Maya does as Mao did

The real tragedy about Mayawati’s statue spree is that she shares that attribute with a long list of rogue absolutist rulers.

How do we respond to the announcement that Mayawati, the CM of India’s most populous state, UP will shortly inaugurate 40 public statues, including 6 of her own? Megalomania does not accept distinctions among different regime types. Power engenders vainglory to some degree or other in every ruler. Statues become obvious choices due to their endurance (resistance to everything dismantling by succeeding rulers).

Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) was a hubristic man but he too was convinced that his statues should be carved in a particular pose, which approximated that of the gods. The political capital drawn from Caesar’s imitation of the celestials in stone was to institutionalize the concept of ‘divine origin’ of the ruler.

In the modern era, communist dictators designed architectural principles with an eye on maximizing legitimacy and propaganda benefits. Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) initiated Socialist Realism to instill the ideology of the Bolshevik Party via the cult of personality. Stalin’s statues were built with religious frenzy across the USSR and Eastern Europe between the 1930s and the 1950s as a way of drilling his totalitarianism into people.

In China, Chairman Mao Zedong (1893- 1976) unleashed an unparalleled wave of intense artistic portrayals of himself as a muscular superman who was ever so benevolent. Mao’s statues, posters and official portraits had to be displayed in every Chinese home during the Cultural Revolution. Those who failed to do so were pounced upon by the enforcers as lacking proletarian values. Statues were crucial for Mao to place himself at the centre of politics as someone whose word was commandment. The involvement of the People’s Liberation Army in proliferating Mao’s self aggrandizing sculptures and cutouts throughout the country sent an additional signal that the supremo had the guns to back up his cruel social re-engineering goals.

Fascist authoritarians had their own pageant of statues and their subsequent ‘dedication’ to the masses. Italy’s Benito Mussolini (1833-1945) imposed their statues on every street and town centre during their heydays in a blitz that few could ignore. One had to be blindfolded to avoid gazing at the innumerable larger than life and heroic portrayals in stone of these brutal patriarchs. Fascist sculpture was well integrated into the overall jingoism and racism that these regimes wished to propagate through visual aids.

In our own times, two tyrants in particular used statues to entrench their personalistic rule in Islamic world. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) ordered gigantic statues and hoardings of himself to be plastered across his domain as a tactic of reaching out to different sections of the society and literally cementing his long dictatorship. Some of the Saddam’s statues showed him as a pious Muslim in Arabic robes while others had him in business suit brandishing a rifle. The attempt was to endear himself to the diverse stakeholders of Iraq and to plant his authority as the unrivalled individual.

Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov (1940–2006) was so despotic that not only were his costly statues and portraits erected compulsory and ubiquitously, but even places and natural phenomena in the country had to be named after him. His resplendent statues at every corner were deadly warning to potential opposition figures and their followers that he and his statue machinery were stalking them. Statues helped Niyazov send the ominous message coined by George Orwell: “Big Brother is watching you.”

That Mayawati the most dynamic elected leader of India’s downtrodden dalits should be in the company of such a long list of rogue absolutists is a commentary on her self- love and political craftiness. Her statue-mania is a damning verdict on the monarchical-cum-feudal tendencies dogging Indian democracy and also a clue to rational caste-based ideological calculations in her own political context.

---The author is associative professor of world politics at the Jindal Global Law School.

[ BY SREERAM CHAULIA ]