Single personality disorder

The tendency to personalise all serious issues is like a chronic disease with us. And nobody is immune to this. Nothing, no ideology, scholarship or experience or wisdom protects us from it. It clouds our judgment and forces us to make blunders based on likes or dislikes for individuals or our own prejudices. The obvious trap then is to address that individual first, ignoring the “issue”, and results usually are disastrous. Just like the Indian Cricket team getting all wound up about sorting out that mystery spinner Ajantha Mendis in the recent Asia Cup final, forgetting that all they needed, by the time he came on to bowl, was 196 runs at less than 5 per over. All somebody needed to do was to push the front foot forward and defend or pad out those ten overs from Mendis, as you would to save a Test, and the Asia Cup would have been won. But, instead of the target of 274, and the victory, the entire team got fixated on Mendis, and perished.

Moving from Mendis to Manmohan, you may say, is rather far-fetched and frivolous. But it is neither. Because the one reason the critics of the nuclear deal, both on the left and the right, have gone wrong is that they overly personalised it. For the Left and its intellectual supporters, this was not a path-breaking agreement between the United States and India, two of the world’s most important nations but a “deal” between Manmohan and Bush. Similarly, for the BJP, it was not “India” continuing to build on the foundations they had laid for a paradigm-shifting strategic relationship. It was just Manmohan Singh working out a private arrangement with Bush and dragging the nation along with him.

Then, once you personalise an issue like this, the rest, the adjectives, the prejudices, the judgments follow. So for the Left, it was a deal between one “international criminal”, Bush, the most hated American president of all time, and Manmohan Singh, that hateful Johnny-come-lately into the Washington consensus, a socialist turned card-carrying neo-liberal in love with himself. That is why the Left still attacks the deal more in terms of Manmohan Singh having dragged the country, the UPA and even his own party into a crisis just “to keep his word to George Bush”. Take note, therefore, that in all these vicious attacks over the past few days, there is not a word against the Congress, any of its other UPA allies, and definitely, definitely not a whimper against Sonia. On the contrary, Pranab Mukherjee is now an honest man, and a victim of betrayal as much as the Left, irrespective of how strongly he himself may support the nuclear deal.

... contd.

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