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T V R Shenoy

For days on end two desperate old men tried their best to revive a dead body

What do you do if there is a dead body in your house? Cremate it or bury it with due religious rites, I suppose.

Ah! But if you happen to be aggressively 'secular,' such ceremonies are anathema. It is the Communists, please remember, who came up with the sick idea of stuffing Lenin's corpse and putting it on public display. Since the Marxists are the high-priests of the United Front, I am not in the least surprised at recent events.

The unprincipled alliance between the Congress and the United Front was ailing well before the Jain Commission's interim report was tabled in Parliament. And it gave up breath altogether on November 20. But the corpse wasn't disposed off!

For days on end two desperate old men tried their best to revive a dead body. Oxygen was given in the form of love-letters, which took days to go from one side of Akbar Road to the other. (I suppose neither Gujral and Kesri knows how to operate a fax machine, but surely even these octogenarians are familiar with the telephone.)

Ultimately, the stench of the corpse was too much for even the United Front and the Congress. Kesri was pushed into withdrawing support, and Gujral resigned. Yet even so, the search for the fabled sanjeevani continued...

What was the point of all this nonsense? The Congress Working Committee repeatedly swore it would back another administration -- provided that it doesn't include DMK ministers. And that is precisely what United Front hardliners weren't willing to consider, leave alone concede.

It was pointless suggesting that Karuppiah Moopanar or Mulayam Singh Yadav take over as prime minister, which is what some Congressmen suggested. I am sure either of those gentlemen would have jumped at the chance, but only if the numbers added up.

After all, it wasn't Gujral's leadership that led to the Congress withdrawing 'support from outside.' It was the presence of the DMK in the Union Cabinet that caused it. Predictably, the Marxists's first instinct was to throw Karunanidhi and his party overboard -- all in the name of keeping 'communal forces,' at bay.

But if the Left Front and the Samajwadi Party jettisoned the DMK, the other regional parties would not have trusted them any longer. Come to that, even sections of the Janata Dal would have looked askance at arranging yet another marriage with the Congress.

Given all this, I really don't understand why the Congress was bent on sending feelers to the United Front. If Congressmen were genuinely trembling at the thought of polls, they should have swallowed their pride and accepted the DMK's presence.

But the United Front wasn't covering itself with glory either. Their MPs too seemed to be shying away from facing the people.

True, Inder Kumar Gujral was finally driven to resigning. But if the United Front genuinely believed that the people of India should have had the last word, why wasn't it saying so openly?

In other words, why didn't the Gujral ministry recommend the dissolution of the Lok Sabha last Friday itself? Yes, I know the United Front steering committee tom-tommed the need for a general election. But the steering committee isn't recognised by the Constitution of India! It is the prime minister of India, not the convener of the United Front, who is supposed to advise the President.

No, the United Front was trying to eat its cake and have it too. For the benefit of the media it spouted allegiance to democratic principles. For its own benefit, however, it tried every trick to keep the eleventh Lok Sabha undissolved.

The reason was simple. The longer the House was kept alive, the better the chances for installing another ministry without the bother of polls.

We should, I suppose, express our gratitude to the hard-liners on both sides. Between them, they made it nearly impossible for another unholy marriage. Which, knowing the Congress, was bound to end in yet another messy divorce.

Speaking of marriage and divorce, I recommend that our 'secular,' leaders take a page out of the Islamic law. By the strict letter of the shariat a divorced couple can't immediately plunge back into matrimony. Instead, the woman must have gone through a wedding to another man in between.

What happens if the woman finds her second husband is a better deal altogether? Well, it certainly teaches the first man that he shouldn't pronounce 'talaaq' in a hurry. Is there a lesson in that for the men in the Congress?

T V R Shenoy