Sycophancy is basic grain of India’s political culture through ages
By K Raveendran
President Donald Trump’s admission that he is basking in borrowed glory is as disarmingly honest as it is characteristically Trumpian. When he says that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the newly minted Nobel Peace Prize laureate, called to tell him that she was accepting the prize in his honour, one can almost hear the former reality TV star in him revel in the drama of the moment. “She said she’s accepting it for me — that’s good enough encouragement for me,” Trump told his cheering supporters, his chest swelling with the satisfaction of someone who has just been anointed as a global saviour. He added, with typical flourish, that his policies had “saved millions of lives.” That Trump’s response should have such a blend of bravado and half-innocent self-admiration surprises no one; it is his political signature, honed over years of turning the art of self-promotion into a form of governance.
The context, however, is larger than Trump’s vanity. María Corina Machado’s Nobel Prize has been widely hailed across Latin America and beyond as recognition of extraordinary courage in the face of authoritarian power. For years, she had stood as the last flicker of organised dissent against the Venezuelan regime’s systematic repression. Her triumph is, therefore, the world’s moral applause for a woman who has endured arrests, threats, and disqualification to keep alive the dream of a democratic Venezuela. But her gesture toward Trump — reportedly a call in which she thanked him for the “moral and diplomatic” support his administration once gave Venezuelan opposition groups — has now been appropriated by Trump into an emblem of his greatness. The irony is inescapable: the man who has been accused of undermining democracy at home is now boasting of being honoured by one who has fought for democracy abroad.
It would have been a minor footnote in the theatre of world politics had it did not found an echo in India’s own noisy political square. Congress spokesperson Surendra Rajput, evidently inspired by the global spotlight on Machado, has drawn an unexpected comparison. He says, almost in lyrical enthusiasm, that Machado’s struggle is akin to Rahul Gandhi’s, and that just as she fought for the Venezuelan Constitution, Rahul is fighting to protect India’s Constitution. The comparison, though made in earnest, is as elastic as political imagination can stretch. It takes a considerable leap of faith to compare a woman who risked imprisonment and exile for defying a dictatorship with a politician who leads India’s main opposition party within a robust, albeit flawed, democracy. But in the age of optics, exaggeration often passes for conviction, and this was yet another instance of that.
Rajput’s remark is revealing not only for its absurdity but also for what it says about the Indian political culture’s addiction to sycophancy. There is an unending appetite among political loyalists to equate their leaders with world icons. Every small victory, every perceived act of defiance, becomes the stuff of mythmaking. The Congress spokesperson’s attempt to frame Rahul Gandhi as a constitutional warrior may have been intended as flattery, but it exposes the party’s chronic dependence on dynastic idolisation. The reflex is so ingrained that even an event as distant and contextually alien as a Nobel Prize in Venezuela becomes a peg to hang domestic hero worship on.
The irony, of course, is that Trump’s self-congratulation and the Congress spokesperson’s effusive comparison both spring from the same human impulse — the need to bask in borrowed light. Trump’s “she said it was for me” moment is not far removed from Rajput’s “Rahul Gandhi is our Machado” sentiment. Both feed on the symbolic power of association. Both also reveal the fragility of self-belief in politics today — that a leader’s moral stature often requires validation from someone else’s achievement. For Trump, it is the reflection of moral legitimacy in a Nobel glow that he cannot himself earn. For Congress, it is the hope that Rahul Gandhi’s pedestrian political journey might be elevated by analogy to a global hero of democracy.
The spectacle would have been amusing were it not for what it says about the broader decline in political seriousness. In Trump’s America, self-mythologising is part of the brand. He can claim to have saved “millions of lives” and his base will nod approvingly because, for them, belief is more important than evidence. In India, sycophancy performs the same function — it sustains belief where performance has failed. When a party is adrift, its cadres find meaning in glorifying the leader’s struggle, even if the struggle is largely symbolic. Rajput’s statement thus becomes a window into a deeper malaise: a politics that thrives not on substance but on storytelling.
If anything, the juxtaposition of Trump and Rahul Gandhi through the Machado episode illustrates how modern politics has blurred the lines between theatre and leadership. Machado’s Nobel win is a rare instance where politics and moral courage converge; Trump’s reaction, and Rajput’s mimicry of it, are examples of how easily such moral moments are trivialised by those seeking reflected glory. The Venezuelan opposition leader’s fight has been one of tangible sacrifice — rallies dispersed by tear gas, colleagues imprisoned, elections rigged — while in India, the Congress’s narrative of constitutional defence often translates into little more than speeches and social media campaigns. The comparison, therefore, does a disservice not just to Machado but to the very idea of struggle itself.
And yet, one cannot overlook the cultural continuity that runs through all this: the political theatre of flattery. In India, sycophancy is an old tradition refined over decades of dynastic politics. The leader’s image is sacred, dissent within the party is heresy, and the spokesperson’s job is less to analyse and more to eulogise. The result is an ever-expanding distance between the rhetoric of resistance and the reality of relevance.
Rajput’s comment, rather than boosting Rahul Gandhi’s stature, only highlights this dependence on overstatement. The question it raises is uncomfortable but necessary: if such is the tone when Rahul Gandhi is merely the opposition leader, what would it become were he ever to ascend to power? The prospect is enough to make one shudder — not because of fear of tyranny, but because of the suffocating chorus of uncritical adulation that would inevitably follow. (IPA Service)
