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The Art of Besharmi

There is a strange contradiction in our politics. It surfaces at every crisis when, instead of rooting for the good guys, those who stand for decency, courage and propriety in public life, mass opinion suddenly swings away (more out of curiosity, I guess, than actual support) in the direction of the badmashes. And, all of a sudden, the media becomes obsessed with the shenanigans of the besharm, the beimaan and the begairat.

That is, those who have no shame, no conscience and are not trustworthy.

Everybody wants to read about them and them alone. The rest can go to hell.

Remember the public obsession with Haridas Mundhra who destroyed the reputation of TTK, one of our finest finance ministers, and almost dropped the Nehru government? Then came Dharma Teja, the supremely well connected shipping magnate with the pretty wife, who fled to Costa Rica or wherever errant businessmen flee when they become bankrupt. Remember the jeep scandal which gave the acerbic Krishna Menon headlines for years on end and Nehru, sleepless nights.

Mrs Gandhi had many such scandals as well but the Emergency brought out the darkest, sleaziest and wickedest side of our politics and some of the most obnoxious people Indian politics has ever had the misfortune to see hijacked all the media attention. From Vidya Charan Shukla and Om Mehta to Ambika Soni and Bansi Lal to Jagmohan and Kamal Nath. Most of them deserved to have been dropped ignominiously in the trash bin of history but because the media had made such huge cut-outs of them, they actually ended up surviving the shame. In fact, most of them are still hanging around in public life, not with their heads bent low in embarrassment but cockily reinvented in new disguises, their sordid past in temporary amnesia.

The same is true for Rajiv's lot. Arun Nehru, Arun Singh, Satish Sharma, Lalit Suri, Mani Shankar Aiyar. Some of them can no longer be traced. But those who are around have zigzagged across various post-Rajiv allegiances and are now trying desperately to return to Sonia's inner coterie where they smell the cordite of power. Arun Nehru flirted with the BJP for a long time after being sidelined in the Third Front. Arun Singh sulked in the Himalayas. Satish Sharma and Lalit Suri ganged up with old Narasimha Rao to isolate Sonia, and Mani Shankar Aiyar actually joined a shrieking Mamta Banerjee to denounce the very Sonia he is now so desperately sucking up to.

Narasimha Rao, who succeeded Rajiv, brought Chandra Swami, Sukh Ram, Satish Sharma centrestage and corruption became so all-encompassing during his time that it no longer sounded like a dirty word. In fact, Rao was the first Indian prime minister to be actually dragged to court to defend himself in bribery and corruption cases involving himself and his family. From St Kitts to Karsan, it was a long story of lies, forgery, deceit, bribery and plain thieving that came to light during the last years of his tenure and when the nation finally kicked him out in sheer disgust, he turned to writing cheap, fourth-rate, kiss-and-tell novels where he thinly disguised his old girlfriends and exposed them to ridicule and cheap jokes. Of course, the media fell all over itself to laud him as the next Marquez. But why blame the media? They are not really expected to know the difference between a novelist and a political ham.

Otherwise, do you think that Laloo and Mayawati and Mamta Banerjee and, now, our good friend Jayalalitha would have got the kind of mind boggling press and television attention that they are attracting today? That is my contention. And my regret is that, inch for inch and minute for minute, the largest amount of newsprint and electronic coverage invariably ends up making stars out of trash. Amazing qualities of leadership are discovered in a man who has swindled his own home state of thousands of crores of rupees and turned it into a filthy criminal den. All in the name of caste empowerment and defying the ruling elite. If Laloo can emerge as a political hero, with even his worst enemies reluctantly admiring his so-called charisma, what stops any pint-sized clown from hiding his crime and corruption under the pretence of benefitting the backward and the poor?

Mayawati, on the other hand, earned her spurs through bullying, ranting and threatening her political rivals and blackmailing the rest into supporting her, again in the name of the weaker sections of society. The dalits to be precise. Amidst this week's crisis, when the Vajpayee government is desperately trying to cobble together numbers that can sustain them in power, she is reportedly negotiating for the various cases against her to be removed in exchange for support to the beleaguered BJP government.

This is exactly what Jayalalitha has been doing as well and getting huge headlines and large posters of herself pasted all over Delhi, to celebrate her new found power and legitimacy. Even the prime minister held a benami dinner for her at Vijay Goel's and Subramanian Swamy his earthquake of a tea party, where Sonia came to shake hands with the new Empress of the South. Is Jayalalitha really as big and important as she is being made out to be? To be honest, I have no clue. Only the next elections can decide that. But I certainly feel that the media is going overboard in projecting her, in terms that are infinitely larger than life. Look at all her television interviews. They say the same things in different ways, in her charming convent accent, but with such amazing sangfroid that most Indians are almost on the verge of forgetting that Jayalalitha has the largest number of corruption cases against her and has spent a fairly longish spell behind bars. The media whitewash has been done with enchanting expertise and daring derringdo.

There are others who may not have corruption or criminal cases against them but have seized the headlines by their sheer versatility in zigzagging through impossible and irreconcilable ideological barriers. H S Surjeet of the CPI-M and, surprise surprise, my favourite chief minister Jyoti Basu is among them.

I could not simply believe my ears when Basu, who has always stood for what is politically correct, espoused his current theorem that Sonia Gandhi alone can provide true and durable leadership to India and declared upfront that he and all his comrades are ready to queue up behind her and support the Congress in this great nation building task.

At first I thought it was a joke. A very funny joke. But now when I hear him espousing this theory wherever he goes, I throw up my hands in sheer disgust. Surjeet, true to style, has chipped in and, much to the embarrassment of many of Basu's own partymen, some of the leaders of the Left seem all set to welcome Sonia as the new Bharat Mata. And Bofors be damned, as well as the red alert for Quattrochhi.

No, it is not amusing. I see a strange pattern to this kind of peculiar and promiscuous political behaviour. Where nothing is sacrosanct but power. Anything goes. The most shameless alliance of interests, the most absurd abrogation of values, the cheapest compromises, the most obnoxious demands, the crudest of posturing, the most reprehensible rhetoric. But such is politics today that the dirtiest words have been cleansed by political necessity and yesterday's villains have become today's heroes and heroines.

Can you blame India for losing sight of its future if we are always so ready to whitewash our past?

Pritish Nandy at Jayalalitha's tea party: Picture by Atul Chowdhury

Pritish Nandy

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