occupying the chair which is unarguably the second most important in Indian political establishment. Bombs are raining on Indian cities incessantly and people are being blown to bits almost on weekly basis
Aditya Sinha
Last week this column was about A Wednesday, a film whose subject matter is terrorism, and the day it appeared, there was an attack on Delhi. For a few hours, all theorizing went out the window; there was simply fear and shock at how unpredictably close random death has gotten to the average urban Indian. It drove home the fear and helplessness that the ‘common man’ feels at the fact of terrorism, and you can’t blame anyone for calling it a war, because it seems even more terrifying than being a Londoner during the World War II blitz might have, or being a citizen of Hiroshima on August 7, 1945.
Suddenly, there was relief from the terror; the tension was surreally broken by a debate over whether India’s home minister changed his clothes thrice on the night of the bombings. One Delhi paper displayed photos of Shivraj Patil in three different outfits that night; another spoke to his tailor. Mr Patil himself was apoplectic. What’s wrong in taking a bath, he asked; why did he have to sit in a police station like a police inspector, he demanded. I am not a drunkard, he emphatically asserted. To offer such comic relief to a traumatized nation is not something to be undervalued. Patil operates in the true spirit of reductio ad absurdum.
Yet this is probably not the reason Sonia made him home minister. After all, if you appoint someone to head the internal administration of the country, to maintain its law and order, and to look after its intelligence, you are looking for someone who will carry forward the tradition of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant, Indrajit Gupta and L K Advani. These are men who understood that the home ministry was the interface between government and politics, more so than any other aspect of government. It ought to be the most important portfolio in a country where, despite a nuclear deal with America and orgasm-inducing economic growth, there remains a diverse citizenry, uneven development and a fractured polity. When you appoint a home minister, you do not expect another Zail Singh or Mufti Mohd Sayeed.
It is too late in the day to make an academic analysis of Mr Patil’s failings in what ought to have been the second most important job in the country; his recent spats with the Delhi media reveal his frame of mind. Anyone who in the middle of a developing crisis worries about a bath or about twiddling his thumbs ‘at his seat’ is obviously unable to grasp the big picture in the way that is appropriate to a home minister. So we have to look past the obvious fact that Mr Patil is incompetent, and we have to wonder why such a dud was chosen in the first place.
Some of you will argue that Sonia Gandhi did it because she did not want an ambitious person occupying a potentially powerful position within the government. That sounds logical. Yet for the post of prime minister, she chose someone who was neither ambitious nor a political threat, but who was presumably an expert at the country’s most pressing problem: organizing its finances. That Manmohan Singh has proven to be a failure is a different matter — he has devoted his entire time to a single deal, and has shown total ineptitude in the political management of the country, a prime minister’s primary job. Sonia Gandhi could have at least found a spineless technocrat like Manmohan Singh for the home ministry. It wasn’t as if she would have been compelled to appoint Sharad Pawar if she hadn’t chosen Patil; and what deviousness would Lalu Prasad Yadav have wrecked if he had been the home minister?
Further, this doesn’t square with the fact that she wanted to promote Mr Patil to Rashtrapati Bhawan. Perhaps he would have served the nation better as president. No one would have grudged him his sartorial whimsies. It was the Left Front that spiked her proposal, and so, in a sense, the Left is also to blame for the fact that the country is operating without a coherent picture or policy of its internal security situation.
The fact that Sonia wanted Mr Patil to become Mr President shows that it was not so much the home ministry that was on her mind as it was Shivraj himself. This is what this column, after much intense brain-racking and silent meditation, has finally deduced: That the reason Sonia chose Shivraj for North Block is because the two of them are deeply in love.
Think about it: haven’t you heard men jokingly refer to their spouses as their ‘home minister?’ And this love explains why Shivraj pays such close attention to his appearance. Never does he leave home without a comb in several of his pockets; never is his moustache out of alignment; and never will he be caught wearing the same suit twice, especially if he is likely to be on television, as is bound to happen after a series of bomb blasts that claims many, many lives. He knows that for Sonia, looks are important; he knows that she cares nothing for the life of the mind, and that eggheads for her are a fate worse than death. Not for her a man who knows his LeT but not his Jimmy Choos.
What many people do not seem to understand is the all-consuming nature of desire. Desire is the sort of thing that causes an individual to lose all perspective.When desire takes hold of a person; rules, morals, society, moderation, obligation and responsibility all become laughably irrelevant. There are people in public life who believe that the nation is worth fighting for; that it is a cause larger than the individual. Nation is an abstraction that makes no sense to a couple who live In the Realm of the Senses; for them, the only cause larger than the individual is love.
In fact, you often read about people exploding with passion, and we have lately seen explosions all over the country, in Mumbai, inHyderabad, in UP, in Jaipur, in Bangalore, in Gujarat, and in Delhi. Perhaps those explosions are a metaphor of the Sonia- and-Shivraj desire come to life? Perhaps in a film, they would represent the desire taking on a physical manifestation and the dream-world entrance to reality. Didn’t a poet say, “Desire kills?” Well, their desire seems to be killing a lot of innocent Indians.
Some of you will no doubt think this columnist has lost perspective. But to persist with this home minister while in our cities, innocent people like you and I die random, unnecessary and tragic deaths, is beyond comprehension. You are welcome to try and come up with a more rational explanation as to why Shivraj Patil continues to be our home minister. There is none
editorchief@epmltd.com