Watch Nidhi Razdan: Personality cult in Indian politics

Read the full story here:   See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km

Transcript

00:00The personality cult has come to stay in Indian politics.

00:07In fact, it has cemented itself.

00:09And now hero worship and psychofancy is something that we're seeing in political parties across

00:15the board.

00:16Take a look at how Delhi's new chief minister Aatish started her first day.

00:20She left the chief minister's chair empty, saying that that was Arvind Kejriwal's chair

00:25and essentially told the people of Delhi that she wasn't there to serve them, but to serve

00:29her leader, Mr. Kejriwal.

00:31That really is an insult to the office of the chief minister because you are elected

00:35representatives who are there to serve people, not to serve a political leader.

00:40But that's how things are in the Aam Aadmi Party now.

00:44And it's no different when you look at the BJP, of course, that has seen 10 years of

00:47complete psychofancy when it comes to Mr. Modi and a complete personality cult that

00:53has built around him, despite the RSS's misgivings about this kind of politics.

00:59The fact is that Brand Modi, it's much bigger than the BJP itself.

01:04The Congress, of course, was the original villain of the piece, which had all kinds

01:08of psychofants around the Gandhi family for decades.

01:11And today, even with Rahul Gandhi, we are seeing people around him trying to build a

01:16personality cult around him as well, so he can do no wrong, he can say no wrong.

01:20If you write anything even mildly critical of him, the social media trolls of the Congress

01:25will come after you and will really try to pull you down.

01:29And that's true of social media sales of all parties, unfortunately, today.

01:34Atashi, what she did was a leaf out of OPS's book in Tamil Nadu.

01:38Remember when the Supreme Court barred Jai Lalita from being chief minister all those

01:41years ago, OPS even put a picture while he was chief minister temporarily of Jai Lalita

01:48in his office and only discharged his duties in her name.

01:53So that's the level of personality cult.

01:55It's not healthy for democracy to some extent, of course, leadership and personalities are

02:00important, but this kind of psychofancy, it's really rather sad to see how it has become

02:06so entrenched in Indian politics.