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All in the family
By Deepak M. Rao
Politics, it is said, is about reaching a moral consensus. Dissecting a philosophy like that may not be a very easy task, but it is quite possible to look at the present-day politics using this philosophy as a looking glass. The ugly spat for power in the morrow in Tamil Nadu makes for a very good case study. Daddy, with his trademark - and inscrutable - dark glasses and white dhoti rules the land till he sees the shadow of the other life extending a hand while his two sons fight over one of India's reasonably well to do States like as if its Family estate. Appa, with enough experience to put a 250-year-old tortoise to shame, sits and lovingly watches it. Perhaps, he is enjoying it, perhaps he isn't, who can tell, with those inscrutable dark shades over his eyes. So, where does all this live the **** about politics being a vehicle to reach a moral consensus? Are we talking about the "MC" amongst the three family members here?
When it comes to Dynasty, can one ever forget THE Dynasty, THE Family, THE Chosen One, and so on and so forth - the Gandhis? The Gandhis are like a software that is perpetually being upgraded, right from Version 1.0 (Motilal Nehru) to Version 5.0 (Sonia Gandhi). Mother, a manager par excellence, brings together a Party that is in shambles, and with Indira Gandhi's ancestral wardrobe, the big men's watch, and diction lessons in Hindi, wins the elections for the Party, stages a drama or two (what a dominant section of the mainstream media insists on describing it as 'Renunciation', including horror of horrors, Time Magazine in its latest cover where it has included Sonia Gandhi in the list of the 100 Most Powerful) and rests in peace to watch her children preparing to take on the reigns of the world's biggest democracy. Remember the word "consensus"? It seems so far offish, so distant, and unreal in India Version 2K7. What we see instead is pure servility, so disgraceful and tasteless.
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And then there is the hometown version of Father & Son Co in our own State. Admirable Daddy and Beloved Sonny Boy fight, make up and embrace in public. They are friends when friendships can be encashed for power and they are sworn enemies when enmity can be encashed for power. The third angle to the story in the form of a certain Yediyurappa adds just that wee bit of Vamp factor to make the story saucy!
What does all this prove? That even in the Age of Coalitions, where wide range of opinions come to the table from different corners of the country, and where you have to accommodate all of them and more, that still has not reduced the power, magic and aura of the Family in politics. Everyone counts, in the Family. Brother, Sister, Inlaws, Outlaws, Cousins, and all the rest of them. When are we ever going to get out of this web? The day we do, fewer people will die the death the employees of Dinakaran had.
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