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home > News/Analysis > Archive: Selected Analytical Articles > Never a Straight Answer
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Never a Straight Answer
By Mukul Dube
[A version published in Hindustan Times as "One long monologue", 20 December 2002]
The people of the Sangh Parivar are masters of double-talk, diversion and evasion. I have yet to hear one of them give a straight answer to a straight question. In interviews to newspapers and on the electronic media, and on talk shows, their routine response to every question begins with "That is not the point" or "That is not what you should ask". They then proceed to deliver their prepared speeches.
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On a television programme some weeks back, there was mention of Shri Ashok Singhal's well publicised statement that Gujarat had been a successful experiment for Hindutva, one which would be repeated elsewhere in the country. The Parivar's male member present responded with alacrity. "You said that first," he burst out. "Those were your words." His finger was pointed at the press, specifically the channel on which the programme was being broadcast. He then proceeded to give the date and other details.
What could be more absurd? The point was that Singhal had made a boast and a threat. That someone had earlier accused his crowd of doing precisely what he boasted about, merely went to show that people had seen through the game.
Attempting to start a ridiculous argument on whether the accusation came first or the confession (in effect seeking to transfer the guilt of the act on to the accuser), was a diversionary tactic which Sangh Hindutva habitually uses. The real issue is drowned in showers and splatters of irrelevant words.
If I admit to being an ass, then my being an ass is important - not the fact that someone else called me an ass before I admitted to being one. The Parivar's people, though, are compulsive finger-pointers, forever seeking to divert attention away from themselves and their sacks full of idiocies. They just cannot rise above their infantile tu-tu-main-main level. They are pettiness personified.
Throw a pinch of potassium permanganate into glycerine, dish up a red herring, filibuster, foam at the mouth, lead people up the garden path - in short, at all costs do whatever might keep the real issue from showing through, because that is where the danger of exposure lies.
The people of the Sangh Parivar are masters of double-talk, diversion and evasion. I have yet to hear one of them give a straight answer to a straight question. In interviews to newspapers and on the electronic media, and on talk shows, their routine response to every question begins with "That is not the point" or "That is not what you should ask". They then proceed to deliver their prepared speeches.
It does not matter to these worthies what the other person is asking or saying. All that is important to them is mouthing their set pieces. It happens every time, without exception. I have seen it often enough to become convinced that it is no coincidence: these people have clearly been trained in the use of the tactic. In my own few encounters with the species, I have learnt that even the small fry are no less intellectually crooked than their leaders. This crookedness evidently forms the core of the shakha syllabus.
Reasoned discussion or argument requires that two people communicate, listen to each other, respect each other. These things are all possible even when there is profound disagreement: indeed, among civilised people they are essentials. It is not possible to have a rational or any other discussion or argument with one who pays no attention whatsoever to what you say but only takes off at a tangent of his own at every opportunity, a joker who does not build upon what you say, who does not even contradict your words before offering his alternative.
These people can only deliver monologues. An even simpler tactic is to merely shout down the opposition. They are unable to see that even the most heated arguments are in one sense co-operative ventures - the participants, or combatants, accept that they are talking about the same things. The Sangh Parivar's rewritten social contract presupposes that they themselves are the only contracting party.
Intellectual opportunism - casting about to left and right and grabbing whatever seems likely to help - is one of the clearest marks of the absence of real convictions, real ideology. This magpie approach is how the Sangh ideologues cobble together their arguments. Each individual element is generally accurate, but the combination is a weird creature indeed: skull of raccoon, neck vertebrae of giraffe, chest of parakeet, belly of mongoose, rear end of hippopotamus....
But even such grotesque assemblages cannot be demolished, because a major weapon in the Parivar ideologue's armoury is stone-walling. Many questioners have discovered that if a haywire construction is challenged, if its internal contradictions are clearly shown, the Parivar ideologue has a stock response: he will simply repeat, word for word, precisely what he said before. It is as if the other person had not spoken, did not exist. One can but give up in despair.
Firm. Unshakeable. Like a rock. Or, as a young friend said with biting accuracy, like a giant fossilised brontosaurus turd.
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