I, Me, Myself
For a man who cut his political teeth at the feet of Jaiprakash Narayan, Laloo Prasad Yadavs conduct is indeed most shocking. Twenty-two years ago when Mrs Gandhi clamped down on Indian democracy, Yadav, a student leader then, won his first spurs defending freedom and fighting political corruption. He had attracted notice for standing up for certain values in political life. And was ready to pay for his beliefs. That the same man who was detained under MISA for 19 long months during Mrs Gandhis Emergency should now be mocking at the very system of governance he had so valiantly sought to defend, spotlights the distance the nation has travelled with Yadav to its moral and political degeneration. Truly, JP must be turning in his grave!
Without doubt, Yadav is holding not just the ruling UF but the entire polity to ransom. Whether or not he is allowed to actually administer the state from jail, the very thought is an insult to the founding fathers of the Republic. Nothing in the Constitution or in our experience of working it however haphazardly in the last 50 years has prepared us to deal with such obstreperous elements as Yadav.
If in 1975-77 Mrs Gandhi had become a menace to the very system she was constitutionally entrusted to protect, Yadav now threatens to do so in an even more reprehensible manner. Mrs Gandhi at least had the fig leaf of Presidential sanction to impose the emergency and to abridge basic human freedom. Yadav is thumbing his nose at the state governor and refuses to step down even after the required sanction has been granted to the CBI to prosecute him.
Are there no remedies for dealing with such obnoxious conduct? Surely the mighty Indian state cannot be so helpless as to be trifled with by a bullying politician? At the end of the dreaded Emergency, pundits and politicians alike were unanimous that the root cause of our meek submission to the unremitting terror of a lawless state was our collective fear of losing out whatever little each one of us had. Not many were willing to jeopardise their today for protecting the tomorrows of the coming generations. In other words, it was pure selfishness of Indians, especially, of the politicians, that allowed the Emergency to last as long as it did. And like it or not, despite the small pockets of resistance, Mrs Gandhi could have carried on with her one- and- a- half-person rule for as long as she wanted. Fortunately, she was lulled into believing that the quiet sullenness of the people was an endorsement of her Emergency rule. She was of course proved wrong in the general election she had ordered to cash in on the trains are running on time syndrome.
Yadav is the latest in the long line of politicians who over the years have exploited the levers of power to line their own pockets. That he is brazen about it underlines yet again the ordinary peoples immense capacity to be fooled by politicians. Make no mistake about it. Despite the mounting evidence of wrong-doings against him, his is no empty boast that he remains the single-most popular leader of Bihar. It is quite another matter that the logic of numbers, which apparently ought to be supreme in a democracy, often does not square with the demands of justice and equity, especially in the Indian context.
How imperfect the current system is, or at least what we have made of it, ought to be clear when a Kalpnath Rai gets elected to Parliament while facing criminal charges. Or when an A R Antulay despite his Trustsgate gets back into mainstream politics. And Sukh Ram continues to be the darling of the people in his Mandi parliamentary constituency in Himachal Pradesh. In the ultimate analysis the fault lies with the people. We deserve our Laloo Yadavs and Sukh Rams.
In the absence of a popular censure against errant politicians, their misconduct goes largely unchecked. Witness how desperately Yadav is now trying to turn his popularity with his castemen into a hedge against his implication in the fodder scam. If he seems to have failed so far, it is in no small measure due to the hawk-eyed monitoring of the investigations by the Patna high court. The saving grace of the Indian democracy on the eve of the twenty-first century is an activist judiciary which has stepped in, albeit reluctantly, to ensure that the system is not pelted beyond recognition by mindless politicians.
As for that gentleman-politician I K Gujral, his plight is really pathetic. He knows fully well what is the right thing to do in the present crisis hovering over the UF with its epicentre in Patna but is afraid to do so for fear of losing his high prime ministerial perch. For this darling of the chattering classes too, self-interest comes before principles. Hence, his do-nothing approach towards a recalcitrant Yadav. That Bihar may be further receding into anarchy, that the established tenets of political behaviour had been stood on their head by the president of the very party of which the prime minister is a senior member, is of little consequence to Gujral. He expects the crisis to resolve itself or, failing which, to be handled by others in the Janata Dal.
The crisis brought about by Yadavs antics is as good an occasion as any for the entire political class to devise a code of conduct for politicians in similar circumstances. Otherwise, with the cancer of caste and regionalism spreading, it will be hard to stop the descent into political anarchy.