The comic republic

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul”, B.R. Ambedkar said in a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, just before putting the Constitution of India to vote. “But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship”. If only the parliamentarians who vented their anger against a 1949 cartoon last week had bothered to read and understand the hero in whose unnecessary defence they sprang up, Indian democracy would have been spared the degrading spectacle of the government banishing a sixty-year-old sketch from the classroom.

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