India may not quite have the ‘silly season’, much celebrated in the British summer months with the emergence of frivolous news in the media being the highlight.
It is actually a more universal phenomenon, with the season coming into US, Australia and the South somewhat later in the calendar year. Some call it the cucumber time and as summer approaches, a kind of silly season seems to have hit the Indian political scene too.
This is marked by the increasing use of acronyms and the funniest one to have emerged may be a new political party in Tamil Nadu which, going by its abbreviations, is the MAD party.
Further north, the UP polls season seems to have been afflicted by this acronymitis, if one is allowed a licence to invent the term. To begin with, there was the SCAM, which the Prime Minister’s speech writers seemed to have hit upon as a bright idea and involving the SP, Congress, Akhilesh and Mayawati.
Having got in first with the acronym, Modi had the early mover advantage while others were at somewhat of a loss to retaliate, although they did go into tit-for-tat mode and came up with some capitalised words.
Rahul, who had enjoyed the early mover advantage with his ‘Suit Boot ka party’ wasn’t quite in the same good form, or maybe his speech writers were just slow on the trigger.
With his boss in the forefront of this battle of acronyms, Amit Shah could not be far behind. At home in Hindi, he used KASAB (Ka for Cong, Sa for SP, and B for BSP) as short for his opponents, bracketing the UP lot with terrorists.
This didn’t go down too well since calling each other terrorist is unlikely to do much for political exchanges. Mayawati promptly came back with the accusation that Amit Shah “is the biggest terrorist of them all”.
The alphabets seemed to have lost their way there, leaving only invective, which is more the Indian norm in all seasons and not only in the silly season that we are focusing on currently. Akhilesh took the battle further with acronyms too, saying SCAM stands for “Save the country from Amit Shah and Modi”.
The Animal Welfare Board may take objection to the exchanges as the UP chief minister seemed to put down donkeys as some kind of inferior creatures, which have very little to commend themselves for.
The asinine debate went on with the poor animals getting some praise at least for their hard work as the PM thought he was working harder than the donkeys of Gujarat to whom Akhilesh seems to have developed a dislike. But DIgvijay Singh didn’t seem to think so as he berated the PM for doing donkey’s work.
“Modi ji, you very rightly said that you indeed work like a donkey”, Diggi said even as he ridiculed Akhilesh for being afraid of Gujarat donkeys.
The Democrats in the US may also have taken offence at this ridiculing of their party symbol, which is the donkey. But then they may all be thinking they have come to resemble their symbol after Donald Trump’s victory.
The wild asses’ park Amitabh Bachchan promotes for Gujarat Tourism has become rather famous now and hopefully tourists will be queuing up to see the poor creatures, thought to be too dumb though faithful.
They are the best friends of India’s hard working dhobis, who may now take offence at their loyal worker being dragged into a political debate that hurts the eardrums and the sensitivities somewhat even if none of us has ears as big as the donkey’s.
If all this sounds very mad, swing back to Tamil Nadu politics, which seems to have been overrun by total madness as a triangular war erupted over loyalty to convicted person or persons.
Deepa Jayakumar, niece of the late chief minister, seems to have hit upon the idea of a dynastic claim being the best ticket to political success in India. A shade of immaturity is to be seen in the greenhorn’s entry into politics with a party named MAD (MGR-Amma-Deepa peravai) although her intentions were honourable in paying homage to MGR and her aunt. How she fell for adding her name to a party is an incipient mystery.
Even then, can you blame Deepa for lack of maturity when Rahul Gandhi, born with the political silver spoon, was said to be still not mature enough after years of being groomed for the dynastic seat once reserved in Lutyens’ New Delhi for the Nehru-Gandhis.
His aunt was quick enough to retract on her statement after seeing the damage she had wrought to the family heir in the rough and tumble of UP politics. Given the way Indian politics is going in the matter of ‘informed’ political debate, maybe someday his opponents may match words with his name to make Rahul an acronym or, for that matter, the name of his bête noir, Modi.
These short names must lend themselves easily to such exercises, which speech writers tend to tackle in the course of their day’s work. Hopefully, they would do better than name a party as MAD.
