Politics, TINA, and our future

I have held definite political views since I was sixteen and never missed an opportunity to vote. I would have voted in around 15 parliament, assembly, and local body elections in Bengal and Kerala. I believe my political positions were consistently correct because 14 times out of 15, my candidate lost. 😊

In my childhood, particularly after 1962, when Jawaharlal Nehru was clearly a broken man, people often asked, “After Jawaharlal who?” Many believed there would be a great void after Jawaharlal’s passing.

Jawaharlal perished, but India didn’t. All India Radio played a pathetic violin for days, but trains ran, buses plied, life went on. In fact, India got one of her finest prime ministers in a simple and unassuming man: Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Continuing the trend of emotional blackmail by the leader of the day, for most of my adult life, a consistent theme of every election has been “There Is No Alternative” to the ruling party. On a national scale, TINA was a mistress of Congress for long. Over the last few years, she’s been with BJP.

There are good reasons why people may believe there is no alternative to BJP, particularly at the centre, including the party’s many strengths like organisational discipline and its bulldog bite.

But more importantly, most post-Congress political leaders, from the two discredited Yadav families in UP and Bihar to Mayawati to Mamta to Jayalalitha have shown that while their ability to govern varied, every one of them is / has been / was corrupt to the hilt. They have also been quick to shift their political allegiance to suit their personal interests. I believe people will never trust Mayawati again because they know she would support BJP whenever it suited her. Why vote for a potential BJP alley when you can vote for BJP directly?

Navin Patnaik is an exception. This silent elderly man has offered an administration without major scams, which is great by the current Indian standards. On COVID too, Odisha did much better than most other states. But Patnaik hasn’t taken a principled stand ever. He hasn’t uttered a word against the many grotesque misdeeds of BJP. No wonder last time, the people of the state voted for him for the assembly while they went for BJP at the centre. Again, why vote a proxy when you can go for the real one?

Moving on to Congress, to paraphrase Ramchandra Guha, Congress has to die if a meaningful opposition is to be born. Clearly, Congress has ceased to be a political party; it’s more like family business. To perpetuate its proprietorial nature, the family relentlessly tries to mythify the Nehru-Gandhi brand. To date, it has not named one policy, programme, or infrastructure project, whether it’s an airport or a urinal, after a non-Nehru-Gandhi, except the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA scheme. Their complete silence during the beginning of Narsimha Rao’s centenary year this June is baffling. The message seems to be, unless you have a particular surname, you would remain an underling in Congress.

However, surprisingly, if there are any senior politicians who have proven record of honesty and competence, you’ll find them in Congress: Manmohan Singh, Anand Sharma, Jairam Ramesh, Sashi Tharoor, Bhupesh Baghel, or at a lower level, Gourav Vallabh. Even in Rajasthan, the Gehlot government proved its mettle during the COVID pandemic, despite internal bickering. I don’t know why these decent people cannot get together, leave Congress, and offer an alternative. For example, why does Sashi Tharoor have to compromise with soft-Hindutwa and get himself weighed in a temple to win an election in Kerala (and injure his head in the process) where BJP is not a factor?

Finally, I think we the people are to blame because we just cannot look beyond established political parties, however discredited they might be. Desperate situations require desperate solutions. Why don’t we at least begin to think of Harsh Mander and Yogendra Yadav as our new Gandhi and Nehru? I don’t think Gandhi did anything different or better during his initial years in South Africa than what Harsh Mander has been doing in India. On the other hand, Gandhi did a lot of stupid things like examining his shit, which Mander wouldn’t care to do. Or in what way is Yogendra Yadav intellectually or emotionally deficient than Nehru?

If these two emerge as the core of our new politics and if decent politicians chuck Congress and join them, we may have an alternative that would capture the imagination of the people. It is possible, as Arvind Kejriwal has shown on a smaller scale. That he has proved himself to be a mini autocrat ready to lick the boots of bigger autocrats is another issue.

Let’s not give up hope. Let’s find a solution.

Wednesday, 05 August 2020