Indian Political Humour: Nothing to Laugh About

by Shashi Tharoor Editor’s Note: Long before Narendra Modi said he missed wit and humour in parliament, Shashi Tharoor had been hunting through the archives for Indian political wit. In this essay that appeared in his 2007 book The Elephant, the Tiger & the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century_, Tharoor says the pickings are slim when it comes to political humour. This excerpt appears courtesy Penguin Books._ There is, sadly, very little evidence today that Mahatma Gandhi’s puckish sense of humour has been inherited by his political heirs. Asked once what he thought of western civilization, the Mahatma replied, ‘It would be a good idea.’ Upbraided for going to Buckingham Palace in his loincloth for an audience with the King-Emperor, Gandhi retorted, ‘His Majesty had on enough clothes for the two of us.’ Gandhiji was an exception: the Indian nationalist leaders and the politicians who followed them were in general a pretty humourless lot. I yield to no one, except perhaps Dr Sarvepalli Gopal, in my admiration for the extraordinary intellect of Jawaharlal Nehru, but dig deep into his writings and speeches and you would be hard pressed to come up with a good joke. The best might be the one classic epigram that he uttered. Reacting with undisguised culture-shock to his discovery of America after a trip there in 1949, Nehru said, ‘One should never visit America for the first time.’ [caption id=“attachment_2335084” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Book Excerpt[/caption] Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was no better. While researching my doctoral dissertation on her foreign policy, I read practically everything she ever said between 1966 and 1977. I can honestly say that I came across only one line that was remotely witty. In India she remarked once, ‘our private enterprise is usually more private than enterprising.’ But from what one knows of the lady, the comment had probably been scripted fur her. Sharp, if not particularly amusing, was her answer to an American journalist in 1971 about why she had refused to meet with Pakistan’s General Yahya Khan: ‘You cannot shake bands with a clenched fist.’ Both these remarks have the merit of provoking thought beyond the immediate reaction to their cleverness. But neither, alas, was typical. In his shoddy Reminiscences of the Nehru Age, the former secretary to our first prime minister, M.O. Mathai, cited only one remark of either father or daughter that he found witty. When Nehru and Indira expressed astonishment that Mathai had slept so soundly after the death of his mother, he apparently replied, ‘That shows I have a clear conscience.’ To which Indira retorted, ‘It can also mean that you have none.’ Sharp enough, but hardly an example of great wit. Cast your mind about the other remarkable figures who have marched the national stage-from the kindly elders Rajaji and JP to the grim men of iron Sardar Patel and Charan Singh, and from the notoriously unsmiling Morarji to the amiable Vajpayee and you will have to admit that, as far as political humour is concerned, our national cupboard is bare. During the national movement, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, ’the nightingale of India, came up with a couple of good cracks: her classic comment about Mahatma Gandhi’s frugal lifestyle and his army of aides-‘if only he knew how much it costs us to keep him in poverty’-is, of course, one of the great one-liners of the independence struggle. Some also ascribe to her a crack about Sardar Patel: ‘Tbe only culture he knows is agriculture.’ I had heard the line before, but was unaware it had been spoken in a political context, nor indeed that the Sardar was its intended victim, so full marks to Sarojini Naidu there. But look beyond her and past independence, and what do we find? We have had our share of political buffoons (does anyone still remember the egregious Raj Narain?) but buffoonery does not count as humour,any more than slapstick can pass for wit. The couple of honourable exceptions one can identify are, alas, among the minor political figures. Piloo Mody was probably one, but when I think back on his career I can recall only the episode of his reaction to Mts Gandhi’s paranoid charges of being destabilized by foreign intelligence agencies: he promptly pinned an ‘I am a CIA Agent’ button on his pet poodle. I am sure Mody did better than that in parliamentary repartee, but no memorable examples come to mind. One that does, however, features the now-forgotten P. Upendra, who as a Telugu Desam MP was briefly leader of the Opposition in the Lower House. On one occasion when Rajiv Gandhi appeared in the Lok Sabha on his return from yet another foreign trip, Upendra ceremoniously began a speech by saying, ‘I would like to welcome the prime minister on one of his rare visits to New Delhi.’ But where are the Indian equivalents of the great political wisecracks of other democracies? British parliamentary tradition is replete with examples of often savagely cutting humour. In 1957, Labour leader Aneurin Bevan was attacking Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd in the House of Commons when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan walked in. He promptly interrupted himself. ‘There is no reason to attack the monkey,• he said, ‘when the organ grinder is present.’ Bevan is still worshipped by misty-eyed old Labourites, but he was not universally loved within his own parry. The most famous put-down of him came ftom his near-namesake, the Labour Party’s post-war foreign secretary Ernest Bevin. Someone remarked to Bevin that ‘Nye [Aneurin Bevan’s nickname] is his own worst enemy.’ Bevin snapped back: ‘Not while I’m alive he isn’t.’ Of course a lot of political humour involves invective, which the rules of decorum oblige politicians to embroider creatively. ln 1978, Britain’s then chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, reacted to criticism from the Tory who would succeed him, Sir Geoffrey Howe, by dismissing it as ’like being savaged by a dead sheep’. The remark is still recalled fondly by political observers more than two decades later though both protagonists have long since ended their careers. Decades earlier, Winston Churchill had scornfully described the mild-mannered Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald as ‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’. This was kinder than his most famous assault on the same prime minister. In a 1931 speeeh about Macdonald, Churehill described going to the circus as a child, for ‘an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities’. He had, he said, most wanted to see ’the boneless wonder, but my parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes. I have waited fifty years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.’ The British are also fond of showing erudition in their humour. Churchill was echoing a famous line of the sixteenth-century thinker John Bradford when he commented about Sir Stafford Cripps, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes God.’ Few could have escaped the allusion to Helen of Troy when a left-wing parliamentarian in the 1960s called a female education secretary, Barbara Castle, ’the face that had sunk a thousand scholarships’. Indian literature and mythology offer plenty of material for similar humour, but few have taken up the challenge. When in the early 1970s Karan Singh, as minister for health, proved slow to act during a junior doctors’ strike in New Delhi, posters went up on the streets asking, ‘Are you Karan or Kumbhakaran [the mythological figure who slept six months a year]?’ But no MP thought of expressing such an idea in the Lok Sabha. Surely we can do better? From what we know of them, our politicians have less reason than most to take themselves seriously. Fearing that perhaps it was I who was uninformed, I asked the readers of one of India’s more literate newspapers, The Hindu, to send me examples of great Indian political humour that I might have overlooked. The results offered slim pickings indeed. The sharp-tongued Krishna Menon proved a particular favourite of Malayali readers. Advocate P.S. Leelakrishnan of Qwlandi in Ketala reminded me of Menon’s cutting comment when American arms aid to Pakistan was described as not being directed at India: ‘I am yet to come across a vegetarian tiger.’ Getting back to parliamentary humour, V. Ramachandran of Kanchipuram offered me a line whose author he could not recall. During a debate on the Indian automobile industry, an Opposition member declared, ‘The only part of an Indian car which does not make a noise is the horn.’ Full marks for wit but not, I believe (given the deafening klaxons that were always an integral part of Indian traffic jams) for accuracy. As forthe Indian equivalents of the great political wisecracks of other democracies, Leelalkrishnan again offered me the only example worth citing. When Panampilly Govinda Menon was chief minister of Travancore-Cochin (the fOrerunner of Kerala srate) in the early 1950s, he pointed to the chief minister’s chair in the Assembly and told the ambitious leader of the Opposition, T.V. Thomas, ‘For you to sit in this chair you will have to be reborn as a bug.’ And for Indians to laugh about the sense of humour of their political leaders, they will need to be reborn as hyenas.