Commentary/ Pritish Nandy

Films, Crime, New Age Politics

For all those who aspire to a career in politics, I have a simple word of advice. Take a short cut. Otherwise, you will never make it. There are far too many road blocks and everyone has this habit of upstaging earnest political aspirants. So, if you follow the straight and narrow, you will spend an entire lifetime aspiring to politics but never quite making it. Others will jump the queue. Mamta Kulkarni or Govinda. Chhota Shakeel or Abu Salem.

Yes, you got it. The short cuts I am suggesting are two. Films and crime.

Ideally, you should start with films. You can become a hero or a heroine, a comedian or a villain, a director or just a simple loud mouthed lout so that political parties can field you in elections or, better still, nominate you to Parliament. It helps if you are stupid as well, and ready to grovel before your leaders in the misplaced belief that politics is the business of power. It is not. Not any longer. It is, in today's India, the business of deal making and power broking and, if you are lucky, getting out of turn, prime time slots on Doordarshan to air a few mindless television serials.

But if you cannot make it in films, if you do not have the right sugar daddies to back you with their AK-47s, you still have no reason to fret. There are other equally neat options in showbiz. For instance, you can pick up a bit role in any of the mythologicals. Play Rama or Krishna or Shiva or even Ravana. Play Sita or Gita or Kaikeyi or Surpanakha in drag and watch your political career take off faster than a Concorde. Even if the BJP does not want you, someone somewhere will pick you up and give you an instant ticket to Parliament. For there is an acute shortage of nautankis in politics and, even if you lose an election, there are enough chief ministers ready to nominate you to the Rajya Sabha. Where you can adorn the benches and never need speak an intelligent word.

Chandrababu Naidu nominated Jayaprada, whom Renuka Chowdhury her own party MP recently described as a mental retard. Yet Jayaprada has quietly emerged as a power centre in her own right, with countless people milling around her wherever she goes. She is the Queen of Hyderabad these days. MGR nominated Jayalalitha and see where she has reached in less one decade. Her personal wealth, if you believe what people in Tamil Nadu say, would be in excess of Rs 10 billion. Enough to call her the Empress of Madras.

Mamta Kulkarni could easily have become the Mata Hari of Mumbai, I am told. Laloo was on the verge of nominating her to Parliament after she went to Patna to entertain his fodder scamsters. But the CBI caught up with him and now the underworld is also claiming her as their own. So she is out of the running till Dubai gets the right to nominate an MP. Meanwhile, a fickle Laloo changed his mind and settled on Pooja Bhatt instead. But his humourless aides dissuaded him from taking the next step after her near naked picture appeared on the Internet.

Last week, the President of India -- a man of more sober taste --nominated Shabana Azmi and Mrinal Sen to the Rajya Sabha. They were two out of nine nominations and, curiously, the list had no educationist, poet, musician, artist, social reformer, environmentalist, technologist or healthcare nominee. Not even an economist or a successful entrepreneur in the era of structural reforms and liberalisation, when India is preparing to integrate with the world economy. Obviously, filmwallahs are more important than anyone else. Or so the President of India believes.

There are many others who have been in and out of politics. Amitabh. Rajesh Khanna. Sunil Dutt. Raj Babbar. Double Bore Shatrughan Sinha. Vacuous Vyjayantimala. Rajnikant. Dipika What's-her-name. Arvind the Ravana. Most of them are renowned for their silence within the House and, in the curious case of Vyjayantimala, notorious for refusing to give up her official government bungalow long after being thrown out of Parliament. They all took their short cut to politics seriously, but few lasted beyond the first term. Yet their clout remains intact.

Take the case of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations. The national broadcaster, Doordarshan, one of the most remarkable success stories of free India, now led by a bold, intelligent, honest officer, was persuaded to celebrate the occasion by doling out six Rs 10 million projects to six film makers. Not to television professionals, who have made Doordarshan the great success story that it is. Not even to serial makers. But to the filmwallahs who have already hijacked almost all the prime time on the national broadcaster to air their mindless garbage in the name of rising TRPs. These are the very filmwallahs who have driven out public broadcasting to the Siberia of off time zones and reduced Indian television into an ugly, tasteless farce, where drivel rules and nothing else can survive unless it conforms to the most abysmal standards of showbiz.

They have made it impossible for quality shows to survive. They have made news uneconomic. They have pushed out educational programming. They have made us into a nation of morons. And all in the name of TRPs and reach. In the fiftieth year of India's Independence, did we need Doordarshan to perpetuate this hegemony of the filmwallahs when India has some of the finest public broadcasting shows in the world, which are unable to sustain themselves through sponsors?

The answer was clear when I interviewed Prime Minister Gujral a month back. We want less films on Doordarshan, more public broadcasting: he declared. Yet the entire Doordarshan budget for commissioned shows to celebrate fifty years of Independence went to six film-makers and two of the nine seats in the Rajya Sabha to filmwallahs and I cannot see how either could have happened without his knowledge or concurrence.

But movies is the first short cut. If you cannot make it by this route, try murder, rape, extortion, kidnapping. Any crime will do as long as it is ugly and heinous. After all, many of the MPs from UP and Bihar have excellent criminal records. Records that are models for all political aspirants. These records have not only ensured them their seats in Parliament but also an endearing role in modern India's political history.

Not all of them are as privileged as Phoolan Devi to have won a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize but many of them have track records which would easily put Charles Sobhraj and Veerappan to shame. It is just because they are not very articulate in the house that they have remained out of the political limelight. Give them a few years and, like Arun Gawli and Taslimuddin, they will emerge as the stars of New Age politics in India.

They have courage, grit, dedication and huge caches of arms stashed away. Their chelas and chamchas know how to capture booths, extort funds, threaten their election rivals into backing off. They can ensure huge margins of victory that are sometimes even larger than the total number of votes polled. And, sometimes, when the going is tough, they even have the magical powers to entirely reverse voting trends. They can desecrate statues, break down places of worship, wipe out entire villages, win electoral victories against the most incredible odds. They can murder, gang rape, loot, cheat, maim, terrorise. No wonder they are in such great demand in politics.

Yes, films and crime. These are the two most important routes to politics. If you are serious about a career in public life, you have no choice but to opt for one of them. Otherwise, stay at home and forget the idea of sharing in the building of modern India.

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