A Walk over the Peanut Husks

The month of December in Delhi is not just about aggravating respiratory symptoms and phlegmatic fountains, it is also about peanuts, the poor man’s almond. Sonia-push-pulled-drawn-rolled UPA 2 has been enjoying power for the last six months. For the year 2009 just a week left to survive with its bag of good and bad. The Prime-Minister-in-Waiting having failed twice, there is high chance he might never fulfil his dream. Much as Advani might try to keep himself physically fit in his eighties, to survive, to keep his dream alive; it’s Manmohan the mask man who wields power for Sonia, his face remaining the same despite all criticisms and loads of insults in the media. More than governing they seem to be grooming Rahul for the chair sometime in the future: The aristocracy surviving in its 21^st century avatar in the world’s largest democracy.

The road-spitters, peanut-munchers and hunched-defecators have given the motley mix of ideologies embaled in the box of pseudo-secularism another chance to rule their destinies. The UPA gang clamours too loudly, ‘Wolf, wolf! It will tear you apart. The atrocities will surpass even Hitler’s genocide.’ So they stay away from the wolf and take shelter with the non-wolf, which has no teeth to bite, but enough brains to plunder public resources unprecedently. Its constituents having come to an agreement not to block anybody’s progress to get more zeroes at the end of their Swiss bank accounts.   

The grand old man of contemporary politics stands robbed of his chance to rule India. Even in his milder avatar, begotten after praising Jinnah, he is not acceptable. Muslims wouldn’t accept the BJPwallah even if he reads kalima and turns Muslims himself; and Hindus do not like this curious unrecognisable mixture of saffron and green. So the grand old man, with Hitler’s whiter version of his moustache, harbinger of a not so bloody revolution, a milder one and acceptable as per the national and international standards, stands mute and meek. Not caring much about a Muslim bullet, he seems more scared of a knee-rattling hit by the stick held by Khakhi-shorts-clad angry persona.

The RSS will not spare him and let him go unpunished. He has to put his claim down; they might go for a better choice now to fit their dream of a nationalistic, resurgent India. However the pain of the patriarch bowing out is overshadowed by the symbolism of a concept: The concept of being democratic in its management. There is a contrast. The fissure between the BJP and the Congress. There are more democratic traces in the former’s mode of operation. The latter just clinging to a particular family, and the former putting down a patriarch who almost singlehandedly formulated the present avatar of the big national party. All its ideological designs still under the carpet, but at least in letter the BJP seems to have paid a huge respect to the Indian masses by asking Advani to go. Can the Congress do the same to the Gandhi-Nehru family if they also fail twice consequently?

The Congress begins and ends with the famed foremost political family of India. The Nehru family is virtually the definition of Congress. Peoples’ emotions have been put on a stranglehold by erecting a well-functioning system of loyalists ever-oiling the causes of the first political family. Accept it or not, it’s impossible to think of Congress without the Gandhi-Nehru clan. What Advani did for the resurgence of the BJP was no way short of Nehru’s efforts to make Congress a family set-up post independence. As far as the efforts are concerned Advani has been as great as Nehru in erecting a national level political structure. But still when it comes to the BJP, it’s possible to smell its chances beyond the Advani clan. It can be drawn as a positive for the Indian democracy. Now the issue just trickles to the question, is it possible to imagine the same fate for the Gandhis? Not as long as the Congress we are acquainted with!