There is a thin line dividing sanity from insanity. The great leader of the casteist forces in Bihar, Laloo Prasad Yadav, took pride in crossing that line last week in Parliament. On the first day of the winter session of Parliament, Yadav and some of his crime-scarred MPs went to great lengths to recycle the garbage that had earlier spewed forth from the mouth of a woman who, through a quirk of good fortune, had once been married into the Advani family.
She had been lawfully divorced from her husband, and, if a sense of honour and rectitude alone were to be her guide, she ought to have closed that chapter in her life once for all. But she wasn’t that kind of a woman and seemed determined to extract maximum personal mileage, even after the divorce had been duly decreed by a Delhi court, by harping on the fact that she was once an Advani `bahu.’
Indeed, even though she claimed to despite intensely the Advanis in general and the head of the family in particular, she still clung to the Advani surname because it was her passport to `success’, her very identity as it were.
In the leader of the tainted ministers in the Government of gentleman Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, she had found a ready ally who would try and boost her career as the tormentor of the Leader of the Opposition. That was the background to her unsigned letter, containing all manner of wholly baseless charges against Advani, given to a few Delhi-based journalists at an impromptu press conference surreptitiously convened by the RJD leaders at the capital’s Press Club.
While a couple of newspapers deemed it fit to publish the tripe contained in the letter, the media by and large steered clear of the self-seeker’s imaginary tale of woes. But Laloo Yadav wasn’t about to let go the opportunity to target the Leader of the Opposition whose party had stalled parliamentary proceedings on the issue of `tainted’ ministers for several days.
While the woman in question retailed rubbish against Advani in Delhi, Yadav marketed her wild sayings in Patna. There seemed to be a perfect harmony between the fodder king of Bihar and the most opportunist divorced daughter in law of Advani. The two seemed to have teamed up to blemish the name of one of India’s most straight-faced leaders who, by all accounts, had displayed no weakness for the proverbial three Ws, something which cannot be said of his traducers.
But what Yadav and his men did inside on the floor of the House went beyond the display of rank bad behaviour by individual members because it marked a breach of the hitherto unwritten code which said that private should not intrude into the public arena. A member’s personal life was his own so long as it did not impinge on his public conduct.
The Westminster model which the Republic’s founding fathers had grafted on this vast country of enormous illiteracy and poverty had by and large worked satisfactorily till the advent of the casteist chieftains in the post- Mandal polity.
It is remarkable that despite the confrontationist politics of Indira Gandhi, despite her wholly unconstitutional action in locking up in prison tens of thousands of opposition leaders and supporters, no one had uttered a word in public about her messy married life or about her son, Sanjay’s romantic peccadilloes.
To be fair, Mrs Gandhi too had not stooped low to rake up personal lives of her opponents for a public airing. Why, the earlier generation of leaders had never eluded in public to the much speculated romantic liaison between India’s first prime minister and Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the last Viceroy. Public discourse was kept free from such tittle tattle fit only for society magazines.
Admittedly, the deepening of the democratic process coupled with the rise of the Mandal castes following the reservations in jobs and educational institutions has replaced the old ruling elites with the new ones. Which may not be such a bad thing, after all, provided the new leaderships realise that the game of democracy too needs to be played within the boundaries of decency and decorum.
If the main accused in the Rs 800-crore fodder-scam, Laloo Yadav, believes that his redemption lies in pulling down everyone else in the polity to his level of crudity and crassness there can be no hope for our democratic system. By seeking to give wider currency to nonsensical charges against the Leader of the Opposition Yadav lowered the prestige of Parliament.
In the process, he also broke the
unwritten compact which barred politicians from dragging the personal lives
of their rivals into the public domain. Yadav ought to be restrained before
he inflicts further damage on our parliamentary institutions.