The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” That was Mark Antony’s lament, in Julius Caesar. To be sure, we all have our list of evil-doers, the bad boys of our contemporary history—VK Krishna Menon as defence minister (and Antony was right in this case, the good that Menon did is not remembered!), Sanjay Gandhi (only Khushwant Singh remembers his good deeds), Mohan Kumaramangalam (for sundry nationalisation decisions, supersession of Supreme Court judges, calls for a committed bureaucracy), and so on.
I wonder, though. Everyone remembers PV Narasimha Rao for leading the minority government that launched the economic reforms programme, for introducing India’s ‘Look East’ initiative in foreign affairs after the Soviet Union collapsed, and other such initiatives. Who remembers that he was human resource development minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government, and did little other than twiddle his thumbs in six languages—like Arjun Singh in the Rao and now the Manmohan Singh governments? So if our education system is the binding constraint for many economic sectors today, who is to blame? No one would mention Narasimha Rao. Or, when you look at the sorry state of government finances in prosperous Maharashtra, who thinks of Manohar Joshi as the chief minister in the 1990s who destroyed the government’s finances and increased sharply the state’s level of debt? And who would pin any of the blame for this on Mr Joshi’s ‘remote control’, the redoubtable Bal Thackeray?
What makes the evil that you do live after you, therefore, is fatal association with a headline-hitting event—the Chinese debacle in 1962, the Emergency misrule, the Mandal decision of 1990 in VP Singh’s case, the post-Godhra pogrom for Narendra Modi, and the trillion-dollar Iraq war for George W Bush. Less visible damage often passes unnoticed, and is never remembered. That is why Mamata Banerjee has stumbled badly in forcing the Nano project to be relocated in Gujarat. Years and even perhaps decades from now, when the Nano factory near Ahmedabad will be rolling out hundreds of thousands of vehicles every year—creating jobs in a Gujarat that does not have the engineering heritage that West Bengal does, paying taxes to Gandhinagar, giving birth to neighbourhood ancillary units, keeping a nearby port busy with cars bound for world markets—the people of West Bengal will recall that the project could have been their pride and joy, but for Mamata Banerjee.
Still, there is hope. If Lalu Prasad’s name makes you think of fodder, it also makes you think of the railway turnaround. If Mr Modi’s name brings up Godhra in any algorithmic scan of your brain, it also throws up ‘Vibrant Gujarat’. Indeed, the cleverest politicians figured out long ago that what works better than a whole bunch of good deeds is a good slogan: many poor people in India still hold Indira Gandhi’s memory dear, and are willing to forget her many transgressions, because of a crisp 1971 slogan (‘Garibi Hatao’). So what could one suggest for Ms Banerjee? How about ‘Chakri chai’ (We want work)? It may sound ludicrous, coming from her, but only a brazenly contrarian move can undo the damage. Backed up with action to create jobs, should she come to power, it could well erase the memory of a lost Nano. That would mean re-writing her political script, of course, but bigger miracles have been wrought in politics—look at the re-invention that Mayawati is attempting, from Dalit tyro to head of a rainbow coalition. It may not work, though—in which case Ms Banerjee can repeat after Lady Macbeth: “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand!”
