Is it right Prime Minister Modi cries in public?

One of the most powerful verses in the Bible is "Jesus wept". I have preached on hundreds of biblical verses in many parts of the world over several decades. But I've never had the strength to preach on these two simple words "Jesus wept".

Does the prime minister of a country have the right to cry in public? Is it proper to turn emotional in a political context? To what extent does a second or third party have the right, or competence, to sit in judgment over somebody's personal anguish?

Turning emotions into fodder for politics is a sacrilege. Emotions are vehicles of truth. In particular, inner truth, which is the essence of the sacred. Emotions, more than reason, are the shabad kirtans, sacred hymns, of human interiority. Emotions are to be deemed sacrifices offered to the Divine. Whatever is cast before human beings is at risk of getting degraded and vulgarised.

"Cast not your pearls before swine," Jesus said, "they will be trampled them under foot."

So, two things are better avoided. (a) public display of emotions and (b) sitting in judgment insensitively over the emotions of others; for who can know when it is genuine and when it is not.

Should emotions be exiled from the public sphere altogether? I'm afraid, not. We are not only rational robots but also emotions monsoons. "A mad man," GK Chesterton said, "is not one who has lost his reason, but one who has lost everything else except his reason."

Expressing the fullness of one's being is basic to human rights. Politics does not, should not, put Modi under the obligation to be only a fragment of himself in the public domain. Even a PM should have the right to cry in public.

Speaking powerfully is basic to politics. It is as an aggregate of words that most people exist in public. Or, we are only voices in the public sphere. Traditionally the disenfranchised people were denied the right to be heard in public. They were consigned to the unending night of silence.

As our species progressed along the broadways of culture, and public life began to be more and more exclusively organized in terms of power and power-play, emotions began to be increasingly distrusted. The problem with emotions is that they do not lend themselves to administrative control. Emotions came to be deemed, quite arbitrarily, as signs of weakness.

Only a weak man - a sissy, one who lacks the manly temper- gives in to emotions in public. It is proper only for women to cry in public.

This manly distrust of emotions, however, did not prevent our species from using it for the wrong purposes. Emotions are whipped up to frenzy as patriotic fervor in war-mongering. On such occasions, reason looks anaemic and emotions alone are powerful. Emotions are on a high premium, say, in connection with communal carnage. Reason becomes an outlaw. So, it is not that emotions are alien to politics. It is that we have created straitjackets for its arbitrary permissibility in public life.

The tragedy today is not that our public life is choked with emotions. It is, rather, that our private and public lives are emotion-starved. We are, as a result, less than human. We lack aliveness.

That tells on our governance and politics. A home will be a wilderness, if richness of emotion is demonetised in the economy of its relationships. It will become a lunatic asylum, if reason, and reason alone, is legal tender.

The flip-side of this is that all those who value life have a duty to respect the sanctity of emotions. They should not be prostituted even at peril of life. Abusing one's emotions as fodder for politics is abysmal self-desecration.

This, however, belongs to the domain of ethics, not politics. Other than the individual concerned, no one can really be certain if the tears are theatrical or sincere. I feel troubled when people sound cocksure of the ethical merit, or otherwise, of some else's emotional experiences. It is regrettable that uncharitable interpretations are put on the PM turning emotional in his Goa speech. His detractors should have waited. They would not have had to wait for long, after all.

The proof for the sincerity of the PM's anguish cannot be established clinically by subjecting his tears to lab tests. It can be done only in terms of the extent to which his emotions displayed impact his actions.

Policy is the bridge between the podium and the people. I feel reassured that my PM feels free enough, addressing the people, to own up his emotions. But there is a caveat.

A PM's feelings are not private tears. The essence of Modi's anguish is not that he left his family. There is no political merit in this; for no one asked him to. It is, as far as I can make out, that his personal sacrifice is being hindered from benefiting the people. He was not, I would like to believe, crying over his voluntary celibacy or renunciation of domesticity. He was, presumably, weeping over a people.

Now it is up to the PM to prove that it was indeed so. There is nothing wrong about giving in to a fit of emotions in full public view. What degrades human tears into crocodile tears is not its bio-chemical quality. It is the reluctance to redeem one's tears, while one is in unrivalled authority at the very pinnacle of state power, through corroborative, supportive action.

That alchemy that can transform the PM's tears into liquid gold of statesmanship is his transparent, courageous effort, here on, to turn the present measure truly into a war against the termites and thieves of people's welfare and the economic health of the country.

We shall wait and see:

- If the Rs 90 lakh worth black money is indeed brought back from overseas and how soon

- With what effectiveness the lakhs of crores that are now classified as NPA are recovered from willful defaulters

- What measures are put in place to avoid the future generation of black money 

- Flushes out corruption from babudom and all corners of governance 

- To what extent the much touted economic magic of the present heroic, historic step is translated into people's welfare, with an accent on the poor who are invoked with tear-jerking emotional intensity.

Only time will tell if our PM's Goa tears were sacred or thespian.

We should wait, rather than see somebody's feelings through the coloured glasses of our own emotional deadness.