Sunday, March 2, 2008

CONGRESS PARTY FOR DALIT PM NOW!

Mayawati’s march to Delhi has the Congress really rattled. The way the party has got into a reactive panic mode is only going to strengthen Mayawati and make her reach that chair in Delhi even faster!

First was the spectacle of Rahul Gandhi spending a brief night in the house of a dalit in UP, much as a prince would do to demonstrate his royal station to his subjects. Then itself, I had written that this condescending, reactive gesture has come too late in the day and that it would, in fact, strengthen Mayawati’s grip as the real leader of Dalits who have been exploited for long as cannon fodder by the Congress. Then came the news that this first royal visit would not be the last; it would be repeated in other parts of the country too!

Contrast this with what a real prince, Prince Harry of Britain, has been doing for over two months. He has been fighting a real war, not as an honorary commander-in-chief, but as an ordinary soldier in primitive conditions no different from those being faced by ordinary soldiers. No VIP treatment whatsoever. On the contrary, the prince has braved real danger to his life, eaten military rations out of a tin and gone without a bath for days at an end before bathing where other soldiers do! The images of the unbathed prince in military fatigues with his unruly hair filled with sand, firing a heavy machine gun and sitting as one with Gorkha soldiers, are meant to convey a powerful message not to just to his subjects but the entire world. No wonder Great Britain become the greatest ever nation and empire in the history of mankind and is still dominating the world almost completely through its ‘offsprings’.

Can anyone imagine our prince or any other pretender to the throne, even the babus lording over the MOD, putting themselves through even half the risk and discomfort, to be one with the soldiers who are fighting for this nation? On the contrary, in the corridors of power, they think that soldiers belong to a different, inferior planet altogether, to be kept out of their closed loop completely! Quite like the dalits! Will any politician ever stay for months with an impoverished dalit like a dalit, sharing his difficult daily life and, go ahead and laugh, toilets in open fields, like a certain Mohandas had done?

Had we learnt the right values from the British royalty and the Mahatma, our political landscape have not been as dismal as it is today.

Realizing that the ‘stay-a-night’ strategy might actually backfire, the Congress has fired another shot straight into its foot. More that sixty years after Mahatma Gandhi dreamt of seeing a dalit as Prime Minister, the party has, for the first time, has expressed the hope that it would give the country its first dalit PM! This ‘lofty’ thought has been expressed in the party’s mouthpiece ‘Sandesh’.

Can you spot a dalit who is a real leader anywhere in the Congress party? Forget that, can you spot any real leader outside the royal family? They are there, but they all left the Congress long back! Where, then, is the Congress going to find a dalit to become the PM?

It seems that the Congress has decided to dispense with the services of Dr. Manmohan Singh after the next elections. The party now seems to be looking for a suitable dalit who can be asked to hold the title should the party find itself in a position to form the government again, since the prince has not yet been accepted as leader by the people, as the party had hoped! Again, I don’t know how can any ordinary Indian be fooled into believing that propping a dalit puppet into the PM’s chair is no different from a dalit getting there as the real leader of the party!

I had written earlier that, for perhaps the first time since Independence, Mayawati is in the unique position of being able to cause a split in the Congress, to lead the breakaway portion on to becoming the real party, with the remaining rump withering away faster that anyone can even imagine now. Looks like someone in the Congress too has realized that!

As of now, that appears to be the only way that the Congress party will be able to fulfill its latest dream of giving the country its first real dalit Prime Minister! Behen Mayawati, are you listening?


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In the current political scenario, the only viable option we have is voting BJP into power. I hope Mayawati never becomes a PM, I don't care if she is a Dalit or not, we need a good PM, that's it. And I think L.K. Advani can do a good job, despite his (communal) past.