The Changing of the Guard: A Mighty Lighthouse and the Shadows of Political Patronage

 **24 July 2007**

The parliamentarians had a farewell gathering for the outgoing President.

The buffoons, clowns and hypocrites who had cracked jokes about the great man's willingness for a second term paid him glorious tributes.

It was a typically political, formal sham show. Like chameleons, those who had squawked at the mere talk of a second term ate their words, changed colours and presented him as a historic man.

But the question arises: if they think he is so great, why the hue and cry over his second term?

A clear example of hypocrisy!

Now the office is being made ready for the first female entrant to the highest seat in the country.

Since she is the new President-designate, we should all abandon belittling remarks regarding her. But the stature of her predecessor is too large, making comparison almost inevitable.

He, the son of a small-town fisherman, rose through the scientific ranks, propelled by the rocket fuel of sheer, genuine, indigenous talent.

Those fundamentally made of the fabric of excellence—like him—cross the defining barriers of their chosen fields to merge into the universal, almost constant traits of honesty, integrity, discipline, hard work, unselfishness, and so on and so forth.

For such a rock-solid, humongous rise is impossible without the blessed, God-given platforms of all these nouns and adjectives of a synonymous nature.

No wonder he rose from selling newspapers to support his studies to the highest seat in the country.

Under the peerless, bearing rays of such a mighty lighthouse, we cannot avoid casting prying looks at the small lady heading shorewards fast in the longboat of increasingly vindictive, oath-waving politics.

Another lady at the helm—working day and night to bring every office in the country under the loyalist shrouds of the long-standing political family—yelling in Italian accents the inevitability of victory.

So how does the present one look in comparison with her predecessor?

Not taking away anything from the old lady's ascension up the political ladder, her stature appears grossly misfitted for a seat meant for a personality of political excellence.

Her first unsuitability is that she is a full-time politician, with all the negativities of patronage and partisanship.

For without such things, you cannot rise on the political graph.

Accepted that hers has been a story of rise, but in which field and by what means?

A political rise, holding on to a particular thread, a blind belief in the tutorship of the sole instructor.

Then how can you expect impartiality in her functioning as the head of state, when the political game is bound to enter an increasingly muddy, sleazy and criminalised backstage, given the way everything is being politicised?

Thus the sparrings are going to reach far and high, with the opposing sides whiplashing each other.

No alternative, no institution, no post, no part of our parliamentary system is going to be spared.

And here comes the suitability of the lady for the first political family, to whom the lady in question has shown unquestioned submissiveness all along her rise on the political graph.

So, whether we say it openly or not, the Rashtrapati Bhavan will definitely come under the Italian-forged Iron Lady's political fold, at least during the next five years.

With the help of hypocritical thugs, she has been successful in removing the grand old upkeeper of goodness and impartiality from the first building in the country, for he would never have borne such nonsense as is required of modern politics.

As the tiny lady, with her tiny credentials, finds herself—like the ever-mute and meek Sikh Prime Minister—landed in a seat which, in the critic's estimation, her whole being knows she never deserved, she will naturally feel obliged to please her benefactor.

Owing so much gratitude to the Italian-forged Iron Lady, she will obey commands from outside.

And operate as a vassal.