The year 2022, like every other year and the one before, has had its share of politicians jumping ships, switching sides, and floating new fronts. Some, like Ghulam Nabi Azad and Hardik Patel, quit with much fire and fury, some after a few comfortable days at luxury resorts, while some others moved away in silence.
Whenever a leader worth his salt switches sides, political commentators like to hark back to the patron saint of floor-crossers—late Haryana politician Gaya Lal. For the uninitiated, he is the ‘Gaya’ in the popular political adage ‘Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram’. If you have been hiding under a rock, or cooped up at home minding your business or mining crypto all these years, let me attempt to introduce this humble politician who earned a place in the annals of history by changing political convictions at the drop of a topi.
Decades ago, in the autumn of ‘67, Gaya Lal, an MLA from Hodal constituency in Haryana, flitted in and out of Congress two times in nine hours. Lal quit the Congress to join the non-Congress United Front only to come back to the Congress hours later. Lal’s defections were so quick that had there been moolah involved, one would wonder if he had enough time to count it all before moving sides. Now, counting the number of times Lal switched sides in the next few years might take a bit of your precious time that you might as well spend on scrolling down your social media feed or doing nothing; suffice to say that his constantly vacillating loyalties gave political pundits a prase that former Haryana chief minister Rao Birender Singh used first while introducing Lal to the press—’Gaya Lal is Aaya Ram now’.
Now back to my point, and this is a humble appeal to everyone and his uncle who would like to remind the readers, viewers, trolls, and nobody in particular about Lal and his vexatious ways. Spare Lal; forget him, for good. The phrase that frequent floor-crossing shenanigans of this career politician birthed has had its run, and it is time we retired this usage. Why, you may ask! The reason might be as plain as the nose on your face. Those moving alone or as a herd to greener (mostly saffron) pastures are not likely to come back, IMAO, unlike Lal who found it so easy to move between sides. Because, why would they?
The major victim of men jumping ships has been the Congress. The party, more than anyone else on the political spectrum, these days is faced with the Schrodinger’s cat paradox when it comes to who is still with it—you never know who is with you until he/she announces that they are no longer with you. It is even harder for the party to read the signs and the signposts, especially when there are mixed signals like a rebel group coming up with ways for revival only for a few of them to exit a few days later.
New year, old woes
When does a leader usually quit a party? If you thought the decision comes when one is displeased and disaffected because nothing interesting comes by, R.P.N. Singh of the Congress may have a laugh at your expense! For the man quit after the party picked him to be a star campaigner for the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls in January, proving that no post can hold you back when the saffron side beckons. Calling his next few words predictable would be too predictable. Singh, or RPN—who spent 32 years in the Congress, some of these as a Union minister—said he was all set to make his “contribution to nation-building under the visionary leadership and guidance of” you know who! Now, expecting someone who just realised that it is time he worked on nation-building to make a comeback to his old fold is like betting on a dead horse. Give it a rest, RPN is unlikely to validate the use of your political leitmotif.
Another month, another exit
When it rains defections, it pours, especially for the Congress. If it took three decades for RPN to realise that it is time to finally contribute to nation-building, for Ashwani Kumar it took four decades, and a few years more. In February, Kumar, who once defended the leadership against the letter-writing revolutionaries of the Congress, realised that that the thinking of the nation and the thinking of the Congress are diametrically opposite. Now, you cannot blame him for finally figuring out a few things, all on his own. The Congress may think, ceteris paribus, walking from one end of the nation to the other might build national unity, but the nation might see it as just an exercise for weight reduction for a few. “Dark future”, “hollow structure”, and “reduced dignity” were some of Kumar’s parting shots for the Congress. If I may take some liberty to put this into perspective for the HBO watching crowd, in Game of Thrones’s lingo, he called the party and everything in it “a Mummer’s farce.” Now, despite many rumours that followed his exit, he has not given into the natural rhythm of things and moved on to the saffron side, but that is no guarantee that he will honour Lal and be back with the Congress!
Patel out!
Hardik Patel only had a fanciful three-year fling with the Gujarat Congress, which also came with the sweet nothing of the post of state working president. Realising that the dalliance is going nowhere, Patel announced the end of courtship, saying, “of course, it isn’t me, it is you” to the party leadership, in May. Like every youngster looking for reasons to put an end to things before they turn dicey (assembly polls were only months away), Patel left saying that leaders were preoccupied with phone and food. He said top leaders were busy with their phones when he reached out to them. He also said Gujarat leaders were keen on ensuring the top brass get their chicken sandwiches on time, instead of mingling with the youth. Now, pop culture may tell you that some who end a relationship find immediate solace in binging on everything from ice cream to Netflix, some in beer, while still others in lifting weights with a vengeance. Patel did something similar. Two weeks after ending the tumultuous affair, Patel found his true calling, to be a soldier of “Narendrabhai.” Will a solider abandon his post? Quite unlikely.
