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Hand deep in glove
Congress was admiring the view of volcanic ash falling on the NCP like dandruff on a sunny day, it also got to see its old adversary, the BJP, splutter in Parliament as if a casteless tribal had just stepped on a Brahmin’s shadow, writes Indrajit Hazra.
The Congress Party is a funny bunny. Just when you thought that it can’t do politics because it’s busy being good by feeding people, playing Robin Hood (even as some critics think that it is really the opposite, a Dooh Nibor, stealing from the poor to pay the rich), making India the proudest planet in the galaxy, and growing a stubble, the Grand Old Party pulls not one, but three furry things out of its venerable salt-stained armpits.
First, there was the breathless commentary of the IPL cockadoodledoo. I promised Ma Sheetola, the patron deity of smallpox, after she cured me of a gang of warts in some unsavoury place, that I wouldn’t write about the IPL again. But when Sharad Pawar and Praful Patel started squirming just that wee bit inside their bush shirts after lies, damned lies and palliatives about the alleged ‘involvement’ of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Lalit Modi’s game, I initially expected Congress President Sonia Gandhi to pick up the phone and give the former Congress MP from Baramati (and present ally in Maharashtra) a piece of her mind.
She did nothing of the sort. After all, you don’t conduct the Heimlich manoeuvre on someone choking on his food if you were forced to invite him to supper for reasons nothing to do with friendship. Also, in these times when mothers are listening in on phone conversations their daughters have with their male friends, who wants to pick up the phone anyway?
If the Congress, from its safe vantage point, was admiring the view of volcanic ash falling on the NCP like dandruff on a sunny day, it also got to see its old adversary, the Bharatiya Jantarmantar Party, splutter in Parliament as if a casteless tribal had just stepped on a Brahmin’s shadow.
The BJP, to be fair to my favourite triple-lettered party without an S in the middle, has been a shadow of its former look-what-the-cat’s-dragged-in-again self. Partymen are behaving as if they belong to one party, so what if its new president bears a ‘faint resemblance’ if too long in the sun.
Which is why it was a bummer to see the BJP come out last week with a new dose of bad PR. Shibu Soren, dazzled perhaps by the presence of the righteous in Parliament, voted against the cut motions co-sponsored by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s ally in Ranchi, the venerable BJP.
Once again, the Congress did nothing. Well, with Mayawati helping out in the kitchen, it jolly well could afford to — and ignore the Thompson and Thomson Yadav duo desperately trying to get noticed that they didn’t go with the bad, bad BJP during the cut motions votes. With the BJP now wondering whether to tow in the wooden horse of leading the Jharkhand government that a penitent Soren has offered in Ranchi, the party is rattled rather than injured.
The new Chanakya-Machiavelli image of Manmohan-Sonia will help the Congress correct its image of being a goodie-goodie who can’t get its elbows in the mud and knees into groins. We’ll know how much the UPA has lost its baby fat when we see the three ladies heading the Congress, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the BSP handle their moment of big differences. In Uttar Pradesh, it’ll have to be over more than just iPod-on-shuffle CBI investigations and playing misty with experimental Dalits.
In Bengal, the TMC may have planned to have gone into the Kolkata civic polls holding hands and singing Rabindrasangeet with the Congress. But local Congressmen are holding out, not wanting any district-level alliance either. In any case, knowing Mamata Banerjee’s talent at governing a state, all the Congress has to do is do nothing and wait till there’s a clamour for some professional help.
Finally, there’s another ‘friendly outsider’ the Congress can try its new nip-and-tuck skills on. DMK chief M. Karunanidhi meets Sonia Gandhi tomorrow My bet is that Phone Operator A. Raja won’t be led up the Tharoor path. By doing nothing, the Grand Old Party can get the DMK to realise that it’s the Congress that’s doing it a favour and not the other way round. A soft chuckle is all that’s required to remind allies like the NCP, the TMC and the DMK of who’s their daddy now.
