Vision and Vitriol

“Resident Idiot”:http://www.tni.org/fellows/bidwai.htm in “Frontline”:http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2108/stories/20040423007612700.htm
bq. The Bharatiya Janata Party has stooped low in building up an egregious personality cult around Atal Bihari Vajpayee…
bq. Such sycophancy around an individual is only slightly less crude than the personality cult around Hitler – who too gave Germany the autobahn (high-speed motorway) – and Mussolini, or Stalin and Kim-Il Sung. The BJP’s publicity material has the same fawning, adoring attitude to Vajpayee as Nazi sympathiser Leni Riefenstahl’s films on Hitler.
But a few days back he himself wrote in “Rediff”:http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/apr/12bidwai.htm
bq. Ms Priyanka Gandhi’s campaign entry, despite its ‘dynastic’ pitfalls, will definitely energise the Congress. She can certainly put some icing on its electoral cake.
Also to see that Sonia Gandhi Pvt. Ltd is not an egregious personality cult, just go to Congress(I) “election posters web page”:http://www.aicc.org.in/elec-posters.htm and see how many of them have Sonia on them. (Also while you are at the page, note that Rajiv Gandhi has a tab by himself, while people like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi are all general history). So would Congress’s sycophancy around an individual be cruder than the personality cult around Hitler ?
bq. These advertisements had a definite pattern: Vajpayee’s face was everywhere. Here, he was shown playing with children. There, he was with Adivasis, donning traditional headgear. Not to be missed was the much-replayed picture of Vajpayee handling a computer mouse to inaugurate a project (although he is computer-illiterate.) In the BJP’s campaign, Vajpayee always stands taller than ordinary mortals. He is invariably shown as leading the nation by theatrically raising his right hand and exhorting the people to rise and shine.
Do you remember the last election Congress fought under Rajiv Gandhi when we had pictures of him with Adivasis, donning traditional headgear etc ? As the “editorial”:http://www.samachar.com/features/250204-editorial.html in samachar.com notes
bq. For over four decades when the Congress Party was in power the fine line dividing the party from the government had been fully obliterated. There was a time when Congressmen were openly chanting `Indira is India and India is Indira’ and misusing public funds for their own personal advancement, nay, enrichment. Ironically, even as the senior leaders of the Congress Party rail against the Shining India campaign, the Congress Party governments in the States are shamelessly squandering taxpayers’ monies to tom-tom their so-called achievements in national and regional papers and on various television channels.
bq. One of the biggest spenders in this regard is the non-performing Amarinder Singh Government in Punjab. Conjuring up its so-called achievements from thin air, almost daily the Punjab Government ads appear in national and regional papers with the mandatory photographs of the Congress President Sonia Gandhi and, of course, the feckless Amarinder Singh himself. Surely, if the State Governments run by the Congress Party could waste crores of rupees of public monies on taking out print and TV ads to peddle their non-achievements, there was no reason why the Vajpayee Government could not launch a media campaign to inform the people what it had achieved in the last five years.
Yada Yada Yada and
bq. It will stoop extremely low to get votes. That can only hurt our democracy, although it might not even help the BJP return to power.
The election results are a month away. At that time we will come back to these statements.