The Farexisation of the polity

The Farexisation Of The Polity

Farex is a brand of baby food that comes in little jars.  It mashes up all kinds of goodness, fortifies it with mild baby digestible boosters, and there you have it. It is for mothers who want the best for their babies in a developed world consciousness. But Farex is not the last word, or even the first word in baby rearing and nutrition. It is just high quality branded baby food manufactured and sold in most parts of the developed world. Affordability is the half of it in the once-upon-a-time ‘First World’; and convenience brings up the rear.

Drawing the analogy tighter to apply it to our desi political karta dartas in the ruling dispensation, you find yourself wondering and despairing simultaneously. It is not as if your disquiet is easy to define. After all, it comes and goes, hero and villain at the same time, but with a persistent residue of systemic decline.

If you were to ask about the sins of the Congress, for example, and its now necessary omnibus passengers in the UPA, the main thing that would stand out is not its actions, venal as many are, but its cumulative inheritance. It might have started off well enough in the glowing idealism of the independence movement, but grew noxious, and toxic, as the decades passed post- azaadi. Today it wears a face not unlike a Dorian Gray-like progression.

Rahul Gandhi is weighed down by it, this nameless evil, and this sensitivity is the single most, if not only, attractive feature of the ‘bird-brained’ scion of a diminished dynasty, or words to this effect pronounced by Pakistani-British Seventies onward London-based activist Tariq Ali. Tariq Ali also said recently that the Indian people want Modi as PM, and don’t care about the controversies being raked up by the Congress.

But Rahul Gandhi, striving to not let his side down however ineptly, does evoke a great maternal instinct and protectiveness quite disproportionate to his intrinsic political worth. It is as if he is at the very least entitled to sympathy for his dynastic predicament. It is a sort of post-modern Hamletism with the Indian people subjected to the flux.

And in the era of coalitions over the last three decades, the rot that comes from a constant distribution of the loaves and fishes of office to buy support that is traded freely, has truly set in. 

The  Indian Railways, once a proud thing, even if the British did set it up for their own colonial/imperial purposes, is today reduced to a whopping loss of Rs 25,000 crores a year on the under realisation from passenger fares alone! Once a guarded and nurtured plum of the majority wielding Congress Party, it has been too often used to mollify the hubris of this or that restive ally. Consequently, it is falling apart from ageing stock and rail,  the primitive safety standards, low utilisation and realisation, little or no modernisation, and populist additions and deletions that weaken it further.

It is, sadly, not the only institution systematically subverted by Congress’ political calculations. The CBI is not called a ‘caged parrot’ for nothing, even if its current incumbent seems to have noticed which way the wind is blowing in the matter of key NaMo aide Amit Shah being left out of the 2^nd charge sheet in the Ishrat Jahan imbroglio.

The Congress  Party, in the days when it used to command a majority, out of  insecurity, lust for power, and a disrespect for the Indian Constitution it helped formulate, mashed up its institutions into running  dogs of complicity. The jury is out on the Judiciary, but enough corruption and motivated judgements have surfaced even there.

It turned almost every Government official into a yes-manning servant of its will, and with devices like the 100% dearness allowance and other perquisites of office, manages still to keep them complicit in the main. It practices a patronage system so pervasive that it has put paid to the pretence of parliamentary democracy given its six decades, more or less, in power.

Everything appears to be fixed to a lesser or greater extent well in advance. The charade causes the voting public, the ruthlessly manipulated people of this country, to vomit up its bile against this confidence trick from time to time.

Every once in a while, when it all gets too much to bear, the people throw a spanner in the works. This causes twice as expensive manoeuvres by the engines of Government, but does not dilute its basic lack of respect for the wishes of the public.  We get this public displeasure as a corrective and purging.  But it costs us in instability, clownish eruptions like the AAP, and frequent elections, economic stagnation, military vulnerability and so on. But the Congress worries only about its essentials, namely its hold on power. This lack of patriotic concern in the garb of politics as usual is probably the greatest wrong done to the country by its oldest political party.

Congress practices the art of telling the people what it is supposed to think, and does not feel the slightest embarrassment at the presumption. But it is terrified at the threat of anyone else trying out the same sorry stunt. It is not only promoting the ‘old club tie’ style cabalism, the you are required to be ‘people like us’, shorthand for the closed club, but  is hugely rattled to see its variations practiced by any other rival.

The many newsy specifics of UPA failure and Congress misrepresentation are surely legion, and will only read like an endless charge sheet of the most heartless venality. Our talking heads debate such things on TV news channels every single night till our heads spin. But the broad trends, like dishas, are much more telling. Congress and the UPA have systematically let the country down while feathering its own nests. It has been seductive in its hold, lulling the exploited public into thinking that, on the contrary, it is munificent and beneficial. It hopes the scales will never fall away from the eyes of the viewing public, for them to see their rulers for the failures they have been.

But if it progress and development our people want now, in  place of a diet of thwarted hopes and bloating lies, they need to look at the man who is offering it with both hands. They need to respond to his call, and relegate the jaded ‘Sultanate’ grown stale and useless, into the fitting dustbin of history.

(1,085 words)

February 13^th, 2014

Gautam Mukherjee