Opinion| Rulers And Power: A Parable In Two Chapters

The 14th-century Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad Tughluq, was by all accounts a stern, puritanical, and yet generous ruler, characterized above all by capriciousness and a brutal exercise of power. They dragged into the streets two men who had gone into hiding, “one of them a cripple and the other blind.” The cripple was flung from a mangonel, and the blind man was dragged from Delhi to Daulatabad, “a distance of forty days’ journey.” Pieces of the blind man fell along the way; at journey’s end, “all of him that reached Daulatabad was his leg.” Meanwhile, in Delhi, the Sultan reportedly looked out upon the city from the roof of his palace, and seeing “neither fire nor smoke nor lamp”, exclaimed: “Now my mind is tranquil and my feelings are appeased.” Two years later, as if in palpable demonstration of the dictum that under despotism the life, limb, and liberty of no one barring the despot is secure, Tughluq ordered everyone in Daulatabad to march back to Delhi. As related by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, he had “a large number of copper coins struck, arbitrarily fixed their value at that of silver coins and ordered them to be used instead of gold and silver.” Every house became a mint; before too long, the value of the new money fell, copper coins were worth no more than pebbles, and “the shortage of money became acute.” Modi had a similar brainwave: in a bid to free the country of the scourge of black money, he announced to a stunned country, on the evening of 8 November 2016, that 500 and 1000 Rupee notes would immediately cease to become legal tender and could be exchanged for new banknotes. Where Tughluq sought to punish the recalcitrant citizens of Delhi by evacuating the city, Modi has imposed upon the citizens of Delhi a new project billed as the “Central Vista”. And yet, in the midst of what the established English newspaper The Guardian called “India’s descent into Covid hell”, the work on the Central Vista Project continues, day and night—if only because the workers have been, by the imperial fiat of Narendra Modi, deemed to be rendering “essential” service.