At the end of riveting drama there was only Pyrrhic victory. Amit Shah won his seat, so did Ahmed Patel. It was India which lost, its politics degraded further by the unseemly stake heaped upon one state’s Rajya Sabha election, so much so two parties went at each other as if this was a matter of life and death. Who can teach these people the nuances of Kipling’s classic quote of triumph and disaster being twin imposters? The cost paid by these victors was so much as to bring out all the stink of the underbelly of Indian politics.
The show of resort politics was nothing compared to the high tension drama that went on in the capital on the premises of the Election commission. Finally, the only institution that came out unscathed from this unseemly episode of naked power play and money politics was the EC, which ruled strictly by a precedent set in the Haryana RS poll. As the cricket wag said, Ahmed Patel won by the Duckworth Lewis Stern method against a readjusted target of 44 votes and all that went before it was sheer political drama.
Did a personal vendetta have to go this far in politics is a question that will never be answered properly by those who indulged in this. Not that the other side came out with great glory in defending a power broker who does background work for the Congress President. Had he been a great parliamentarian who raised significant issues and made fiery speeches, one would have understood the depth of the backing for him. But here was unflinching support for a power broker. He represents all that is questionable in the grand old party’s personalised style of politics based on family loyalty.
Had the contest been settled in the correct parliamentarian traditions of party loyalty and the posts had gone smoothly to the same three candidates none would have had a complaint. But politics has become so venomous in the days of BJP ascendancy and Congress slump that everyone is prepared to go to any extent to out-Chanakya each other. But for what is the question as there is not so much at stake in one seat that one party would be willing to pay a princely fortune to defectors and the other would spend almost as much in just protecting its legislators from temptation.
Throughout this two-week drama, none of the political parties involved would have lent a thought to the people whose representatives these legislators are. Their vote in a Rajya Sabha poll is also supposed to be for the people they represent and for their party affiliation rather than themselves, but so self-serving are the nation’s politicians that they have no time even to think of how they got to where they are.
Let us not for a moment believe that any of the cross voting stemmed from any altruistic motive. There must have been crores of rupees behind each move in this biza-rre game of moneybags chess.
The Ahmed Patel-Amit Shah rivalry goes back a long way. Don’t be fooled for a minute that the challenges of today before Patel had nothing to do with the moves he would have made against Shah when the latter was an accused in the Sorhabuddin case.
Patel may complain that government agencies, including the IB, were hounding him during the current poll. Can he say that the same agencies were not set after Shah in the past when Congress was the ruling party? That could well be the genesis of this big fight between Chanakya and Kautilya, although history has it that they were the same person. In a bizarre way, you could think of these two as peas in a pod, apart from their political leanings of course.
While all the drama was going on, people were dying in the floods in Gujarat. The Congress MLAs could not even make their routine lip sympathy visits to the areas ravaged by the selective fury of the monsoon.
Closeted in resorts, legislators would have been too busy being wined and dined and who is to say they were not unhappy with the confiscation of cellphones by their minders. This highhandedness is part of a bundle of party tactics that ‘jails’ its own legislators because not even party whips are guaranteed to make them vote to uphold a party stand.
Pyrrhus of Epirus, who defeated Roman armies at Asculum, is said to have remarked “one more such victory and we are lost.” The point is the cost of victories won’t stop anything in Indian politics.
The people remain the biggest losers as their representatives get detached the moment they win elections and go on to whatever they wish.
