Comedy comely

6 December 2019

Humour is the best form of offence and defence, there is nothing like a self deprecatory remark or an admission of ignorance to deflate a heated argument or  tight situation of verbal duels! Parliamentary exchanges are recorded as some of the best sources of humour, where a healthy repartee and a pun however vicious get the ovation of the benches. Wry or remark laced with innuendo, barbs of sarcasm, prods of lingual sophistry and bombastic bluster all play their parts in this affair of arguments and counter arguments, and it is in these exchanges that the health of Parliamentary Democracy and by extension that of the national polity is assessed by analysts from time to time.

We life now in a Post Truth World. One where the oratory of a Vajpayee, stridency of an Advani, sophistry of a Nehru, advocacy of a Piloo Mody or even Feroze Gandhi are lost on us. We are in an atmosphere that is now real universal for even in the Mother of all Parliaments, we more remember a Speaker who intones -‘Order! Order!’ And of course, dare I say that the partisan nature of the present US Congress is such that it takes the very premise of a deliberative process out of the equation?

If India were the cauldron or melting pot of ideas, of civilisations and legacies, the richest arena for such evidence automatically should have been our Parliament. Yet, the way our representative democracy has survived and thrived, it is clearly one where elegance, eloquence and egalitarian substance are the farthest from even its most basic of calculus. The Left itself is unable to now find bench strength to replace a Somnath Chatterjee. The legal fraternity and their familiarity with court room drama are for some time the ‘leading lights’ on either side of the aisle, and more heft and time is granted to the articulate and the ardent, than to sober and sense!

So is our Parliament a dysfunctional system now, unable to tap into the mythical civilisational values and strengths that India possesses, or is Parliament a mirror of the larger Kingdom of Owls out there of us, the Commons, from whom they are representatively chosen as MPs? So per chance, if they could be representing the best of us they could equally be representing the worst of us. An inkling of all this is readily available with the ADR, an organisation that has been striving to in a bipartisan manner, improve our democratic credentials. (https://adrindia.org)The simple vein of evolutionary theory, shows that our representative democracy discovered ‘vote banks’ which needed credentials ( hence emphasis on ‘family’, pedigree) and to encash it at the ballot, it needed money and muscle in various degrees. Over time, the money and muscle came to the fore and hence today the ADR data reveals this data that our public servants are either crorepatis or criminals mostly.

So the present tussle at the heart of a democratic reform for greater health of our Parliamentary democracy is financing of elections. It will be very clear from the series of exposé on the false assertions made and cold calculations that were drafted into the Electoral Bonds scheme brought in by the Modi government in its first term, that is now under judicial challenge, that lopsided financial advantage cannot be undone in a grassroots democratic approach too.(https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/electoral-bonds-narendra-modi-election-commission-opposition-arun-jaitley_in_5dce3cd1e4b01f982eff5c62) 

Like Police Reforms, like Centre State Relations, Election Financing is a perennial subject in India, festering and fumbling around, where clearly the political will is absent to resolve it. Going by India’s reform record, unless there is a crises, like Balance of Payments, the status quo is difficult to dislodge. So despite the failure of policing, as seen from the latest ‘Disha’ rape and murder, where police wrangled about jurisdiction, about the motives of the missing lady, despite the GST Council, the Centre not releasing funds of the States share, and the evidence of paramountcy of electoral financing in electoral outcomes, India is nowhere out of kilter and going to alter the status quo on these fundamental issues! Something more dramatic has to ‘give’.

Look at how Mr Amit Shah was led to read out a statement on the security protocol drill at the residence of Ms Priyanka Vadra? India’s Home Minister said that the intruding vehicle resembled the model, make and colour of Mr Rahul Gandhi’s official vehicle, so the security let it pass! Then connect it to former PM Chandrasekar’s son’s comment of how SPG cover made the protectee feel like the PM himself! Mr Neeraj Sekhar was speaking as a first time BJP MP from the Rajya Sabha while discussing amendments to the SPG Act.(https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/under-spg-cover-you-feel-like-pm-says-former-pm-chandra-shekhars-son-in-rs/articleshow/72353388.cms?from=mdr) Look at Mr Nirmala Sitaraman assert in the Lok Sabha that she does not know the vagaries of onion pricing as her family hardly consumes it. If you thought it was an unpractised off the cuff remark, think again, for another MP and Minister from the Ruling Party spoke glibly outside the House to media, saying that as a vegetarian he was unaware of onions.”I am a vegetarian. I have never tasted an onion. So, how will a person like me know about the situation (market prices) of onions,” says Union Minister Ashwini Choubey. Another BJP MP Virendra Singh Mast, in Lok Sabha: “To defame the nation and government people are saying that the automobile sector has slowed down. If there is a decline in automobile sales then why are there traffic jams on the roads?” Now connect this with Ms Sitaraman’s repartee that Mr Rahul Bajaj’s question to Mr Amit Shah was an individual point of view that was not in ‘National Interest’.

You are familiar with the American term filibustering. This sudden descent into dumbness and this loutish grandstanding is the Indian Right Wing style of filibustering- using bluster and blabber, making it appear like humour, a comedy of errors as much, to get past a cornered fight! So a script writer is at play, ingeniously using carefully choreographed sequences that promote a sense of dumbness, dignity of the commons, the pithy sense of the derelict and distraught, but which if you can see through it, is informed by a sense of entitlement and arrogance. No social scientist in India will miss the connect of VIP culture and security of black cat commandos, nor will they the use of onion and social hierarchy, nor the use of Nationalism as a shield.

Former PM Tony Blair was the first major politician accused of substituting gravitas with spin. He was honoured for this with the entire field of spin after his name as Blairism! Today we know that despite being a successful Labour leader, he has no legacy. New Labour as it was then christened turned out to be one big soap operatic hoax! But then if you link Tweet history and Celebrity to economic news in India, you realise that all our matinee idols and worshipped stars, with rare exceptions, are equally guilty of backing a narrative with a motive. When onions are raging past ₹ 100, people are retweeting old tweets by a host of stars from Mr Bachchan to Ms Juhi Chawla, even by journalists like Ms Pallavi Ghosh, Ms Nidhi Razdan, the stunning silence when petrol is cheaper than ‘pyaaz’ is the biggest damnation for our democracy- either the price of goods and services does not matter when the saffron cat is at work, or the saffron cat has gagged them all with ease! ( Paraphrasing a Deng dogma about colours of cats as long as they caught mice.)

Ultimately, whether the voter realises it or not, the joke is on him/her! It is like the Ro-Ro that PM launched with such fanfare on the eve of Gujarat elections in 2017 which has turned a dud within a year, and now the very vessel in which the PM posed is up for sale! It is the tax payer, both direct and indirect ones at that, who is picking up the tab for such efforts. When you hear that the military is mobilising close to 5 million personnel for a weekend clean up drive in their neighbourhoods to promote ‘Swacch Bharat’, you realise that another great campaign is now just rubbish, biting the dust because, at a very direct level, it has failed to connect to our people. Remember, many schemes and plans are laid out and pushed forward with best intentions by governments and leaders. Some are successful, others are failures. Leaders own both. People who are affected by them, own them as well. We think that a fool is not blessed with a guile to cheat, we think that idiocy is an exhibit of humility, we think dumbness is a sign of decency! That is our Divine Comedy as comely or as ungainly as it gets!