Intolerance of Dissent II: Are the other guys any better?

A friend shared an op-ed from the Hindu on facebook this morning, comparing the situation regarding Jaswant's book on Jinnah with Shashi Tharoor's book "From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond" (first published in 1997 and updated by Tharoor in 2007, according to the Hindu). The sub line of the Hindu op-ed says "A Jaswant-Tharoor comparison shows the Congress to be far more accommodating of internal criticism" and the article goes on to show how critical Tharoor's book was, about the Congress party and its dynastic leadership, and yet he was offered a Congress ticket in the 2009 general elections.

Call me a skeptic if you like, but frankly, does this really demonstrate maturity in terms of the ability to accommodate dissent, on the part of the Congress? When it comes to the art of the possible, anything is possible: convenience is key and opportunism rules. I criticized the BJP in my last post, but the Congress is not a party of saints either. As an Indian voter I follow a relative grading system and elect the lesser of the two evils (subject to change with every election, but tends to be the Congress more often than not, mostly by default), simply because I'd rather cast a valid vote than not. But as a global citizen or just another arb guy with a blog, I am free to evaluate these folks on an absolute basis.

So here was my comment to my friend's facebook post:

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. Two quick observations / points to ponder:

I think the Congress is only marginally more decent than the BJP ... if that. Tharoor wrote at a time when his future looked like he would be the UN Secy Gen, not an MP from Thiruvananthapuram on a Congress ticket. Its interesting to speculate over what might have happened if he wrote something like that now, in his current avatar. Would Sonia tolerate all that stuff he wrote about the Congress, about her husband Rajiv and her MIL Indira, if he wrote that now?

On an unrelated note - wonder why Vidya Subrahmaniam considers it necessary to translate the word 'toddywalla'. Or it might have been Tharoor in the original, just quoted verbatim in the article. In any case it is not an accurate translation: the word for toddy in English is .. guess what? Toddy! Not Liquor. Why do Indians tend to have an international audience in mind while writing in English?

Authoritarianism is not the prerogative of the BJP alone (just in case my last post suggested that I thought so), and in the history of Indian politics, several politicians have been sacked by their parties for dissent. In the more recent past, the former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee was expelled from the CPI because he did not toe the party line vis-a-vis the confidence vote in July last year. It may be that the post Indira Gandhi Congress is afflicted by a milder strain of the virus of authoritarianism, but to make up for that, there's the fact that in their case, authoritarianism is patrimony -- inherited and passed down the generations as family legacy. Even their pet canary commands more authority than the common koyal that might have accidentally come to power, except perhaps that it only commands it and does not demand it. Not overtly, at least -- their canaries are too sophisticated for that.

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