Storm in a coffee cup: How amazing, the Dutch PM can clean up his own mess!
A video clip of Mark Rutte mopping up the coffee he spilt inside the Dutch Parliament has gone viral.
There is no use crying over spilt milk. But wiping spilt coffee has its uses, as the Netherlands’s Prime Minister Mark Rutte recently found out. A small sweep for a man became a giant splash across international media, as a video clip of Rutte mopping up the coffee he spilt inside the Dutch Parliament building was shared over and over, with gushing tweets about his humility, good humour, good human-ness.
Sometimes Prime Minister can do the job of a sweeper but not in our part of the world only Mark Rutte the Prime Minister of Netherlands can act as a sweeper I am impressed by his humbleness and that's why he is very popular in Dutch people pic.twitter.com/Kdjiue4r0i
— Hamid Mir (@HamidMirPAK) June 5, 2018
Why the awe and the awws, exactly?
All Rutte was doing was cleaning up the mess he made, as any decent person is supposed to do. In fact, he was clearly not very familiar with mops, and had to be helped by the housekeeping staff on the right way to use it.
Yet, he has become an international hero.
While Indians going gaga over this is understandable – with our proud tradition of former Union ministers carrying party leaders’ slippers (V Narayanasamy with Rahul Gandhi) and top cops cleaning chief ministers’ shoes (Deputy Superintendent of Police Padam Singh with Mayawati) – why is the Liberal West so excited?
Traditionally, heads of states in western democracies have not been as up above the world so high as their Indian counterparts, if only out of consideration for political correctness. Rutte himself cycles to work, and teaches children as a side job. Britain’s David Cameron and Tony Blair have both been known to take the London Underground.
Why, then, the storm in the coffee cup over Rutte?
That in the 21st century, basic good manners in a man is supposedly worth celebrating internationally shows that the gulf between the 'rulers' and the 'ruled' is widening, even in Europe, the self-styled cradle of “liberty, equality and fraternity”.
Thus, on the one hand, we have Germany’s Angela Merkel – always a leader, never just a person, all her pictures at formal events, all her communications official statements – or we have Canada’s Justin Trudeau, PM and son of a former PM, who has become a social media darling playing the common man.
Every time Trudeau going for a walk with his family or Barack Obama “not using the air-conditioner” becomes news, the real story is that, even in western democracies, the elite and the plebeians are two very distinct categories, and people seem to be putting leaders out of reach by the very act of electing them.
This gulf, of course, is the space that leaders like America’s Donald Trump utilise, good at pretending to be “one with the people”, speaking their language, talking to them directly through social media and TV addresses.
Those who mourn the imminent collapse of the liberal order and the decline of democracy often ignore the fact that democracy was first betrayed by its own elite, by the leaders of the people, for the people, by the people who forgot they were “people”.
India, after centuries of caste inequalities and colonial rule, is used to treating its leaders as divinity, metaphorically and literally putting them on pedestals and worshipping them. The West, on the other hand, has long positioned itself as the champion of the free world, of the values of liberty and equality. It has fought wars to deliver the third world into the light of democracy. The Rutte brouhaha, however, shows clearly the coffee stains on its escutcheon.