New Delhi, Oct. 31 -- The dead have one enormous disadvantage in politics: they cannot answer back. They cannot interrupt a press conference, challenge a statistic or ask why a problem that supposedly began on their watch remains unresolved years after they left office. Thus, the living summon them whenever explanations become inconvenient.
When America plunged into the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover became the face of economic failure. His successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, promised a 'New Deal' to a country desperate for recovery. The crisis was real, the suffering immense, and Hoover's record deserved scrutiny. Yet the Depression was also a reminder that economic catastrophes rarely have a single cause, and that inheriting a crisis does not absolve a successor of the duty to confront it.
Hoover left office in 1933. History has spent decades reassessing what he did, what he failed to do and what circumstances placed beyond his control. The dead, it turns out, can be blamed quickly and understood slowly. That is the peculiar convenience of political memory. A predecessor's failures can be reduced to a slogan; a successor's responsibilities require answers. The former fits neatly into a speech. The latter may demand an explanation of why promises remain unfulfilled.
History's Long Shadow
Across the world, departed leaders continue to inhabit political arguments long after they have passed on. Margaret Thatcher's economic legacy remains contested in Britain, where debates about inequality, industry and the role of the state still carry the imprint of her years in power. Her admirers see a leader who changed the country's direction; her critics question the social costs of that transformation. Both positions deserve examination. Neither can settle every argument about Britain's present by invoking Thatcher's name.
Mikhail Gorbachev presents an even more complicated inheritance. To many outside Russia, he helped bring the Cold War to an end. To many Russians, he remains associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the upheaval that followed. His legacy cannot be understood through a single verdict, still less through the convenience of choosing whichever part of his record best serves a contemporary argument.
This is what history does: it complicates. It forces us to distinguish decisions from consequences, intention from outcome and responsibility from coincidence. Political rhetoric, by contrast, often seeks to simplify.
The past matters profoundly. Policies can shape institutions for generations. Wars, economic decisions and constitutional arrangements can impose costs long after their architects have died. To insist that today's leaders acknowledge those consequences is reasonable. To suggest that the mere existence of an inherited problem settles the question of present responsibility is not.
Question of Inheritance
Every government inherits a country it did not create from scratch. It inherits public institutions, laws, infrastructure, international commitments, social divisions and economic conditions. Some are assets; others are liabilities. Almost all are the accumulated result of decisions made by several governments, alongside forces no government fully controls.
The temptation to blame a predecessor is, therefore, not confined to any ideology or political party. It is a recurring feature of power. Today's critic becomes tomorrow's incumbent; today's incumbent may eventually become tomorrow's cautionary tale.
But inheritance has two sides. A government cannot claim credit for every favourable condition it encounters while attributing every difficulty to those who came before. Nor can it be expected to erase every historical disadvantage in a single term. The fair test lies between those extremes: what did it inherit, what choices did it make, what progress did it achieve and what remains unfinished?
These are harder questions than asking who started the trouble. They require evidence, comparison and an honest accounting of constraints. They also require political leaders willing to accept that circumstances can explain a failure without indefinitely excusing it. Democracy is not a system in which any administration begins with a clean slate. It is a system in which each administration must answer for what it does with the slate it receives.
India's Living Past
India, too, has a long political memory. Jawaharlal Nehru's decisions, Manmohan Singh's economic record and Atal Bihari Vajpayee's tenure continue to invite argument. Their legacies are different, and none should be placed beyond scrutiny simply because the men are no longer alive.
Nehru's choices helped shape the institutions and policy assumptions of independent India. Some are still defended; others have been questioned, sometimes fiercely. Manmohan Singh's years in office remain part of debates about economic reform, growth and the direction of public policy. Such assessments are legitimate. History is not an exercise in protecting reputations from criticism.
Vajpayee offers a useful reminder that political inheritance does not belong to one party. The former prime minister left behind a record that can be examined on its own merits, without treating every achievement or difficulty of his successors as a simple continuation of his policies. His legacy, too, deserves neither automatic praise nor convenient blame.
The point is not that India's former leaders should escape criticism. It is that criticism should illuminate the record rather than become a substitute for examining the present. If any policy has created a lasting problem, establish the connection. If a decision had consequences that remain visible today, years or decades later, explain them. But the passage of time must not turn a historical argument into a permanent exemption from contemporary accountability.
A country's past belongs to its citizens, not to whichever political formation finds it most useful at a given moment. The dead should be neither sanctified nor summoned as all-purpose culprits.
The Living Must Answer
There is also a human cost to this endless backward glance. Citizens do not experience governance as a contest between historical reputations. They experience it through the quality of public services, the security of their livelihoods, the reliability of institutions and the opportunities available to their children. They need explanations for present conditions, along with credible plans to improve them.
A government may be right to point out that a problem is decades old. It may be right to argue that a predecessor made a costly mistake. But it must then explain what it has done to address that problem, what obstacles remain and what citizens can reasonably expect next.
The same standard applies to the opposition. Criticising those in power is essential to democracy. But blaming every present difficulty on the current administration is no more persuasive than blaming every inherited difficulty on a departed one. Accountability is meaningful only when it is consistent.
The dead cannot answer questions, but history can still interrogate them. Records survive. Decisions can be reconstructed. Claims can be tested against evidence. The proper response to a disputed legacy is not silence or reverence, but serious examination.
The living, meanwhile, have something the dead no longer possess: the authority to make decisions, change course and accept responsibility for their consequences. That is both the privilege of power and its burden.
One day, today's leaders will also become the subjects of speeches, arguments and historical verdicts. Their successors will inherit their achievements, their mistakes and the problems they could not solve. They may be praised, criticised or blamed for conditions that emerge long after their departure.
Perhaps that is why patience is such a fitting quality to attribute to the dead. They can wait while the living argue over who was responsible. They can wait while today's explanations become tomorrow's historical evidence. They can wait for the record to grow more complete, and for the distance of time to separate genuine accountability from political convenience.
The dead are remarkably patient. The living, however, should have to answer for their own time.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.