Leaders with a forked tongue

Our politicians have been making history in the most dishonest and dangerous way. They are doing something that had never been done anywhere else in the country. Look at the following developments that took place in Andhra Pradesh in a span of less than five years.

1. In the general elections held in 2009, the Congress party wins a whopping 33 Lok Sabha seats out of a total of 42 seats; 21 of them were from the 25 in Seemandhra region alone. The Congress party, under the leadership of YS Rajasekhara Reddy, wins a simple majority in the Assembly elections and YSR is sworn in for the second term. It is a record score for any State after 1984.

2. A bizarre accident involving helicopter kills YSR, a very popular leader and a successful chief minister, in the first week of September 2009, leaving the Congress in AP in a shambles.

3. The Congress high command appoints the senior-most minister and number two in YSR Cabinet, Konijeti Rosaiah, chief minister. It never thought of having a popular leader elected by ballot as CM. The nominated CM, who did not have his own mandate or the social and the political support that the earlier incumbent had, is tentative, sitting on the edge of the chair.

4. The Telangana movement that is at its weakest ebb, thanks to YSR who used all the means at his command to derail it, starts gathering momentum. It rises like a Phoenix and starts making waves that shake Delhi. K Chandrasekhara Rao (KCR) of Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) goes on fast. The rest of the developments are fairly known.

5. Both the principal political parties in the State, the Congress and the TDP, enter into electoral alliance with the TRS, a party with a single-point agenda of creation of Telangana State, during the two general elections giving the party legitimacy. The supreme leaders of both the parties, YSR and Nara Chandrababu Naidu, indulge in falsehood when they told the election meetings that they had no objection for the creation of a separate State of Telangana. No leader of any political party in the country has done this kind of doubletalk on a very important issue for years together, believing in something and saying and promising something diametrically opposite.

6. Established Opposition leaders like Karunanidhi, Jayalalithaa, Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Naveen Patnaik or Mamata Banerjee never indulged in this type of untruthful politics on this scale. Lalu Prasad was against division of Bihar. He roared that the State could be divided only over his dead body. But after being persuaded by the NDA government, he did not raise his voice against Jharkhand. Mulayam was against the division of UP. He never changed his stance for the sake votes from Bundelkhand or Western UP(Harith Pradesh). Mayawati is for dividing UP into four parts and she never went back on that policy for votes of integrationists.

7. It is only in AP that we find politicians with twisted tongues who hunt with the hound and run with the hare. In recent times, NTR and Chenna Reddy praised Naxalites as real patriots and gave full powers, after occupying office, to the police to deal with the ‘menace’. That was a departure from honest politics. But it was not as harmful as the deceptive (mistaking it for tactful) politics practised by YSR and Naidu.

8. After the demise of his father, YSR’s son wishes to become chief minister just like Rajiv Gandhi succeeded his slain mother and Rahul wants (does he?) to be named as prime ministerial candidate. It is the preserve of only the first family at the national level to inherit the top job; not at the State level, however powerful the family is.

9. The Congress high command continues its dependence on rootless wonders, rehabilitated at 24, Akbar Road, as AICC general secretaries to monitor matters in States, to make decisions. Someone up there is impressed with the presentation of a young Congressman called Nallari Kiran Kumar Reddy from the same area and community as YS Jaganmohan Reddy, who rebelled and floated his own outfit by then. Though Kiran Reddy is new to government, having never worked as a Minister, he is given the assignment with two very specific instructions: to finish the TRS and the YSRCP.

He could do neither. He appears as though he is bent upon finishing the high command itself which allowed him to continue as CM and enjoy all freedom, including flaying his benefactor Sonia Gandhi in public. The Congress high command has never, in its history of more than 120 years and 65 years of power, been so lenient towards a recalcitrant CM. Even before Modi and the voters of the four States, where the Congress had got an unprecedented drubbing, the party’s own chief minister is castigating the party leadership and openly questioning its decisions.

None from the party high command has guts to act or say anything against the CM who made the very first family the target of his virulent attack. The BJP could humble Yeddyurappa who tried to defy the party’s national leadership. Narendra Modi may invite Yeddy back into the fold, but the saffron party could have its way when it wanted to discipline its chief minister. But the Congress appears to be helpless, clueless, rudderless and shameless.

10. We are now witnessing a spectacle in Delhi where a handful of Congress MPs are trying to topple their own government. Look at the track record of all the MPs in question. Each one of them told Sonia Gandhi, the supreme leader of the Congress, in power or in opposition, for more than fifteen years, that her decision on the Telangana tangle would be final. In no State do we find ‘leaders’ like this who mislead their own supreme leader and then blame her for her decision which was based on their advice. Whether they will succeed in their attempt to dislodge the Manmohan Singh government through a no-confidence motion is not very important. But the way they are trying to unseat their own government has no parallel in the history of India’s parliamentary democracy. We have been reduced to a laughing stock.

11. Naidu, who was part of the Congress culture in his early days of political career, has been behaving the same way as his peers in the Congress. In order to have a electoral tie-up with the TRS, he made half a dozen senior leaders of his party go round the State and report that the people in Seemandhra were not against formation of a Telangana State. It was all a sham, a command performance. If it had been otherwise, the TDP leaders of Seemandhra would not have participated in the movement against bifurcation.

12. In no other State in the country at any time do we find State-level political parties getting split vertically on regional lines. Political parties which claim to represent the whole race of Telugus, have been agitating in 60 per cent of the State against 40 per cent demanding that hundred percent of unity has to be preserved. The parties (first YSRCP, now TDP, rather slowly but steadily) that have abandoned Telangana are saying that “the woman from Italy” is vindictive against Telugus whom she is mercilessly dividing. These parties say Sonia Gandhi is insulting all Telugus and burn her effigy whereas the Telugus in Telangana (who comprise roughly 40 percent) are preparing, foolishly, to build a temple for her.

13. In no other State do politicians use filthy language against one another as our worthies do. They have only one issue. They refuse to learn from a Kejriwal or a Shivraj Singh Chouhan. How humble and down-to-earth they are! Look at the way they speak. Their public discourse is of far higher order than the feisty, combative, violent and below-the-belt variety language our politicos indulge in. What is worse, they take pride in that and they have huge following. People get the leaders they deserve.

14. Sonia Gandhi has to undertake deep introspection, as she promised, to see what kind of persons her party is selecting as candidates in general elections. Contractors, middlemen, musclemen, the affluent and the arrogant who win in a wave created by assassinations of members of the first family or hard work of leaders like YSR. They don’t meet people nor do they attend to their needs. They don’t represent them in the true sense.

15. Rahul Gandhi was talking about selecting candidates through ballot. The idea of ‘primaries’, as in the US, also came up in private discussions. He had allegedly tried it, to some extent, in selecting Siddaramaiah as Karnataka CM. But nothing more is done. Tickets are being sold and purchased as usual. Rahul Gandhi said he would learn from Kejriwal and “involve the common man in decision-making better than anybody in the country and in ways that you (we) cannot even imagine.” The first lesson that Rahul has to learn from the Aam Aadmi Party is honesty, then transparency and, third, humility.