Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Thank God, it did not come to pass the way a national daily had predicted it may : Finance Minister Chidambaram, the paper had warned, may choose the peace of a Lok Sabha TV studio, rather than the mess the hallowed chamber of the House of People has become, to present his interim budget, vote-on-account, as a matter of fact, preparatory to the General Election due in a few weeks from now.
Yes, after the senseless antics of warring MPs from “Seemaandhra and Telegngana in the Lok Sabha, like yanking the presiding officer’s mike and using its stump as a virtual knife, or spraying colleagues with pepper spray, because the billionaire Andhra MP believed it was his birthright to carry the spray “as a weapon of self defence”, causing coughing, sneezing, teary colleagues to flee the chamber, two of them needing medical attention. Not to mention the display befitting more to riotous mobs than the nation’s law-makers who, incidentally, have earned notoriety as habitual law-breakers; at least one third of our MP Sahibs are just that, with criminal records, if you will.
I don’t propose to convert this piece into a study covering the decline of our parliamentary system, never so glaring as witnessed in this second term of the UPA – and, thank God it’s about to end soon – I can’t but help conveying my sense of relief when the Finance Minister, ignoring the partisan chants from the Andhra MPs, did perform the ritual vote-on-account, (the last rites of the UPA, some said) making budgetary provisions until the new government is formed in the next three months or so.
Frankly, I don’t wish to dwell any more on how the two houses of Parliament rendered themselves dysfunctional these two weeks – nothing new, really, given that the political parties have for two years and more rendered the two Houses non functional, conducting not the nation’s business, but surely serving partisan ends, obstructing work of any kind and yet only too willing to protect their own privileges including, of course, their pay packets.
Not surprising that our MPs have always refused to codify their own privileges or anything remotely resembling a code of conduct.
Their privileges, the obvious and the not so obvious, must remain sacrosanct. The law of the land applies to you and me but it must not touch our ‘bahubali’ MP Sahabs. And don’t you be taken in by the new hype, the mantra which the AAPs of the world may have put on offer. Here you have another bunch that is out to get its piece of the cake, even as they continue to swear by the Aam Admi.
A desperate people, screaming their tops off, crushed by rising prices, scarce basic amenities, hospitals and schools including, may have owned the dream which the Kejriwals of the world may have dreamt for them, but do look at the man : quits as Chief Minister within 49 days, hoping his sleight of hand, his glib tongue would see him through not only in Delhi but nationwide when his AAP fishes in the wider political waters.
Kejriwal and his merry men (and the odd woman) may be upbeat on snagging the popular vote in elections to come but, by giving up Delhi in a trice, he has frittered away the Aam Admi’s first real shot at governance. Honesty can make the honest look and sound ridiculous because there is no halfway. It is an absolute virtue; you are either honest or you are not. The third category which we euphemistically call practical, as opposed to idealistic, is just an improvised tool designed to lighten the load on our conscience for doing things that laws and ethics don’t permit.
Going by the record of Kejriwal’s movement from the day when the simpleton Anna Hazare used to swear by him, to his dramatic exit as Delhi Chief Minister in just seven weeks – his life’s work seemed done when he said he has got FIRs registered against Mukesh Ambani and Oil Minister Veerapa Moily for alleged corruption. Honesty is all encompassing; you cannot be honest in one place and be less honest or dishonest in another.
So an honest person can stretch things to such extremes that honesty can stop being a virtue and start looking more like a fetish.
Like, Kejriwal accepting and then rejecting two five bedroom units in Bhagwandas Road or refusing the use of a Sarkari gaadi. Just like corruption and the Jan Lokpal Bill became the be all and end all of Kejriwal and his experiment at governance.
The aam admi did find Kejriwal more accessible but when he tried to overdo it he virtually ran for his life at his first public durbar held on the lawns of the Delhi Secretariat. Outsiders demanded changes and insiders thought of erecting walls to keep the outsiders out. So it would seem.
That said, Kejriwal and his team got a shot at governance and with that we were asked to believe that Kejriwal, the infallible was always right and we were too take his word for everything. When he says he is not power hungry we have to say : “Of course you are not”. And when he says that what his time in Delhi Assembly taught him he needed to move on to parliamentary pastures to effect change at the national level, he expects you to believe that there is no power equation in there.
In another person you might say that speaks of arrogance but his arrogance, you be assured, is that of the honest. For the man who has thrived on the generosity of the media, electronic in particular, he will say that’s negative media attention. He had to hammer in his message of anti-corruption, the first time he savoured power in Delhi.
So far as the illegal ‘dharna’ staged by him outside Rail Bhawan for 38 hours around the Republic Day, urging the policemen come to remind him he was violating prohibitory orders, to remove their uniforms and join his protest sit-in that was a call of “Dhrama”. He adamantly refused that his Minister Somnath Bharati was wrong in conducting a midnight raid in a South Delhi colony to hound “African women of easy virtue”. By and large the people might have supported the dharna if it was seen as a fight to get full Statehood for Delhi. Such was the credibility he had commanded pre-dharna
To end on a happier note for the Aam Admi, I am tempted to quote one of his admirers who speaks of “suspicions and accusations that Kejriwal was doing all these bizarre things like filling the Ambani FIR to divert attention and avoid being questioned on his ability to deliver on his election manifesto, or that his government was out of depth to govern and therefore looking for an escape route.
I cannot remember a single instance of a Chief Minister bringing down his own government while seeking that the anti-corruption bill be adopted” says the admirer. Kejriwal did exactly that. So that’s him for you and me – and now the country, since he has started competing for space at the national level.
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