Indian politicians are either smart or street-smart and they assume that whatever they say will finally get them votes when the time comes. I use the word ‘assume’ because more often than not these politicians speak things that lie somewhere between being utterly dumb to being absolutely unsavory. When we are in a charitable mood we may smile and nod our heads calling them jokers who cannot be trusted to do anything meaningful for the country. However, most of the time we dismiss their words as nonsense and mutter: #IdiotsInParliament
The tragedy here is that despite decades of being called jokers and idiots these people or people like them invariably manage to get elected again and again. I am hardly surprised to find India graduating from being a nation where naked fakirs roamed around doing some vague rope trick to now being a country where Sandeep Dikshit, a Congress MP refers to Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat as a ‘sadak ka goonda’, where political mandate results in bizarre announcements like removing the Taj Mahal from the list of tourist destinations, where Chidambram, our finance minister, once said: ‘When you can buy ice-cream for Rs 20, why complain about price rise?’, and where Gulam Nabi Azad once said: ‘When there is no electricity, there is nothing else to do but produce babies.’ India is now a country that thrills cartoonists and comedians because we have people like Sushil Kumar Shinde who say, ‘This kind of rape should not occur.’ We have even Narendra Modi reportedly remarking in an interview to the Wall Street Journal that Gujarat has malnutrition because ‘figure conscious girls diet’. We have had comments from politicians going viral because we have people like Sriprakash Jaiswal, Ex Union Coal Minister, saying: ‘Like an old victory, wives lose charm as time goes by’… or Mamata Banerjee, CM of West Bengal assuming that ‘rape cases are on a rise in the country because men and women interact with each other more freely now.’ These are besides the comments that wanted to ban jeans and chowmein for girls as they were the real culprits when rapes happened.
If we assume that our politicians make irresponsible remarks because they are uneducated or illiterate, we’d be off the mark. Yes, we have a fair share of politicians or elected representatives who may not have gone to school or have a higher degree to go around with. Our Assemblies and the parliament has seen all sorts of politicians. We have had Phoolan Devi who never went to school and was yet a Samajwadi party MP from Mirzapur, Rabri Devi with no formal education to become the CM of Bihar, Golma Devi who was unable to even read out her oath during the swearing in ceremony, Uma bharti studied only up to the sixth class, and Jaffer Sharif who worked as a driver with S Nijalingappa and then entered politics to finally become the railway minister. Indian politics has seen film stars, scientists, writers, poets, cricketers, and even doctors besides a huge number of lawyers, economists, and those who are here because they think politics is more like a family business. We have also had examples like Jitender Singh Tomar from AAP who went around with a fake law degree racing with people like Subramaniam Swamy, P Chidambram, Shashi Tharoor, and ManMohan Singh who have degrees from some of the best colleges and universities in the world. By the way, when we talk of #IdiotsInParliament we are not talking of just India. US has had ‘the archetype George W Bush as the president. For 8 YEARS. The man whose idiotic musings managed to sustain businesses had a nuclear arsenal at his command.’ Dean Burnett in The Guardian continues to write: ‘Not that the UK can feel smug, with the amount of demonstrable idiocy in our own system. Michael Gove, Chris Grayling, Grant Shapps, Jeremy Hunt, David Tredinnick, a ridiculous Labour party (complete with mugs), the rise of UKIP, and the beloved bumbling mayor Boris Johnson. Plenty of people are quick to point out that Boris Johnson is actually very intelligent/dangerous, that he’s only pretending to be a buffoon. But this underscores the point; an intelligent person has to feign stupidity to achieve political success.’
Buffoonery is like a pseudonym for those who we send to legislate and decide on what laws are to be made and which one of those need to be amended. Watch any debate that is there during sessions on the LokSabha and the RajyaSabha channels on the television and you will know why Rajiv Gandhi remarked that politics is in our shirts and pants. But I certainly wish politics wasn’t some sort of a chemical to catalyse gonadal giggles but had the sensibility to cohabit with logic, far-sightedness, and empathy. Politicians were not meant to be stand-up comedians but had a far more serious role to play.
Politics has never had an easy role… and now with polls and the magic of IT, the politician feels that only numbers tick which obviously leads me on to say that polls+IT+whatever ticks=politics. If this sounds idiotic, the hashtag that goes with this post #IdiotsInPolitics will be perceived as deserving as #IdiotsInParliament. So yes, political comedy is a show that never ends.
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#IdiotsInParliament Political comedy is a show that never ends
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Arvind Passey
11 September 2018
