In the mood with much fervour

State-owned Air India has accumulated losses of over Rs 50,000 crore and debts of over Rs 48,000 crore. Its financial position is so precarious that no private buyer stepped up to buy a 76 per cent stake in the airline when it was put on the block last year. Cost-cutting and more cost-cutting, you would think, should be the internal mantra for the airline in this ultra-competitive market.

Its owners and management appear to have other concerns — that the staff of this ailing airline must display patriotic fervour in a prescribed manner.

A March 5 advisory from the Director of Operations stipulated: “With immediate effect, all are required to announce ‘Jai Hind’ after every announcement after a slight pause and with much fervour.” The advisory, officials explained without irony, was “in line with the mood of the nation”. No surprise, social media exploded with corny jokes — what cabin crew would say in the event of air turbulence and so on. The news was certainly quirky enough for BBC to put out a news report on its website, helpfully adding the post-Balakot upsurge in nationalism as context.  

It is easy to guess where the order originated and why. But perhaps nationalist stalwarts on Raisina Hill may want to pause and consider. Sloganeering-to-order has an unhappy history.

Let us look at the more immediate corporate record. The financial services-to-hospitality group Sahara, which was wont to call itself the Sahara Parivar in its heyday, saw its apogee in the late nineties and early 2000s. It even once sponsored the Indian cricket team, usually an infallible sign that a group has hit big time in the Indian business firmament. Sometime in the early 2000s, the management directed its employees to greet each other with the words “Good Sahara”, accompanied by a US-style hand-over-heart gesture. Whether employees actually followed this instruction is unrecorded but Parvez Damania, formerly of Damania Airlines, who joined Sahara Airlines around that time (and later the now defunct Kingfisher Airlines) attested with some embarrassment to a  Business Standard colleague that he did indeed greet his colleagues in this way.

We know now that no amount of fervent sloganeering by employees (if indeed they did comply) could save the group from the variegated regulatory transgressions by its colourful founder Subrata Roy, who found himself partaking of the hospitality of Tihar jail, Asia’s largest prison complex.

For a certain kind of leader, sloganeering offers the illusion of compliance and support. No one understood this better than Adolf Hitler, who aligned Germany’s power with his own person to such a degree that “Heil Hitler” (or the variant “Heil, Mein Fuhrer”) replaced the original Nazi salute “Sieg Heil” (Hail Victory). To be accompanied by an outstretched arm at an oblique angle (Roman style), it became the compulsory form of greeting among government functionaries. There were various state security institutions to enforce this command, though in the first flush of Hitler’s victories even senior military commanders needed prompting (the greeting was not compulsory for the armed forces).  

Hitler himself took the whole shebang seriously and even worked out every day to strengthen his right arm and shoulder so that he could hold it up at the prescribed angle for hours during party rallies or military parades — a feat that burnished his reputation in his followers’ eyes. On most other occasions, he employed the foppish wave that became his trademark.

The Hitler salute became fodder for much sniggering among his European enemies. His Ambassador to Britain Joachim Von Ribbentrop, scion through marriage of a liquor retailing business, the honorific “von” acquired by persuading an aunt to adopt him, became the butt of many jokes because of his obtuse projection of his boss’s powers. After he chose to greet the British monarch with a Hitler salute, the papers dubbed him “Herr Brickendrop”.

By 1943, though, “Heil Hitler” came to acquire subversive connotations among besieged Wehrmacht soldiers as the Red Army surrounded them in the freezing bend of the Volga river at a city then called Stalingrad. That was the slogan they shouted in deep despair as they were taken into Soviet captivity, most of them never to return. The battle of Stalingrad was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.

The line between patriotism and nationalism is a thin one. George Orwell explained the first as an admiration for a way of life, reflecting loyalty to a set of values and beliefs. Nationalism, he added, was rooted in rivalry and resentment and was the enemy of peace. With India’s economic growth slowing, unemployment high and exports in trouble, it is worth wondering to which sentiment the order to airline staff to repeat a fervent exhortation to the motherland (after a slight pause) is subscribing.