Immortal Politicians

Politicians’ world over can exist in only two forms, as ‘mortals’ or as ‘immortals’. While President Clinton proved to be as much or more of a ‘mortal’ than us, normal face-less beings, we have in India given birth to another ‘immortal’ politician.

While we have been used to being ruled by mortal politicians, it has been quite awhile that we have had the chance of being ruled by an immortal politician, a larger than life figure. With the departure of the Gandhis and Nehrus from our world, we Indians, suckers that we are to fawning and drooling, have had a vacuum in our lives. Mrs G partly quenched our thirst of needing to have a demi-God until she slammed on to the ground as Icarus, for having flown too close to the sun by imposing an ‘emergency’ in a land that abhors dictators. The Nehru-Gandhi clan has again risen to the occasion and provided us much needed succour with the emergence of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, a saint in the garb of a human; one who relinquishes the throne for the sake of saving India.

With one masterstroke she, till the 19th of May Circa 2004 a mere mortal, has risen to the ranks of immortals and has assured her place among the portraits of Nehru and Gandhi who stare down at us from every conceivable wall of our seats of government. We Indians have had multiple earth shattering orgasms on the night of the 19th, let the date be etched in our memories, to see a Gandhi, true to form, rising, as it were, as a Phoenix, straddling over us as Gulliver did in the land of Lilliputians. I wonder if Ashoka the Great was wooed to reclaim the throne in the same manner that the Congressmen did; falling over each other, to request, nay plead, cajole ‘Madam’ to please take the throne; alas she was unmoved! She did not heed to any of the innumerable petitions, nor did she let her ‘desire’ fall prey to pictures of a Congressman holding a pistol to his head, held aloft on a makeshift podium, declaring that the gun shall bring to him his deliverance, if she were to abdicate the throne. As an aside, not a single Congressman either shot himself dead or did any of the terribly ghastly things that they threatened to do if ‘Madam’ did not choose to revert to being a ‘mortal’ again. I must say that ‘Amma’ down south has a much more stronger band of followers who regularly ‘immolate’ themselves if their beloved ‘Amma’ were, so much so as to, catch a cold.

The Indian media, specifically the print guys, fell into a mighty swoon. The editors and correspondents, for the first time in their lives, were left groping for words. How does one describe such rare occurrences? Who in this day and time gives up power and relinquishes the grand trappings of office and pelf? So thus we gave birth to Saint Sonia, a larger than life figure, an Indian who is more ‘Indian’ than us, a foreigner who has taught us the long lost art of ‘sacrifice for the larger good’. Her ‘inner voice’ now has more credibility in the world media and is quoted verbatim in the haloed British parliament than any other ‘external’ voice. The human mind, a fascinating piece of machinery, cannot see an object or person in seclusion without trying to ‘categorise’ it and express it in degrees of comparison, and so Saint Sonia is now in the same league with Mother Teresa, Annie Besant etc.

The BJP, a party now, with an extremely severe case of both ‘feet and hand in the mouth’ and ‘eat crow’ disease, has been hard hit with one of those President Bush’s ‘precision guided’ missiles. For a change, the precision guided missile did turn out to be ‘precision guided’ and hit the target, bang on, with pinpoint accuracy. Elections 2004 had already robbed the BJP of its sheen and had sent its leaders into a dumbfounded silence, and while party stalwarts Vajpayee and Adwani locked themselves up, nursing their wounds, the children came out to play.

Big ‘bindi(ed)’ Sushma, out to avenge her sidelining by the likes of Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley, declared her ‘Savitrick’ zeal for India, in the full glare of the media lights, and presented to all her viewers of the ‘imaginative kind’ a fascinating image of her tonsured visage, sleep-on-the-floor stiffness and more dark circles round her eyes, what with eating only ‘channa’! Saffron robed ‘sanyasin’ Uma wanting to go on leave for a long time and searching for the opportune time promptly submitted her ‘resignation’ to the party president and not her state Governor to take an extended all-expenses-paid sojourn to ‘Kedarnath’ and ‘Badrinath’ to cleanse her and ‘India’s’ soul. Govindacharya, the guy with the oily mirror-like shiny pate, crawled out of the woodworks and in his immaculate Hindi pouted why Sonia wouldn’t be fit to be the Prime Minister. Alas, Saint Sonia robbed them of their issues and me the opportunity to see Sushma’s bald visage.

