By Valson Thampu

Character, they say, is who you are when the lights are off. It is also who you are when the heat is on.

Hilary and Trump slugged it out. Out of their love for each other, each said and did everything imaginable (and unimaginable) to prove the other better than oneself. They competed furiously on escalating levels of meanness. The Presidential election hit the zenith of a new low.

If Trump and Hilary have blazed the trail, would our politicians suffer themselves to be left far behind?

What are you to do, when you have nothing to recommend yourself to anyone? And, at the same time, have to package and present yourself as the hot favorite?

Simple. Attack your adversaries. Malign, defame, abuse, vituperate, and paint them black, head to foot. When your adversaries are daubed with muck, you begin to shine forth as a flawless object of irresistible attractiveness! (What the former RBI Governor, Rahuram Rajan, described to his peril –drawing from H. G. Wells- as being the one-eyed king in a land of the blind.)

That’s ok as far as it goes. But how far can it go?

I call you, my rival candidate, a donkey and you, my rival candidate return the compliment (well-deserved, do doubt) with abuses and expletives of exquisite taste, drawing richly from laudable familiarity with diverse members of the animal kingdom. I accuse you, my electoral foe, of supplying electricity to elephants and denying the same to tigers and tortoises; and you, my cultured fellow wrestler of formidable prowess, damn me on picking the back-pockets of peacocks. You, my electoral pugilist, accuse me of serving secret dinners to pappus and hippies and I, your grandfather’s sister’s great uncle’s puny grandson, accuse you of sharpening your teeth, pricking your ears and smacking your lips, at not being thus served.

And together we continue to contribute to the national stock of putrid entertainment.

Every piece of our meanness, every syllable of our boorishness, every punctuation of our pre-historic barbarity is beamed nation-wide. We become the new norm, the edifying benchmark for the next round of heady rallies, speeches and patterns of abuse!

Our netas and ummeedvars in the next elections will start where we now leave off. They will take this game of free-wheeling insinuations and verbal abuses to a new height (never say a new low! How can lowness be associated with a process which everyone from the Prime Minister down invests with legitimacy?)

Now you get back home. Your children too are back from school. Both want to watch TV, but different programmes at the same time. They fight for the remote.

“Give me the remote, you jackass,” shouts the younger son to the elder.

“How dare you call me a jackass, you channel-hogging, remote-grabbing dope?” the elder one responds and restores the balance in the unfolding, adversarial face-off.

The fight to secure monopoly over the remote gains in intensity and vituperation. Every inventive, speculative, demeaning appellation and classification of pedigree is deployed. Each lash of the tongue despoils the dignity and culture of the home.

At the height of it, you suddenly emerge from behind the arras. Applaud aloud the splendid performance of your sons. And present your evaluation report to the effect that your younger son has outperformed the elder one in the corrosiveness of the abuses improvised.

I doubt, if you would.

You would, perhaps, spank the brats for behaving like guttersnipes. You will pack them off to their respective rooms, declaring yourself to be ashamed of their boorish behavior.

In that event a question would arise: shouldn’t the bottom-line norms of passable conduct that we insist on vis-a-vis children be also applicable to those who hog public visibility? Instead, why are we pretending to be entertained by what, by all reckoning, is outrageous conduct on their part in full public view?

Should desperateness of electoral compulsions be allowed to condone the spewing of muck into public consciousness?

Or should we stand up in attention, as we do when the anthem is sung, when these patriots and exemplars of conduct hit newer and newer heights and articulate sentiments that Joseph Conrad would describe as “the gush of the sewer”?

Our children are hit by this avalanche of boorishness. They are caught in this unedifying eddy of mean-mindedness. The public discourse is polluted by these putrid exhalations. Our national character is denatured by this discourse of indecency.

We must protest.

What is life worth if its felicity is undermined? What will happen to patriotism if abusing and defaming each other as fellow citizens is its expression? Where should the national motto be re-located once we turn damning each other with lies into a high art?

Those of us who have watched street fights break out would know how they result from unfettered indulgences in public spats. One man’s intemperate, even unwitting remark, provides the trigger. The person offended at this feels obliged to return the compliment with interest which, then, becomes the new benchmark for issuing the next abuse. A spiral of aggravating abuses and provocations follows. The emotional energy built up eventuates into fisticuff when verbal abuses no longer match the intensity of the super-heated anger mutually developed. Hands take over the talking.

A similar thing seems to be underway. Every negative and abusive word uttered, every provocative insinuation issued, every communal taunt and every regional slur, swells the smoldering heap of hostility and indignation. The soul of the nation begins to choke in the poisonous fumes bellowing from this volcano of public intemperateness.

Voters insult themselves and do a terrible disservice to the country by rewarding, encouraging, even tolerating, this lamentable display of incivility.

Until we express our uncompromising disapproval of this national slur, candidates and parties will not bother to seek our votes on the basic of the good they do, rather than the bad and the foul they speak.

(Valson Thampu is the former principal of St Stephen’s College, Delhi)