State of play: Of unspoken feuds and a Lingayat churn

Let me start off by saying that while all eyes are on the Chief Minister’s sudden dash to Delhi on Saturday, the corridors of Vidhana Soudha buzzing over the unspoken feud that has erupted between Siddaramaiah and the KPCC president G. Parameshwar (and talk that the CM has been asked to explain himself to 10 Janpath), it was the PM’s move to take all the hoopla of a state visit by the Japanese premier Shinzo Abe out of Delhi and shift the song and dance to Ahmedabad that dominated the news cycle last week.

And it was, well…underwhelming.

Even Akie Abe in a dull, shapeless salwar kameez, new DefMin Nirmala Sitharaman style, didn’t grab any eye-balls. Not as much as when she pretended she didn’t know any English in a possible snub to the insufferable Donald during her U.S visit!

Abe –the son of a former Japanese prime minister in dynastic Japan - has done Delhi before. And Ahmedabad. Incidentally, even Russian president Vladimir Putin is said to hate all the drama of the red carpet welcome at Rashtrapati Bhavan and prefers to host his VVIP guests at St. Petersburgh, his home town over Moscow and its backdrop of the onion domes and the Kremlin. But there’s not much to choose between these Czarist capitals, is there? Both, simply spectacular. But Ahmedabad? Gandhinagar? (That Gandhi word again!). The Sabarmati ashram? As opposed to the sheer grandeur, sweep and scale of Delhi’s India Gate and Raj Path?

Trolled as the prime minister of Gujarat for his ploy to impress his fellow Gujaratis, in a state he cannot afford to let slip out of his grasp, the grandstanding over the Ahmedabad- Mumbai bullet train would have gone down so much better if the circle had been squared, and all the other infrastructure connects that the nation needs urgently - such as an investment boost for the Mumbai-Delhi, the Delhi-Kolkata, Bengaluru-Chennai corridors, and the much needed farm to market air, road, rail and freight corridors, were all given due importance.

This was, in case you’ve forgotten, former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s pet project – the Golden Quadrilateral - tasked to a transport minister who became this government’s Rail Mantri who saw one Duronto after another careen into one another and come to a screeching halt. I believe a Rajdhani ran off the tracks in Delhi on the day the two premiers signed off on the bullet train! Isn’t it time, we look for investors who can overhaul the entire creaking railways that date back to the British Raj and kill more people than any friggin’ air crash?

As the Supreme Court rightly said, the PM is the prime minister of all of India, not just the states where the BJP rules. He heads a Union Government. He runs our country, our nation, one India, one Bharat. Give us a sense he speaks for all of us and it would make us all that much more proud to have an energetic, driven, never say die leader at the helm. Till 2022, if that’s what he wants. As long as we can have an inclusive government that brings us all together and takes us on a path to a better India.

But here’s the thing. The worry that an Anant Kumar Hegde has been picked for a cabinet berth over other candidates because of his vicious rant against the Muslims of his communally sensitive coastal constituency sends a frisson down my spine. Is that the ring of fire that the BJP leaders of Karnataka must jump through to prove they are committed to the cause, the greater good of the party? Is that why the state BJP leaders threw themselves at the police at some protest or the other because as the chief minister alleges, they’d been asked if they had been at the forefront of any agitation? One hopes that’s not the litmus test of loyalty!

The hassle is that the Congress, without one single mass leader to its name and no shadow cabinet that can present an alternative blueprint for the future, is such easy pickings. Granted, Rahul Gandhi’s unexpectedly perceptive speech at Berkeley shows that he’s picked a marginally better speech writer for once. Even if he hasn’t quite got ahimsa, non-violence and Partition and the Congress’ less than stellar handling of the crises of the past quite right. Either way, his comments rattled the BJP, and in an over-reaction of extreme proportions, brought on our television screens an army of 17 or more functionaries to counter the man-boy’s comments on India’s dynasts – be they political and business – and Bollywood.

Rahul isn’t his father or his grandmother, let alone his great-grandfather who epitomized their times. Will he ever be?.

Oh, for all those who blindly buy into the Gandhis perpetuating themselves story, no Gandhi has held the highest political office in the land since Rajiv Gandhi stepped down as prime minister in November 1989, after the Congress party he led, crashed to a mere 190 seats. And that was almost 30 years ago!

Dr. Manmohan Singh’s government, may have had Sonia Gandhi pulling the strings from behind the scenes, perpetuating the socialistic clap-trap of another era instead of opening up the economy and helping India rise to its full potential. But in real terms, Sonia isn’t a Gandhi either. And for Rahul, the Gandhi to take Raisina Hill, he must win an election. As must all the dynasts. Be they Vasundhara Raje, daughter of one of the BJP’s outstanding women leaders. Or the multitude of others across parties - the Scindias and the Pilots,  the Abdullahs and the Muftis, the Yadavs and the Paswans, the Karunanidhis and the Chandrababu Naidus.

So why did the BJP over-react in the way that they did? Nervous much? Over the slip-slide in the economy, the slowing job front, the general slowdown, the low blow from a former RBI Governor who did what he did?

The prime minister’s biggest plus point has always been that he represents a new India. That’s what India wants to hear from him. Unfortunately, as in Delhi, so in Bengaluru, the raison d’etre of the political class is one thing alone –nail down a re-election.

The KPCC chief and the CM are no longer on talking terms - they haven’t been seen at one single event together. Dr. G. did a solo inspection of the Indira canteen, while the chief minister on a long overdue tour of the city’s stinking drains, pot-holed roads and derelict infrastructure and buses – he skipped the cesspool that are also known as our lakes - was accompanied by only his loyalists.

And while the attack on the BJP leader and Lingayat icon B.S. Yeddyurappa has been relentless, and the cleverly sown division among the Lingayats may or may not have the trickle effect of drawing in the younger Lingayats, hungry for jobs and entitlements, to boost Siddu’s canny caste census gaming, the political churn is still on.

No wonder, I can hear Anant Kumar Hegde laughing!