Supreme Leader: A Camouflage to Promote Personality Cult

Ayatollah Khomeini

The world is awash with Supreme Leaders. Some countries, as Iran, do it upfront, while the others behind the facade of democracy. Supreme Leaders are supreme to all institutions. Beyond reproach, infallible; in a way divine incarnate. What they spell out is inviolable, has to be adhered to in letter as well in spirit.

Communist regimes have a long gallery of past and present supreme leaders. Though they have a layered party structure, in practice the supreme leader’ views have their way. The Indian bourgeois parties have plenty of supreme leaders. Some leaders, like Lalu Yadav and Mayawati, love to be addressed as Supremo.

The Congress is pivoted on the concept of Supreme Leader.  Mahatma Gandhi was the supreme leader of the party before Independence, and thereafter Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi. Senior Congress leader D.K. Barooah had equated Indira Gandhi with the country with his infamous slogan 'India is Indira and Indira is India’ during the Emergency.

Trump is the supreme leader of the oldest democracy, America. But his supremacy is not absolute. Checks and balances are functional there. The American Supreme Court’s recent decision on the tariffs is an example.

Narendra Modi is the supreme leader of BJP.  The party's slogans 'Har, Har Modi, Ghar, Ghar Modi' and 'Modi Hai Toh Mumkin Hai,' among others, say it all about his unchallenged status in the party. In India as well, judicial checks on the executive are active, though at times, it falters. On the Electoral Bond, Modi's supremacy was leashed.

But Iran's Supreme Leader has a divine sanction which straddles both spiritual as well as the temporal words. To criticise him invites the severest punishment. The country's Islamic ruling clique is under attack from outside. Iranians have also been agitating against their dictatorship, but they are not ready to walk a few steps down from their perch and democratise the system.

The country's bureaucracy is on a course of terrorising the protesters staying in India, directing them to delete their anti-Supreme Leader posts, warning them with the loss of their properties in their native country.

Being scared of action against them, and the memories of the regime sending thousands of youths to the gallows just for their dissent still rankling in their minds, they have started deleting such posts on social media.

Supreme Leader, Divine Representative, Charismatic Leader or Messiah of the poor or redemptory, these are epithets coined by the panegyrists of the rulers in history and in the present to promote personality cult. But they are anachronisms in a democracy.