Not very long ago, when the Yankees were witnessing a great economic upsurge and the basic infrastructure was being put in place to act as the harbinger for increased American effort, a particular rail and road making company bought off the entire Pennsylvanian state assembly, including the treasury and opposition benches to make its own clandestine ends meet. This gave rise to the what is colloquially known as ‘Mugwumps’, which eventually forced both the Republicans and Democrats to put forth better candidates and improve the quality of the polity. The ‘Mugwumps’ in the form of the Anna Hazare Movement have arrived on the Indian horizon; albeit a section of it has been transferred to the Aam Aadmi Party which has allowed itself to morph itself as a political protégé of the Congress. Others remain scattered on the Indian horizon in the shape of RSS and other nationalistic organisations.
We all remember how a few of our classmates in college who would never contribute to a project but would overnight collect some good insights from qualitatively superior students and mug-up the questions and answers. They would manage to score in the same range as those who studied throughout the year and enjoyed conceptual clarity. However, these ‘Student Congressis’ brought in another concept altogether, that the ‘learning’ was ‘subservient’ to ‘scoring marks’. It is no wonder that the Congress has managed to retain the fulcrum of power in Delhi Assembly even after being decimated to dust thanks to an alliance with the AAP. It is a ludicrous democratic subterfuge that the Bronze and Silver Medallists have formed an unholy alliance and did not allow the Gold Medal Winner a place on the podium.
It became a sorry state of affairs when the publicly announced posture of AAP–announced by Arvind Kejriwal himself to not offer or enjoy support from any other party, was thrown into the gory dustbin of partisan politics. It is no wonder that a few congress leaders rewrote their allegiance to the AAP, albeit without shifting the eventual and original cacophony of their destined political aim: keeping the Narendra Modi-led BJP out of power. There are no prizes for guessing as to why Yogendra Yadav now finds it hard to find enough evidence against Sheila Dixit. It becomes axiomatic that it will not be easy, if not due to political expediency, to find anything wrong in the Shunglu Committee-indicted Sheila regime.
This is not for the first time that the Congress has used such tactics of burning the bridges once the loot is over. It started, in recent memory, with the rise and subsequent amalgamation of the Praja Rajayam Party (PRP) in Andhra Pradesh into Congress. It is only incidental that the PRP was crying hoarse about the wrongdoings of the Congress, the party which catapulted them to mainframe polity in the first place.
Every housewife, who cooks for her family out of a sheer emotional connect, remains a process based person in her kitchen: try displacing her wares by few inches and she will scowl at you. There is a reason for her scowling. She knows that people change, for good or worse, but processes offer us a platform to bring in change for the better. This makes one believe in processes more than people, and in a democracy, processes are supreme.
Nothing should offer one more pleasure that Dr Harshvardhan who went to attend Arvind Kejriwal’s swearing-in and sat amidst the people he and Arvind represent. It will be a disservice to one’s own understanding that Arvind and AAP symbolise a sense of upsurge in the Indian Citizen to vibe with the powers that be.
Kejriwal did manage his earlier days in public life better, but when one witnesses that AAP features on the list of current political alliances with the Congress, nobody with a brink of political sanity can afford to judge the eventual goal: UPA-3. Just imagine, another 5 years of an Italian Proxy Rule and double speak.
If Kejriwal and AAP are going to help Myanmar ingress into Indian Territory, allow a small nation like Togo to compare itself with India’s might, will we really aspire to imagine what Pakistan and China would be doing to us? Also, let us serve ourselves a grim reminder: the division of votes between other players and the BJP will eventually help form UPA-3.
There are no free lunches in life. Only deluded utopians will conjure up the faith to say that Arvind Kejriwal is not under pressure not to open up CWG files given his alliance with the Congress.
There is some doublespeak doing rounds about the AAP not having any alliance with the Congress. In that case, may I very respectfully remind that there is a party with largest number of MLAs sitting in the Opposition and that there is nothing democratic about it.
And now we come to participatory democracy. Can we, for God’s Sake, know from the mandarins of the AAP’s offices as to what were the exact methods adopted to ensure only Delhi Voters voted in the SMS and other polls, how the system was programmed and no double voting was resorted to?
Simplicity becoming a virtue in the Indian Democracy is a welcome change, but didn’t Lalu Yadav got himself dropped in a rickshaw when he took the oath of office for the first time ? Isn’t Mamta Bannerjee being driven into office in a rickety personal car ? Arvind Kejriwal is not the first person from the IITs to be a politician. Goa CM Manohar Parrikkar uses a scooter, if that is the benchmark of office-going good CMs. It matters little as to which educational institute one attended. Most of the errant mediamen who have been shaming this great institution of our democracy have a ‘Oh So Good’ past list of institutes they went to.
One last point, Arvind Kejriwal is on camera and on record that he will neither support neither take support from any of the parties, but what exactly made him go back on the pledge he made swearing on his kids, what exactly made him take a U-turn ?
We are going to support to each and every good thing Kejriwal brings to the table, but definitely not his role in bringing UPA-3, which is equivalent to a nuclear attack on my nation.
After the precedent of the entire Pennsylvanian State Assembly being bought out by a Rail-Road Company and the rise of ‘Mugwumps’, the Americans were quick to realise that the future of their democracy lay not in promises made by Left-Leaning Liberals, but established administrators who could propel them to the place in the world which they now occupy.
The Indian Voter’s task is cut-out clearly: remain wary of anything that can bring in UPA-3 and propel Narendra Modi to a position where this sea of one-sixth of humanity can take its existence to the next level of progress and prosperity.
