TALES OF TRAVESTY
DR. JITENDRA SINGH
The inimitable Piloo Mody, known for his famous one-liners inside and outside the parliament, had once remarked that Indira Gandhi was a better mother than a Prime Minister. The obvious reference was to the blatant manner in which Indira Gandhi had thrown to winds all norms of propriety to impose son Sanjay on an unwilling nation during the early and mid 1970s.Nearly four decades later, as a devout daughter-in-law, Congress President Sonia Gandhi has stepped into her mother-in-law’s shoes, or shall we say chappals, by seeking to impose son Rahul on an unwilling nation. And thus, the single loudest message emanating from Congress party’s “Chintan Shivar” at Jaipur last weekend is that Sonia Gandhi has kept up the Nehru-Gandhi tradition of supreme motherhood.
Anyway, now it is official. Rahul Gandhi is the Vice President and by implication Number 2 after mother Sonia Gandhi in the Congress hierarchy. From the hot dry deserts of Rajasthan comes the decree to salvage Congress fortunes by hooking these to the apron strings of country’s first political family.
The spadework was going on for long … quite unambiguously. The Congress corridors had been, for the last few years, monotonously echoing with a deafening clamour to bring in Rahul for a “bigger” role…whatever that meant. And this clamour was invariably accompanied by an unending eulogy of the young Nehru-Gandhi scion, his assumed popularity among youth and his proclaimed love for youth which stood out rather quite “unremarkably” when very recently he chose to maintain a convenient silence even as a few kilometers away from his residence, the entire youth community of Delhi was out on streets protesting against rape and murder of one of their peers.
He pulls up the sleeves of his “Kurta” every now and then when he is on public address system. He grows and shaves his beard in cyclic phases. He is trying every formula in the book to endear himself to the people of India while his party is dutifully trying every trick in the book to instal him as Prime Minister of India. Like an adolescent school pass-out making a bid for admission to a professional college through round-the-clock coaching classes, Rahul “Baba” too is working hard…really, very hard…. to live upto his mother’s expectations and secure admission into the PM office which has been successively held earlier by his father, his grand mother and his great grand father but…he has a tall order to answer. One of the tragedies for a man, goes the adage is to be born to a great parentage !
“Chintan Shivar” is over marking the arrival of Rahul Gandhi via Jaipur. It is now time for “Chinta”. Come 2014! And Rahul Gandhi will have to go through the “reality check” in much the same way as his father Rajiv Gandhi was made to go through in 1991 when he almost lost the election for himself and his party before he got assassinated at Sriperumbadoor to secure a sympathy generated victory mandate for Congress through the remaining phases of general election.
Finally, it is the common man whose verdict will make all the difference even as Umapathy, a La Sahir, yearns with a poetic wish to endear Rahul to India’s two hundred crore populace through a desperate matronly imploration laced in mother Sonia’s anxiety ‘‘…..Jise Tu Kabool Kar Le, Woh Sadaa Kahan Se Laon !….’’
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