The Faulty Genes’ Stupid Offspring

THE SELF-MADE POLITICIAN, especially of the criminal variety, is a clever resourceful person; an entrepreneur who decided early on that success and morals cannot go together and battled his way up with the understanding that so long as he continued to succeed, he would stay out of jail. It is not easy. Millions of criminals aspire to success in their crime careers; millions of politicians aspire to be become MLAs or MPs, but only a handful make it to a higher level. They are survivors with instinctive timing on when to murder someone and when to not. The son of the criminal politician, on the other hand, thinks he is everything that his parent is, but he is not.

We know that Manu Sharma pulled out a gun and shot Jessica Lall for refusing to serve him a drink, but it was not an arbitrary act of impulse. There was son-of-a-politician psychology behind it. Since the time he was born, all he has been seeing is his parent work the system and he thinks that he knows it inside out; that there are loopholes and bylanes in the law created just for him when he randomly murders someone. The entrepreneur-politician, with his experience, knows the when, where and how of breaking the law. The son has no such filters.

Bindi Yadav is a criminal with multiple cases against him. His wife Manorama is an MLC. With a name like Rocky and guns for toys, it was almost certain that sooner or later their son would shoot someone in daylight. The only values they taught him was the bravado of the thug. He thinks that his father and mother will get him out, and they will definitely try. They have already provided an alibi for the time he shot dead a 19-year-old for overtaking his car. But Rocky Yadav’s fate is to now to spend a lifetime going in and out of jail as the many attempts of his parents sometimes succeed and sometimes fail.

The Bihar that Rocky grew up in was the jungle raj of the 1990s and his father was one of the predators there, terrorising and extorting from a town to such an extent that businessmen fled in fear. Shooting someone for overtaking a car would have been par for the course in those years. But look at Rocky’s parents in 2016. His mother is a legislator in the ruling party of Nitish Kumar, who brought the state out of the dark ages. When crime didn’t pay and politics did, Bindi and Manorama Yadav knew they had to adapt. But the son has no clue that a daylight murder in the age of national television is as good as a life sentence because the case is too big for all the mechanisms of law—from the police to the courts—to be manipulated.

After a decade in jail (hopefully), he might possibly get it—that it is neither alright to kill someone just like that, nor is it worth it. In the interim, he will wonder what is wrong with the world.

About The Author

Madhavankutty Pillai

Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai  

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