If manners maketh man, one has only to admire Narendra Modi’s flamboyantly flowing turban and dazzling Nehru — oops, sorry, Hindustani — jacket on Republic Day to understand that clothes help to make politicians.
However, the sartorial star of the current political show isn’t India’s prime minister. It’s Xi Jinping even if his Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with 92 million members comes a feeble second to Mr Modi’s 180 million-strong Bharatiya Janata Party. The demure Mao coat that replaced Mr Xi’s usual immaculate Western suit at the CCP’s centennial celebrations was itself the message. If 40 years ago, Deng Xiaoping pushed through major reforms on the party’s 60th birthday, Mr Xi used the presumed centenary to confirm the restoration of Maoist orthodoxy and CCP supremacy over All Under Heaven that he indicated on an earlier anniversary.
I say presumed centenary because like a society belle who is coy about disclosing her age, the CCP isn’t sure of its birthday. Official records say July 23, 1921, at Mao Zedong’s house in Shanghai’s French Quarter. But who is Mr Xi to cite documentary evidence when 20 years later the Great Helmsman himself unilaterally fastened on July 1 as Foundation Day? Remembering the fate of Zhao Ziyang, China’s third premier, Mr Xi dare not take any chances.
Dazzled by Western fashion like Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, Zhao, who also had a penchant for natty lounge suits, had urged Western correspondents to report that China-made suits were smart enough for export. Lured by the profit motive into broadcasting China’s ideological heresy to the world, he must have been denounced as a dangerous capitalist-roader in that blissfully virtuous dawn before Deng’s revisionist thesis that “a market economy is not necessarily capitalist, and a planned economy is not necessarily socialist” polluted revolutionary purity. Zhao was politically purged, incarcerated under house arrest for 15 years and —the unkindest cut of all — denied an official funeral.
No wonder, Mr Xi plays safe sartorially. Doordarshan broadcasters reduced him to “Eleven Jinping” (probably to show off their familiarity with Roman numerals) and Mr Modi ignored his CCP while showering greetings on the Dalai Lama and Joe Biden. But Sitaram Yechury recognised another man for all seasons in the return of the Mao jacket.
It calls for skill, courage and strategic sense to dress to kill. King George V was relieved when Britain’s first Labour Ministry did not turn up in cloth caps and tieless collars. People ignored the ebullient Raj Narain’s call to “drop the tie and wear the loin cloth” (whence possibly the Hindi kanti ka langot for a necktie) to save Indian culture. Even the bantam-sized wrestler who vanquished the mighty Indira Gandhi from Rai Bareli in 1977 didn’t prance around in the loin cloth he advocated for others. It would have demeaned the Benares Raj connection in which he gloried.
That famous meeting-ka-kapra cartoon of a dinner-jacketed Anglicised Congress leader swigging a burra peg while his bearer held out the obligatory khadi kurta-pyjama set indicated that many freedom-fighters were also quick-change artistes. Nationalists feared that all hell would break loose if one of those stalwarts forgot to get out of his black tie ensemble before the satyagraha leading to prison that was de rigueur for patriots. But would it? The loving pride with which Indians salivated over tales of Motilal Nehru sending his shirts to Paris for laundering suggested that a dinner-jacketed swadesi might be lionised!
Having cut a suited-and-booted dash in London and Pretoria, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was cannily aware of vestiary pitfalls. His deliberate semi-nakedness which was beyond Churchill’s understanding prompted a rhyme in that Bible of the fashionable left, the New Statesman and Nation, that C F Andrews quoted: “Hitler with his Brown Shirts, riding for a fall,/ Mussolini with his Black Shirts, back against the wall,/ De Valera with his Green Shirts, caring not at all,/ Three cheers for Mahatma Gandhi, with no shirt at all.” During World War II British Tommies sang a loyally modified version ending with “Churchill in his dress shirt dominates them all,/ Three Cheers for Gandhi — no Shirt at ALL!”
Garments can be a nuisance as even Mao discovered. Mistaking his scholar’s robes for those of a priest, papal officials once hung his portrait near Pope Paul VI’s in the Vatican's press room. There’s little risk of similarly confusing Mr Xi who still wears enough for two, as Gandhi observed of George V after tea at Buckingham Palace. But the taizidang (princeling) about to be granted Heaven’s Mandate for a third term and expecting to reign forever as Son of Heaven need not worry about giving away the shirt on his back. If Mr Modi dresses up for his constituents, Mr Xi, who was back in his smart European suit at last Tuesday’s World Political Parties Summit, dresses down for his. The Mao jacket is his meeting-ka-kapra.
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