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ShareMumbai: While American politicians have been churning them out, their Indian counterparts are scarcely visible on the shelves of book stores. DNA surveys the few titles available on the netas who will be battling it out at the electoral hustings this month.
Most American politicians mark their arrival on the national scene with their policy declarations or their life stories. Barack Obama had done three books: Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance (2004), The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream (2006), and Change We Can Believe In (2008) by the time he sought presidential nomination in 2008.
His Democratic rival Hilary Clinton did her own life story, Living History (2004), for a fat sum after she stepped down as a two-term First Lady of the USA. Of course, the Americans have well-oiled, evolved machinery for the writing job. They haveresearch teams, ghost-writers, co-authors and collaborators. In India, the political writing business is not even in its infancy. You hunt in vain for information about our politicians. What little you get is in the badly-written bio-data that gets posted on the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha member sites and directories.
Our politicians love to hear their own voice. But they do not seem to love the magic of words. There was a time when Indian politicians loved toexpress themselves through pen and ink. Jawaharlal Nehruwrote tirelessly and with charm too. The Selected Writings Of Jawaharlal Nehru remains an unfinished project despite nearing 30 volumes. Mahatma Gandhi was not the literary man that Nehru was, but the Collected Works Of Mahatma Gandhi stretch to 100 volumes!
Other major political leaders such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Vallabbhai Patel, Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad, and Govind Ballabh Pant had all kept a constant flow of letters and other communications. And each one of theirwritings runs into several volumes -- a veritable historical treasure.
Come to the present and we hit an arid patch. Apparently, our politicians don't feel the urge to record their views and write about their lives. When a biography of a political leader of prominence does appear, as has been happening in the past few years, it comes as a huge surprise. Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati, two powerful women who will play a crucial role in the Lok Sabha elections this summer, now have their biographies in the market: Sonia: A Biography (2009) by Rasheed Kidwai and Behenji: A Political Biography Of Mayawati (2008) by Ajoy Bose.
Both are unofficial; in other words, written without their official consent. They did not object to them, but they did not lend a helping hand in the writing of them. Is it a sense of modesty, an Indian sense of self-effacement that makes our leaders averse to tomes being written about them? The motives are less noble than that. What they fear most is revealing their vulnerable selves to the world. They do not want their ideas and their lives to be scrutinised.
Rashid Kidwai is a journalist who has been on the Congress beat for many years. In his biography of Sonia, he has confined himself to her political career, touching lightly and gingerly on her personal and pre-political life before 1998, the year she became the president of the Congress party. He does start his narrative with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, and how Sonia cried her heart out through the night when she got the tragic news.
But he quickly moves on to politics, the safe, public terrain. The only other significant insider detail he weaves into the story is the meeting of the working committee of the party when Sharad Pawar raises the foreigner issue, and Sonia Gandhi gets up and walks to the door. At that point Arjun Singh follows her to the door and requests her with folded hands to come back. It is the kind of detail that makes a biography riveting but there aren't too many of them in the book.
Ajoy Bose, too, wrote about Mayawati without her help. Though he spoke to her colleagues and critics, nobody wanted to express their perceptions and views on record. So, the biographer may get to know a lot many things but he cannot include them in the story because they cannot be attributed to anyone. Bose assiduously tracks the progress of the Dalit leader who disarmingly flaunts her ambition to be the first Dalit prime minister of India.
Sankarshan Thakur, another journalist, who wrote a book on Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Lalu Prasad Yadav titled The Making Of Lalu Yadav: The Unmaking Of Bihar (2000) had a slightly different experience. He says there were times when Lalu gave him a lot of access and talked to him, revealing details about his childhood. For example, he explained to Thakur the reason behind his hair-style, which goes back to the beatings he got at school. But there were also times when he just turned away. When the book got written, he told Thakur about the things he did not like about the book. But Lalu is an exception. He is an extrovert who understands the value of exposure and is relatively unafraid of criticism and ridicule because he is sure of his social and political base.
It is a curious fact that all these three biographies have been done by journalists. Kidwai, Bose and Thakur are convinced that political scientists in this country are incapable of writing political biographies. Bose feels that political scientists look down upon the task as too trivial and beneath their academic dignity. Kidwai thinks that political scientists are lost in the world of theory and just do not know how to deal with the real world of politics and politicians. Thakur is far more blunt. He says that they cannot bring themselves to write a straight sentence -- convoluted jargon is their forte -- and that why they cannot get down to the task of writing a readable political biography.
They also spell out the dangers and pitfalls of journalists writing political biographies. Most of the time, it is believed that these journalists are close to the politicians about whom they write, and that they are doing it for stated and unstated rewards. They say what makes a political biography credible is the personal distance that the journalist maintains with the politician he is writing about.
If this be the state of political biographies, what about political autobiographies or memoirs? A conspicuous political autobiography has been the 1,000-page tome of the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, LK Advani, titled My Life. It was written after he made that famous speech in Karachi about Mohammed Ali Jinnah being secular, and as a result he had fallen from grace in his own party. It was an introspective moment. But what emerged was a listless political diary of sorts. The excitement of getting a peek into the happenings inside the BJP is just not there.
Another BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, too wrote his political memoir, A Call To Honour, but it too did not reveal any salacious details. All that came out of it was that there was a mole in PV Narasimha Rao's office who worked for the Americans. And he would not name the mole! It was indeed tantalising, but it did not go beyond that.
Will we ever get an exciting political biography in India? Thakur feels that it is difficult because Indian politicians never retire, and they are forever hoping to get some assignment or the other. So, they would never dare spill the beans at any time. Indian politics is exciting and the cupboards are overstuffed with skeletons. But they will rarely tumble out. All we will ever get to know will be in the form of unconfirmed tales, rumours which will never transmute into facts.
