I’m sure many readers would have seen clips from the nearly hour-long interview/conversation Kangana Ranaut had with Navika Kumar (henceforth NK) during the recent Times Now Summit. If you haven’t, it’s worth skimming through, just to experience some of the choicest moments. In it, Ranaut (henceforth KR) brings all her famous attributes on stage as she answers NK’s mostly gentle and encouraging questions, enunciating clearly in Hindi and English, speaking with supreme confidence, maintaining the kind of poise you expect from leading film stars and other celebrity personalities.
Very quickly, we learn that KR’s grandfather was a freedom fighter in the Congress and that he was also of a right-wing bent of mind, a proud Hindu, and that KR and family draw a lot of inspiration from this late centenarian. Down the line, KR also joins great Congress leaders to her grandfather’s ideology when she drops a remark about ‘Patel and Shastri, who had right-wing inclinations.’ Asked about today’s Congress and Rahul Gandhi, her response is a) to tie him to the nepo culture she claims she has had to fight in Bombay and b) to claim that god hasn’t gifted him with what it takes to be a leader — “Voh nahi ho sakta, aap baad mey software nahi download kar saktey, voh download ho ke aata hai… [some of the audience applaud] ... voh bhagwan bana ke bhejte hain!” Throughout the interview, she leaves us in no doubt as to who she believes has received the requisite manufacturing beneficence from the almighty: Narendra Modi, according to KR, is an “ansh” of Rama, he has great “tej”, he shines with the brightness of the sun before whom the Opposition leaders are but small flickering candles.
But before she fully expands on Mr Modi’s alleged attributes, she has a few impassioned words to say about some of our great leaders from the past. “... jab hamey azadi mili, the first prime minister of India, Subhas Chandra Bose, voh kahan gaye?” (When we got Independence, the first prime minister of India, Subhas Chandra Bose, where did he go?) NK is obliged to softly point out that Bose was not our first prime minister. KR leaps upon this with tigerish energy. “Nahi thhe kyun!?” “Why wasn’t he [the PM]? Where did he go? Why was he disappeared?” Again, NK has no choice but to ask: [are you suggesting that] “So, the Congress disappeared him?” KR pauses for a beat and sidesteps a yes/no reply. “I’m just saying that this guy, who brings us our independence, who gives his blood for the nation... he isn’t allowed to even land in India!... And those who were watching TV in jail, they end up running the country!”
Now, some other interviewer might have stopped KR right here to point out that by most accounts Bose died in August 1945, two years before Independence. And if someone wanted to give KR more rope, they could have teased out of her exactly which Bose-didn’t-die-in-plane-crash conspiracy she believes in and then asked her to explain how the Congress would have had any control over the un-dead Netaji’s movements. Someone else might have pointed out to KR that had the autocratic but secular Bose assumed power in India, he would likely have had a much rougher way of dealing with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha than did the democracy-and-non-violence-addicted Jawaharlal Nehru.
However, NK is not that interviewer and she lets KR further expand into her song. Continuing about our leaders (the ones who were languidly watching television in jail in the 1940s), KR exclaims, “Aren’t they an extension of British people? I have proof that they were!” What is this proof? KR provides it in a tone of vehement triumph: “Why didn’t Patel become our prime minister? Because he didn’t know English! This is quote-unquote: “‘Sardar is a better leader but he is not good with English.’ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi!” Again, someone else could have asked KR a few difficult questions about her confident spouting of what she calls history. For instance, does she know that M.K. Gandhi, Sardar Patel, J.L. Nehru as well as M.A. Jinnah were all barristers who had qualified in London at the Inns of Court? Does she understand that qualifying as a barrister in London in the late 19th/early 20th century meant you had to have serious command over the most complex English? Has she never read any of Patel’s letters in English to various people? Does she know that the Sardar had already started to struggle with ill-heath from the mid-1940s onwards, and that all the jail years and the stress of overseeing India’s painful birth took a huge toll on him? Does she realise that he died in December 1950 after nearly two years of serious illness? Or that up until SVP’s death, he and Nehru achieved what they did because they worked as a team?
We can laugh and simultaneously be appalled at this unfortunate woman, at her peacocking delusions, her abysmal ignorance, and her radioactive reverse-intelligence, but at some point we need to focus away from her and draw the necessary lessons. Born in 1987 into a middle-class family, KR’s absurd assertions are a sign of one of independent India’s greatest failures — our inability to educate not only generations of our poor but also such a large percentage of the reasonably privileged. Growing up as KR does in post-liberalisation India, she not only has no real sense of our history but as a society we’ve also failed to deliver any download of a basic sense of honesty and justice. The lesson absorbed by far too many of those who grew up post-1991 is that if you can blag your way to a particular goal, it’s okay to jettison knowledge, rigour, questioning, empathy and ethics. Ignorance attracts ignorance like magnets cleaving to each other, and this spread of anti-knowledge and anti-facts and, furthermore, the total indifference to these critical fallouts in our world-view are what have allowed ruthless power-grabbers to manipulate millions of our young and seriously damage their future.
