By Aditya Aamir
Justice (retd) Markandey Katju wants a statue of LK Advani at the centre of Connaught Place in New Delhi “with this line from the Ramcharitmanas inscribed on it in gold ‘Taat Laat Ravan Mohe Maar.” Katju says this on his Facebook page. But he spells “statue” as “statute” and then implies in replies to comments that the “laat” Advani gets is that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Katju doesn’t like Modi and has called him a “fraud’; once also stating that Modi cannot be exonerated of a role in the Gujarat riots. Katju is a gadfly, a facet of his personality he kept undercover for so long as he was a Supreme Court judge. The other day, he reiterated in another Facebook post that Mahatma Gandhi was a “British agent”; that Gandhi never failed to inject “Hindu religion” in all that he did and said, thus furthering the British project to divide and rule India.
Justice Katju is a former chairman of the Press Council of India and gives the impression that if he wasn’t justice, he would have been journalist. That is said not in jest though many of Katju’s public comments do draw laughs. Very recently he said Indian media is nowhere like the US media, is incapable of doing to Modi what the US media does to Trump, i.e., keep at Modi till a frustrated Modi gets hot under the collar and labels Indian media “enemy of the people!”
In his Gandhi post, Katju asks, “By constantly injecting religion into politics for several decades, was Gandhi not objectively acting as a British agent?” Then, to add to Gandhi‘s sins, he says, “Gandhi successfully diverted the freedom struggle from this revolutionary (Chandrashekhar Azad, Ramprasad Bismil, Bhagat Singh) direction to a harmless nonsensical channel called Satyagrah(a). This also served British interests.” Besides, Gandhi’s economic ideas repelled Katju – “all nonsense and an act of deceiving people.”
Making his displeasure of Gandhi known, what does Katju want? That Katju doesn’t make public, but coming at a time when politics without religion is impossible, Katju seems to be either warning Indians or muddying the water further to further his own political agenda. The retired Supreme Court justice may not like that imputation, but it is hard to imagine Katju may not have goals other than shaping public opinion. Ask, so close to general elections, does Katju have political ambitions?
Maybe yes, maybe not. But the timing does leave people, especially journalists, guessing, including the fact that Katju has made it clear that he doesn’t like Modi and he feels the Indian media is too effete to take on Modi. Justice Katju believes public opinion lacks maturity and independence to stand up to authority. Two, media barons don’t want to rile government and readily surrender because they have other business interests and are keenly aware of how vengeful government can get.
Justice Katju might be right as far as public opinion, still incapable of standing up to political pressure, but even that is not wholly true. In fact, the ruling party and its allies are using the power of public opinion to forward their agenda in the face of judicial rulings. Like in the case of the Ram temple issue. Also, on the flip side, farmers marching to Mumbai show that public opinion is not wholly subjugated to authority. In Kerala, an entire segment of public opinion is building up against the LDF government on the Sabarimala issue.
The contention that Indian journalists compared to American counterparts succumb to government pressure because they are financially not secure and risk losing jobs if they take an anti-government line is also not completely the truth. Indians journalists in positions to shape opinion, pressurize government are not paupers. Almost all the so-called ‘celeb journalists’ are well-off and many of them live in palatial South Delhi residences, some in exclusive farmhouses. These are not all kowtowing to government.
Justice Katju does raise several questions but because he makes many outrageous statements leaves him outside the pale of serious discourse. His demand that an Advani statue be built in the middle of Connaught Place cannot be taken seriously; he’s just being sarcastic or funny. The comments that he receives in reply are equally frivolous. Mostly anti-Modi, they only go to stiffen the support for Modi further, something Katju was not aiming to begin with.
Statues are a waste of money and Katju never gets to that point. Nor does he spell out the statute on statues, if any, except to spell statue as statute, a hangover from his days as a judge and justice. His FB post that soon we’ll have statues reaching into outer space without the benefit of rockets is the “inner child” in him speaking and the “inner child” in you is that part of your personality which still reacts and feels like a child! (IPA Service)