Dr. Farooq Abdullah is of the opinion that it was my
"neech" remark that cost the Congress Gujarat. It is a view widely shared among commentators in politics, the media, the general public - and my party. I squirm, of course, at the thought that I should have brought down the party that has given me so much. I particularly regret having dashed the cup from my friend's son's lips just as triumph was around the corner.
With the Congress and the BJP racing to the finishing line neck-to-neck, it was inevitable that one indiscretion and the outcome could be tipped in favour of the opponent. That happened in a sufficient number of seats for the BJP to be pushed ahead and the Congress to be placed in the invidious category of winning merely a "moral victory."
Frankly, I was bewildered by the outrage generated by my use of what one editorial has delicately described as an "inappropriate adjective". I would call it a "double fault".
The
first fault was that my parents who believed the greatest gift they could bestow on their eldest son was a "good" education, whatever the expense. The desire to make this their first duty was so deeply ingrained in their psyche that even after my father, who was an extraordinarily successful chartered accountant and income tax adviser, was killed in an air-crash at the age of 45, when I was barely 12, my mother, struggling in the face of her husband having died intestate, insisted on keeping me and my two younger brothers in the most expensive school that India then had to offer.
But as this was in the immediate aftermath of Independence, my so-called "good "education meant education in English, mostly by Englishmen and women, in an environment where English was not only the sole medium of instruction but masters spoke to the schoolboys in English and the schoolboys spoke to each other only in English. At home too, English was the
lingua franca, my mother being fluent in that language despite being a Tamil scholar and poet who tried desperately to keep us in touch with our Tamil cultural roots. Friends would be amused to hear us conversing, she almost exclusively in impeccable Tamil, with me lamely responding in English.
What went unanticipated was the social and cultural transition that would, by the time I reached middle age, relegate English to a hangover of our colonial past, and lead to English-speaking Indians being dubbed the bastard children of Macaulay's infamous Minute on Education. All that money spent on me and my ilk has left us a parody of the imperial foreigner - a brown
sahib - in the eyes of the emerging sons of the soil, who see and project themselves - and are generally accepted as - the true children of Mother India.
My "good" education thus became my most serious handicap. The only way out was to try to learn to speak fluent - if, inevitably, frequently incorrect - Hindi. I could never get even the gender right! That was when I committed
the second double fault.
I had a basic, very basic foundation in Hindi because one of my favourite teachers was my Hindi teacher at school, H D Bhatt 'Sailesh'. He spent his creative time writing overdramatic fiction, even as I, then a teenager, was tentatively trying my hand at writing overdramatic fiction in English. We built up a rapport, with me attempting to translate his tear-drenched short stories into English and his encouraging and helping me to try to do the reverse - English to Hindi - for the ghastly short stories I was churning out (generally involving the protagonist dying in an air accident just as love began to bloom!)
Once I was out of my "good " education, my Hindi interaction increased (largely through group singing of doleful Hindi film songs) - but that was on the periphery, English being the sole languages of thinking, conversing, writing, reading and the penning of lengthy reports to MEA - the staple of service in diplomacy.
That changed considerably when I was posted to Pakistan at the age of 37. A lot of Urdu went through my ears and some through my tongue. My Hindi, such as it was, became Hindustani. Pidgin Hindi joined pidgin Urdu to develop in me a strange hybrid - pidgin Hindustani.
Then, to cut a long story short, I got into parliament at the age of 50. Earlier, as a civil servant, I had listened in awe in the officials'gallery to a masterly Hindi orator, Prakash Vir Shastri. Now I found myself on the other side of the aisle from Atal Bihari Vajayee and Sadhvi Uma Bharti. All through my first term in the Lok Sabha (1991-96), I listened spell bound to the two of them, my heart ecstatically racing at the faultless flow of their Hindi (never, ever an English word) and the deep spiritual and cultural roots that permeated their speech. I disagreed almost entirely with what they had to say but was mesmerized at the way they said it. The baggage of my "good" education could, I felt, be discarded, if only I could absorb something of this Niagara-like cataract of Hindi, the passion of their language, laced, in the case of Vajpayee, with a gentle, mocking humour as his eyes twinkled with delight at the barb he was about to unleash.
Thus it was that my beginner's Hindi improved enough for me to start using it for interventions in parliament and TV appearances, but I also saw that this "learned" language could never sound authentic. Hindi would always remain for me a "learnt language", learnt but not rooted in a milieu where allusions, literary references and colloquialisms would be part and parcel of the culture of my use of the language. For in my mind, I would translate directly from English to Hindi, instead of thinking in Hindi when speaking in Hindi. This has now proved my undoing.
It is my friend and former boss, K Natwar Singh, a native Hindi speaker but also an absolute master of the English language (he was and remains a protege of EM Forster), who awoke me from my bewilderment to an understanding of why such a massive row had been generated by my use of the "inappropriate adjective". Colloquially, he explained,
"neech" is not used literally as "low" but as "gutter". I had, in effect, compared Modi to a "guttersnipe". I would never have done that in English. Macaulay had tripped me up.
That was bad enough. But it got further worsened when Modi, then desperately campaigning in his home state to forestall what many foresaw as his party's certain defeat, seized opportunity by the forelock. Within a few minutes - or was it seconds? - of my saying what I said to a TV new agency, he grabbed the word and blatantly lied that I had said he belonged to a
"neech jaati".I never had, I never would. It was not that Modi twisted the meaning of the word. He just falsely and deliberately added another word -
"jaati" (caste) - that I had never, never used. My inappropriate adjective is on full display on YouTube for anyone who cares to look to see. Equally, Modi's blatant lie is on YouTube, for anyone who cares to look. But few, if any, have, damn the facts.
The Congress lost - marginally. Had we won, or had the margin of loss been wider, I could have ducked. But the results stare one in the face. At least ten seats were lost by a few thousand votes. Those few thousand votes could be linked to my "haw-haw education", to my "arrogance", to my "elitism", to my having been born to Brahmin parents - or to my inadequate grasp of colloquial Hindi. It is cold comfort to argue that the Congress also won some seats marginally, with a few thousand votes. The fact is that had we won the half a dozen seats that we lost at the margin, Rahul Gandhi might have been in Gandhinagar, beaming at the swearing-in of the first Congress Chief Minister of Gujarat in close to a quarter of a century.
In my mind, however, the question will always reverberate: was it my "inappropriate adjective"or Modi's mendacity in adding an utterly untrue noun -
"jaati" - to my adjective that lost us this handful of seats? And, tell me, should I sue the Prime Minister for slander, libel, defamation - or all three?
(Mani Shankar Aiyar is former Congress MP, Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.