The Political Grammar Of Opposition As Enemy
BY R.K.MISRA
Rahul
Gandhi is a ‘pappu’ and Priyanka Gandhi , is a ‘babli’ but every time the two open their mouth, why does the BJP get verbal diarrhoea ?
Cold
derision to deep embedded antagonism has marked the targeting of the two along
with their mother Sonia Gandhi, the widow of
former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who was the victim of a terrorist
attack as was his mother, late prime minister Indira Gandhi gunned down . BJP
leader Sushma Swaraj threatened to tonsure her head in 2004 if duly elected
Sonia Gandhi became Prime Minister but
had no objection sharing space in Parliament
with 120 MPs facing criminal charges(ADR). If the saffron set-up is to
be believed India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru not only fathered a
daughter but also all that is ‘ill’ with India. And then off course the
‘designated’ trolls would have you believe that Indira Gandhi’s parsi husband
was a muslim and so was her Kashmiri
pandit grandfather ,Motilal !
Convincingly
trounced in the 2014 general elections
and truncated to seeming insignificance in 2019, the Congress is the last thing
that should be on the minds of the Narendra Modi- led BJP government. It has a
plateful of promises to fulfill but prevaricates because it cannot get over the
persona of the previous cooks even after being twice anointed the chief chef of
the indian kitchen. Wives and widows are deserving of respect in the indian
ethos but the defining line stops short of just one family.
Pappu
is one of the more charitable nick names designed to evoke mental comparables
with a thumb sucking child same as
‘babli’ for Priyanka Gandhi is to
equate her with a female fraudster
character of a hindi movie “bunty aur babli” loosely patterned on Hollywood’s
Bonnie and Clyde. Others have ranged from’ clown prince’ to’ nali ka keda’(insect
of the gutter) and Babar-bhakt to kin of khilji with ‘siberian bird’ and Priyanka twitter Vadra for his sister. If
these came from important BJP leaders, Narendra Modi is credited with
describing the President of the then ruling Congress party as a jersey cow and
her son as a hybrid calf (2004) when he
was the chief minister and Rahul as the most joked about person on google (
2017) after he had taken over as the Prime Minister. All these disparaging
pronouncements incidentally come from leaders of a political party which claims
organisational lineage to the highest traditions of hindu culture !
If the
Nehru-Gandhis are what the ruling
leadership believes them to be then why waste time and energy on them? Why the
chronic hiccups every time they clear
their throat? Quite simply because despite burying the Congress two elections
deep, insecure BJP head honchos still get nightmares of its resurrection. Like
it or not, there is still a fair section of the indian population rooting for the
moderate party and the Nehru-Gandhi off springs do retain a national appeal.
National
political discourse seems to have travelled
a long way from the time in 1957 when
young Jan Sangh leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s speech in Parliament
criticizing the government earned praise from Jawaharlal Nehru and a prediction
that this young man will become the country’s Prime Minister one day. In turn,
Vajpayee’s speech at the same venue on the death of Nehru remains a rare gem as
does his extolling of Indira Gandhi as an incarnation of Goddess Durga after
the 1971 war with Pakistan . Time was when Prime Ministers took opposition
stalwarts to represent the country as did Rajiv Gandhi take Vajpayee to the United
Nations in 1988 as much to thwart the UN resolution on Kashmir as to attend to
his damaged kidney. ”Rajiv Gandhi is why I am alive” said Vajpayee candidly for
the record.
Official
records and journalistic accounts are replete with incidents of personal
camaraderie and political
cordiality in ruling party and opposition relationships even past tumultuous times like the Emergency of 1975,
installation of the first non-congress government led by Morarji Desai through to
the rise of the Vajpayee- led first
Saffron government in the nineties. ”Beauty with brains” for Congress turned
opposition leader Tarkeshwari Sinha and “ Gungi Gudiya “ for Indira Gandhi of
the early sixties by Dr Ram Manohar lohia were considered high water marks of
the time. Switch to 2019 when Gujarat
BJP president Jitu Vaghani exhorted the
people to identify the bastards(haramzadon) in a reference to the Congress
during the poll campaign
It is perhaps for the first time in political
history that a party which came to power
with an absolute majority bagging 282 of the total 543 seats in the
fifteenth general elections in 2014
changed the idiom of both personal and political discourse in India from
harmonious co-existence to hate-filled hegemony.
After
the advent of Narendra Modi as Prime
Minister and Amit Shah as BJP president on the national stage, the opposition is
no longer merely an opponent but has found itself upgraded to an ’ enemy’
status. A political opponent is a fellow traveller with a different perspective
while an enemy is an object of hate marked out for annihilation. The Congress which had led the freedom
struggle with the cry “Angrez, Bharat chhodo”(quit India) faces the clarion call of a “Congress-mukt
Bharat” from the new saffron rulers- a national purge is what the ruling party
implies of the present principal opposition that ruled the country for good of
40 years !
Prime Minister
Modi even went on record to state that the Congress was conspiring with
Pakistan to topple the BJP government in Gujarat(2017) and his party national
general secretary Ram Madhav took it further
stating that Congress could easily win the elections in Pakistan(March
2019), followed by party chief J.P. Nadda
terming it anti-national(April 2020) .
Conveniently clouded in the myth manufacturing cacophony was that it was
during Congress Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s rule that a decisive war in
1971 split Pakistan leading to the
formation of Bangladesh defying a
threatening US Seventh fleet bound for the Bay of Bengal .while BJP’s claim to
fame rests on a sole ‘surgical’ strike . Kargil was at best a ‘lapse’ which was
recouped at considerable men and material cost and named kargil Vijay diwas to salvage national pride.
A similar situation presents itself today.
Hate as a tool of political discourse is like opium. It gives a temporary high as it courses through the veins in double quick time but ultimately
destroys the very body fabric it was meant to protect. Hate cannot heal, it can
only hurt.
In
parliamentary parlance, the post of a Speaker is one of great wisdom and
constitutional propriety. Ganpat Vasava, was the honourable Speaker of the
Gujarat Vidhan sabha from 2014 to 2016.He is now cabinet minister for forest
and environment in the Vijay Rupani government .
Speaking
at a rally on April 20,2019 in Dediapada of tribal Narmada district Vasava had
compared Rahul Gandhi to the puppy of a dog who wags his tail before Pakistan
and China. His exact words were “when Narendrabhai stands up he is like a lion,
when Rahul rises from a chair he is like
the puppy of a dog, standing and wagging his tail: even if Pakistan throws a
crumb, he is happy and even if China throws a crumb he is happy”. These words
were spoken for the president of the
principal opposition party of the country.
It is
not for nothing that sobriety in public discourse and restraint in language has
been advised for words have a way of
returning to haunt. Despite all
the filth , dirt and derision being hurled by respected members of the ruling establishment,
Rahul Gandhi’s utterances, whether on the
enveloping virus, economic tailspin or the occupation by the Chinese, are
ringing true. And that is precisely what the job of an opposition leader is.
Pappu toh pass hogaya but it is Hercules
who has slipped on the Himalayan heights !
Comments
Post a Comment