Black coats, khadi, khakhi, kaavi, In our politics, men maketh the cloaks

Black coats? Yeesh! Khadi? Khakhi? Kaavi? Nobody but nobody in any of these comes out looking good. Looking good? No one’s come out smelling like roses, either, this past week. The posturing by the poseurs who don one or the other cloak, mask, uniform, call it what you will and use the situation to make political capital out of it, is inherently sickening.

Be it in the case of Rohith Vemula or the Pathankot attack or the National Herald and now JNU and the arrest and detention of Kanhaiya, there’s not much to choose between the politicians and the lawyers and the activists, or for that matter, the BJP and the Congress, is there?

What’s stopping the Fekus from jumping on the Jat reservation bandwagon that has brought Haryana to a standstill is mystifying. The vultures are circling, no doubt, taking potshots at one other without really believing in the cause they claim to back. Political opportunism at its best…

And there goes the Parliament session, with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP government probably going to hold the dubious record of having three back to back successively unproductive parliamentary sessions. ‘The problem with this country is with one family…” And you expect them to play ball?
If someone could have only told the prime minister that it would have been far more politically savvy to ignore a party that only had 44 seats instead of giving it this fresh lease of life by building them up again and again, by victimizing them at every juncture… Everyone loves the underdog, especially when he’s down and out!

The point about Kanhaiya, as it was with Rohith Vemula is therefore simple. Student politics is almost always a heady mix of clever sloganeering laced with vitriol that leans to the left. It’s about the oppressed both at home and abroad, and leaves no room for centrists, no elbow room — for the last sixty odd years at least — none at all for the right-wing after their man Godse aka Nathuram gunned down the Mahatma as he chanted his prayers. How does one ever get past that!

If the BJP policy makers had been given the idea that the only way to consolidate the youth vote which was theirs for the taking, was to put their imprint on JNU and Jadavpur and the other premier institutions in the country, then, taking the violent path was hardly the best choice. It shows them as being little different from those who eliminate opponents with one scythe, so common in my home town, across the Marxist dominated parts of Kerala and West Bengal.

The events that brought the BJP into the political mainstream are too well-documented to need a retelling. But every man saffronist knows in his heart that while a nation rose to reject a non-performing Congress government trapped in its own Gandhiesque miasma, and back a new force for good in Narendra Modi, the events of these past few weeks since the JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar was arrested for sedition have reinforced the creeping sense of doubt and unease that we have elected a dispensation that stops at nothing to impose an ideology that is at variance with the sense of a hundred different Indias that lives as one.

The Gospel Sufi singer Sonam Kalra, a Sikh whose band is made up of Muslims and a Jew held a packed audience on Friday night in Bengaluru in thrall, to the mesmeric ‘Hum sab ek hain’ number that summed up most Indians’ sense of nationhood.

Therefore to colour our left-leaning, anti-establishment naarebaaazi of the campuses with charges of sedition and anti-nationalism is to miss the wood for the trees. Nobody condones the anti-India sloganeering, but to beat the living daylights out of a student leader and then shove him in jail — park him in the same cell as Afzal Guru!! — is unconscionable.

Especially now that it has come to light that the video that television studios aired without verifying its content was doctored to show the man saying something he had never said at all.

Where did the girly-voiced BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra get the clip he played on his laptop? And why did the normally savvy Mr. Nation Wants To Know allow it to be run, even if he said it was not verified?

Print media has two golden rules — three sources for a story, and always give the man who is being charged, a chance at a rebuttal. Television is instant entertainment, all about high decibel invective and wordplay that keeps the audience riveted to their flat screens. But it’s a uni-dimensional viewpoint, that never tells the full story. Whoever shouts the loudest walks away with the spoils.
In this case, ‘Mr Bassi tho phasi’ blotting his copybook all over again. First with AAP and the protestor hanging from a tree instead of arresting him when they could, and now, allowing the goons in black to thrash a man in police custody as he was being taken to court because these are men who “uphold” the law! Someone get him a better P.R, please!

Sometimes you cannot help but thank the smart Karnataka official who banned on-campus elections to student bodies and spared us the blood-letting that is now par for the course elsewhere.

Fact is, as the BJP braces for the fall-out of the doctored tape — which incidentally was either hurriedly shushed up and not made available to all the media — the Congress has been incredibly slow, almost paralysed, unable to go on the offensive here in Karnataka, where the Hebbal debacle and the party’s inability to mobilize not just the minority Muslims but the chief minister’s Ahinda must be deeply troubling. As is Mr Siddaramaih’s ‘Watchgate’ which neither the BJP nor the JDS are likely to let go. Time for the CM to make a clean breast of it. An insider says a luxe store in the city is letting him indulge his secret passion without having to pay for it. Others say that H.D. Kumaraswamy has finally got his own back at Siddaramaiah. Either way as the harried Congress party braces for the results of the Zilla Parishad and Taluk polls, this is the one man who must be hoping against hope that the demise of his former alma mater, the Janata Dal (S) in the Old Mysore area will follow on from their decimation in the recent bypolls,

As for the BJP, for whom it’s imperative they make their presence felt in the run up to polls in five state assemblies, they must know that stoking a divisive fire in the student community could go as badly wrong as Dadri did. It will not consolidate a Hindu vote. It only sows a seed that breeds a poisonous tree of hate. That’s not the kind of low-hanging fruit any ‘right-thinking’ Indian wants on his table.

The Congress can see its minority/backward vote is no longer secure. Can the BJP see that its hold over the young and upwardly mobile is equally tenuous?
You know what they say about the road to perdition….