Wayanad National Congress

NANA PATOLE, who reportedly resigned as president of the Maharashtra Congress, does not understand the party he joined a few years ago. No one sends a resignation letter in Congress. What do you do if, instead of leading your partners to a great victory in Maharashtra, your alliance’s vote share sinks to 35.3 per cent against the BJP-led bloc’s 49.6 per cent, and Congress presence in the Assembly crashes from 44 seats in 2019 to 16 in 2024?

You shrug. You wait. You keep quiet for perhaps two or three days, until the focus has shifted to Kaun Banega Chief Minister? There is always going to be some squabble for office among the victors, so take your time over the mourning period. Life goes on. You hold on. If Congress leaders had to resign after defeat, Rahul Gandhi would have gone from his post after a calamitous 2014 and left politics after 2019. The only law is: Someone else is to blame.

You slink into the shadows after bad news and bask in the limelight if you win. Glory is singular, defeat is plural. In defeat, blame the Election Commission and EVMs. If that proves a dud, shut the door and take it easy till the discourse has shifted. Did Bhupinder Hooda resign as chieftain of Haryana Congress? No. He is a good Congressman. Learn from your elders, or youngsters. Resignation is a fatal error.

The eternally wise veteran Sharad Pawar sees a pattern: BJP wins the big states while Congress is restricted to small ones. Political space in the broadlands of democracy is being shared between BJP and regional parties. Congress,

vulnerable to BJP in bastions, has been relegated to the margins even by allies in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Maharashtra, Bengal,

Tamil Nadu, Bihar, and Jharkhand. It has lost the status of the largest non-BJP party in Maharashtra. Its presiding family could once contest from any constituency in India. The Gandhis have now made Wayanad in Kerala their political home. Is Indian National Congress becoming the Wayanad National Congress?

D-DAY

Every election in India is a festival of democracy. The high point of the democratic calendar is November 26, the day our Constitution was adopted in 1949. Since debate is a synonym of freedom, it might be useful to recall what was not adopted. One option suggested was a directly elected president as executive head of a federation of states, instead of the more fluid British-style prime minister. Sardar Patel and Babasaheb Ambedkar apparently saw the logic of a stronger institutional check on centripetal forces in an India whose political geography resembled an irrational jigsaw puzzle in 1947. Others, including Jawaharlal Nehru, could not be persuaded. Seven-and-a-half decades later, India has resolved institutional tensions in a very Indian way. The prime minister has become as strong as the American president and Parliament as variable as Britain’s Westminster.

NOTE ALLOWED

An old friend from Haryana who has reduced his intake to a mere two kilograms of milk a day and speaks in a musical timbre interspersed now with the occasional English word, dropped by to ruminate. An instinctive anti-establishmentarian, he was disarmingly honest. His predictions about the Haryana elections were wrong. He had heard only the side he wanted to hear. Congress lost in Haryana because the party behaved like victors before voters gave them a victory. It is a familiar mistake, with known consequences.

My friend’s Haryana is many worlds away from Lutyens’ Delhi; the difference is anthropological, not geographic. Delhi’s power-centric citizens are never wrong. If voters differ from their proclamations, voters have made a mistake. Candour is not their natural characteristic; entitlement is. At which point my friend veered away to explain why Haryana is sui generis. There is no rural Haryana, he said, since everyone has a refrigerator. Farm labour comes to work on a motorcycle. The truly distinctive fact of Haryana, he said in a very matter-of-fact manner, is the unique quality of its corruption. There is no comparison to venality in government elsewhere, he said and repeated. He likes being repetitive. It is a measure of conviction, not ego.

How?

Very simple. If a file reaches a government desk without the necessary envelope nearby the official does not read the file. He scrawls two words on the margin: “Not allowed”.

If the file returns, this time accompanied by a happy lubricant, once again he does not read the file. He merely adds a single letter to the two words. ‘E’ is supplemented to ‘Not’.

‘Not Allowed’ is transformed into ‘Note Allowed’.

This story should be a prominent chapter in any good book on governance in India.

SUNSET HOUR

Good news from the shards of the British Empire. Young people: you remember the British Empire, I hope. It dressed itself in pink on the world map. Its fulcrum was India, but bits and chunks swerved across Afro-Asia, and the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. According to its publicists the sun never set on the British Empire, because there was always sunshine in some far-flung corner. There is news for Empire romanticists. According to the English magazine Spectator the sun has, at long last, set after Britain returned the Chagos Islands, home of the Anglo-American military base Diego Garcia, to Mauritius. My astronomy being weaker than my geography, I cannot vouch for this. One passes on information as read. Norway, for those in search of quiz knowledge, is the only nation with seasonal rights over permanent sunshine. There is no sunset in Svalbard between April 20 and August 22.

GO GENTLY INTO THE NIGHT

Nothing but death could have brought believers in God together. Assisted dying is the legislative flavour of the moment in Britain. If it becomes legal, you will be able to sign your own death warrant if life becomes too painful, either physically or psychologically.

The best way to go, as my mentor in journalism, the late and beloved Khushwant Singh, used to say, was to die in your sleep. He did, at the age of 99. He wanted to live till 100 but no one argues with God. The merits are obvious. You have no knowledge of how you were born, and you should be as blissfully ignorant of how you depart. Most humans, alas, die in less pleasant circumstances, so there is an argument to be made for assisted dying, although there can never be unanimity. Given the nuances, let us turn to France rather than stare at Britain.

François Mitterrand ruled France like a bourgeois prince between 1981 and 1995, when it was still possible to do so. In 1996, told that he did not have much longer to live, he ordered a last supper. It started with two dozen oysters, continued with capon in cream, and had a main course of tiny roasted songbirds eaten whole including bones and feathers. A week later he was dead but happy, possibly curious about whether gastronomy was a sin or a virtue in heaven.

One does not know whether Mitterrand believed in heaven as much as he believed in France, but if he was Biblical he would have known of the Last Trumpet, whose flourish takes us to life after death with some lyrical language: “Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

There will be songbirds in heaven, of that one is sure. But not on the menu.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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