TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
What could be more painful for a mother than to be told that to prove her sincerity to salvage the situation, she must renounce her only son? And that, precisely, is the tragedy of the 21st century India’s most celebrated mother, Sonia Gandhi, whom her own party men have begun to subtly hint that to live upto the responsibility of rejuvenating the Congress party and to reassert her credentials as the Patron of the 100 year old party, she must ask her son to take a back seat and cease being a liability instead of an asset for the party.
To add salt to injury, the party colleagues donot say so in too many words but wish the ‘‘mother -head’’ to believe that the heir-apparent does not deserve to be the “heir.” And the mother finds herself too mellowed down even to turn back in shock and express her anguish as Julius Ceaser did in Shakespeare’s famous epic when he saw the loyal Brutus too turning against him and exclaimed, ‘‘Et tu, Brute?’’ or ‘‘You too, Brutus?’’
Difficult it is indeed for a mother to accept the fact that the son is undeserving. Even more difficult for her is to accept that the son deserves to be reprimanded. And still more difficult, bordering on almost impossible, is for the mother to herself carry out reprimand against the son. Rare have been such instances is history where the mother actually went ahead to push the son aside for a higher cause… often such occasional occurrances are only a part of fiction like the one portrayed in Mehboob Khan’s magnum opus ‘‘Mother India’’. Will Sonia Gandhi emerge as ‘‘Mother India 2014’’? That is a question everyone, more so every Congressman, is asking.
Given the psyche with conditioning of dynastic succession, well-wishers of the family are also whispering the merits of daughter Priyanka stepping in to redeem the Nehru- Gandhi tradition… notwithstanding son-in-law Robert’s business ventures which may nevertheless prove to be an embarrassment. After all… how can the Congress take the risk of passing on the mantle to somebody from outside the family and place the whole nation in peril ?
On a serious note, however, Verdict 2013 has sent out a message loud and clear…. that the people of India are wary of family monarchy which they realize is hardly what they had fought for as a replacement to British Raj. And, this is a reality, which the ‘‘dynasty’’ mothers and the ‘‘dynasty’’ children will have to learn to live with. What has come as a hard lesson to the occupants of 10 Janpath, is bound to dawn, sooner than later, on the regional monarchies as well, which have inadvert- antly turned into replicas of erstwhile princely ‘‘Rajvadas’’.
With the Indian voter wary of ‘‘dynasty’’ the sons and daughters of several other ministers and Chief Ministers would also do well to voluntarily step aside and make room for sons and daughters of ordinary mortals lest the common man should rise in revolt and overthrow the glass-castles. Umapathy drops the warning with Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetic phrase ‘‘….Woh Waqt Kareeb Aa Pahuncha Hai, Jab Takht Giraye Jayenge, Jab Taj Uchhale Jayenge…”
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