sacrifices to ensure greatest good for the greatest number. Economy is where it hurt the masses most. Many were ruined. But they chose to ignore the suffering.
Disappointment was quick to follow. The measures were a shot in the dark. They had not achieved anything of note besides propaganda points for the great demagogue. The myth-makers had no spin to offer now. The leader was suddenly no more infallible.
Perhaps everything was not lost for him still. He had the popular goodwill intact. He tried and failed, but the intention was not generally perceived to be dishonest. However, the bigger hit to the perception about him came from the source closest to his heart: the
ideological fellow travellers. While he was busy with his grand measures, the latter were busy opening up numerous conflicts, small yet damaging, across the country.
As the state receded, leaving space to criminals with an ideological agenda, the great demagogue chose silence over reaction. His famous rhetorical skills deserted him when people wanted it the most. He still communicated a lot, but it was about quotidian topics. The all-powerful, muscular leader looked lost and helpless against street goons.
What he lost in the process was the moral high ground. Worse, people started realising that the man and the myth did not match. Now that they have realised that they have been short-changed, they would be wary of tall talk in future.
Did the man failed the myth or the myth failed the man? There is no clear answer.
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