What the BJP needs is a good doctor to save it from being hospitalised. It also needs to send all its workers with any of the two diseases to the ‘Abu Garib’ prison in Iraq for some ‘American-Contractor’ treatment, to drill some sense into them and fully purge them of their really dreadful aliments.

But I digress; Saint Sonia is due much more than we give her credit for. She has calculated the pros and cons in taking up the journey towards sainthood and I dare say the pros outstripped the cons by a mile. I do admire the lady and her ‘inner voice’. It would not be unfair to say that her inner voice did speak out at the most opportune time and thereby let the cat out among the pigeons. While we can all pontificate about how a non-Indian can become a Prime Minister and that we, a mass of a billion people cannot find a single politician amongst us who is capable of leading the country forward, the larger issue of experience (in public life), capability and maturity needs to be understood. A roll call of all the Prime Ministers that we have had so far will reveal that they were men and women of experience, with long years spent in public life and though someone like Indira inherited the mantle from her father nevertheless she was exposed to the socio-politico milieu right from her childhood. The least experienced politician to take the high chair was Rajiv, though he was groomed for some years, after the tragic death of his brother Sanjay, by his mother and had some experience in ground level work as an AICC General Secretary. Dolts like Viswanath Pratap Singh and Deva Gowda too came with years of political experience, though it is besides the point that the muck really hit the fan during their tenures (remember the Mandal-Kamandal fracas).

Sonia Gandhi had none of the credentials and to boot she was a reluctant entrant to politics. That she did enter politics was due to the fact that the Congress party was going to the dogs at an alarming rate and only a person with some degree of Nehru-Gandhi pedigree (albeit borrowed) could arrest the decline. Her taking up the Congress Presidents post infused the cadres, who were used to extraordinary amounts of fawning and grovelling, with renewed vigour and at long last a deity to pay obedience to.

Her taking up the Prime Ministerial throne would have irreparably damaged this carefully crafted and nurtured image, of an Indira look alike in gait and stride, astride an open jeep or hanging to the footboard of a ‘Safari’, pallu tucked, just right, over her head (alas she had no white streak of hair to show!) and gregariously waving to the teeming masses of the rural and semi-urban folk while being showered with rose petals (all red as during Indira’s reign) and an assortment of garlands flung with careful aim. The damage would not have been restricted to her alone but would have affected her family, whose political ambitions are not lost to the general public.

If she were to take up the chair it would have been an enormous and daunting task of:

a. Keeping up to the pulls and pressures of coalition politics; doing the neat balancing act punctuated with threats and sulk, à-là-Vajpayee

b. Keeping a check on the army of sycophants who would have agreed to all that she said irrespective of its merit

c. Keeping from the opposition a steady supply of instant-on-the-street demonstration material. Any bold move that she would have made would have construed as a sell-out of India to Italy in particular and the Western world as a whole. If the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch did not spare the BJP what chance did the Congress led regime stand!

d. Keeping the government alive for the full term

e. And as a porcupine, be in a constant state of alertness, so as not to expose the soft underbelly least the enemy makes a killer strike.

Sonia’s ‘inner voice’, as in all our inner voices, has ensured the survival of the species. By giving up the claim to the throne she has:

a. Catapulted herself, in one deft stroke, to the haloed heights of martyrdom and has attained an almost iconic status for the Congress workers and the mass of Indians so prone to demi-god worship

b. Snatched from the opposition their most potent issue and converted the fence-sitting intellectuals on to her side

c. Ensured that she is the ever-present ‘power’ behind the powers

d. Neatly segregated the handling of the ‘bad’ and the ‘good’. All that is bad, can be laid at the doorstep of Dr Singh and all that is good would be because of her presence and stewardship (She retains the Chairmanship of the Alliance)

e. Her giving up the throne has, more than ever, legitimised its handing over to Rahul or Priyanka, with Dr Singh doing the interim holding operations till the Prince or Princess, the choice is yours, is ready to take over the mantle.

f. Ensured that if the government were to fall in the next 2 – 3 years she would escape unscathed and would be in a position to ask for the people to vote only and only for the Congress since all other experiments have failed and that she Saint Sonia is not power hungry.