Azad ho gaya azadi
If I need to insult someone in good measure, I would borrow a few words from Charles Dickens, and call the aforementioned beneficiary of my insult “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato,” but I wouldn’t go so low as to find fault with his DNA, unlike a certain Congress spokesperson did after Ghulam Nabi Azad’s departure in August. The fault, dear Brutus, is not with our star(s?) but with your Modi-fied DNA, said the spokesperson after Azad put in his papers, blaming the “coterie of inexperienced sycophants” who are stage-managing a “non-serious” individual. Tougher words than this have been said about the Congress, but only by those who are on troll duty! Even when you are punched hard in the gut, there are blows that you do not deal, even in a no-holds-barred street fight. Then again, electoral politics gets dirtier than street fights as Azad realised the moment he ended his association with the Congress. As if a mock funeral for him was not enough, tears that Modi shed for him months before in Parliament (which Azad had clarified were not for him) were recalled to vilify Azad’s DNA. Azad is no Lal, and is unlikely to make a comeback to his old fold, especially now that he is the bossman of his own outfit.
Politician and a gentleman
Not all roads lead to Rome; not all who dump the Congress end with the BJP! While some of his former buddies found their “nationalistic voice”, Sibal, who was among the 23 rebels with a definite cause, realised he needed an “independent voice,” of course with some support of the Samajwadi Party. The statement that followed Sibal’s renunciation of the Congress system of things was indeed the stuff of legend. Thirty years with the Congress made Sibal understand that he is a member of the party and hence “has to abide by the discipline of that party.” There was no acrimonious huffing and puffing though, unlike the many other political departures, because Sibal, above all, is a gentleman, a rare find in politics. His parting shot was not a list of his grouses—for he may have had exhausted the list—but stoic silence!
In search of voice
Five decades into the party, it dawned on Sunil Jakhar that he has a “nationalistic voice” that needs to be heard. Before he said, “Good luck and goodbye Congress,” in a Facebook live, Jakhar gave a bit of a lecture on assets and liabilities to the Congress leadership. He asked the Gandhis to know their assets and liabilities if not their friends and foes. He had earlier claimed that unlike the party leadership believed, former Punjab CM Charanjit Singh Channi was “not an asset”. Like many men before him, Jakhar did not take long to turn all saffron and blame his previous party for attempting to smother the nationalist in him. Whole three days after his departure, he was in the BJP fold, and the usual words were uttered as he announced that he was now all the more patriotic than ever before—’nationalism’, ‘unity’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘interest of the country’. Now, you cannot fault him for finally siding with wholesale dealers of nationalism; neither can you expect him to come crying back to those who he claimed attempted to muzzle him.
In gods we can’t trust
I do not know if it is the beaches, shacks, cheap alcohol, or the general festive vibe, in Goa, politicians find it hard to stick with one party. Curse of Goa they call it, as the state regularly sees its leaders playing political musical chairs. The year 2022 was not different either, as eight of the 11 Congress MLAs, including former CM Digambar Kamat, embraced the saffron shade even as Rahul Gandhi began his efforts to jodo Bharat, in September. Before it all began, in January, in a bid to tame the monster of defection, Congress candidates for the Goa assembly elections marched up to a temple, church and dargah and swore loyalty to the party and promised to resist the temptation to switch sides after victory. Little did the Congress top leadership seem to know about the Adam Smithian idea that people—unlike chess pieces that their political masters, and their gods want them to be—have a principle of motion all of their own, altogether different from what someone else chooses to impress upon them, when they decided to trust the gods to keep their leaders in check. If gods could not get them stay in their fold, can mere men hope to do much?
Real vs Original
While the Congress has been finding it hard to hold on to its leaders, the Shiv Sena faced a bigger problem. In June, the party, which was in power along with the Congress and the NCP, suddenly learned that it is not one, but two; and very disagreeable two. While one side, who claimed that they were the “real” Sena, wanted to have nothing to do with the Maha Vikas Aghadi partners, the “original” Sena, led by Uddhav Thackeray, was all for the partnership. After moving from one resort to another—Surat and Guwahati—the “real” Sena of Eknath Shinde, which had more manpower because of some ‘real’ support from the BJP, managed to stage a coup and show Thackeray the door of Varsha. A coming together of the ‘real’ and ‘original’ to be ‘originally real’ or ‘really original’ is unlikely now, at least not as long as the predominant political colour in the country is saffron.
And there was one!
It is not just the Congress that faces the natural flow of leaders into the saffron sanctuary to where most roads lead. The JD (U) in Manipur, which had six MLAs in the assembly, found on one September day that its bench strength was down to one man as five of them had merged with the BJP. Two of them, L.M. Khaute and Thangjam Arunkumar, may have taken a lesson or two from Lal’s escapades as they were with the BJP, but joined the JD(U) in February after they were denied tickets, only to get elected and return to the BJP. All’s fair in love, war, and politics! But, for optics’ sake, came a disclaimer; almost a tearjerker of a disclaimer. The crossover was because—well, you guessed it right—people wanted them to do it. After Nitish Kumar dumped the BJP in Bihar, the JD(U) MLAs in Manipur were moved by the urge, as all politicians are wont, to stay loyal to people who elected them from the NDA platform and did the right thing. Nonetheless, just because two of them were inspired by Lal once, you cannot expect them to repeat history every other day!
Defections are here to stay, in election season and off it. To keep the score every day, every month, and every year is indeed a laborious task. It is time we got a bit creative and came up with something with no Lal in it, because frankly, my dear, no Ram who comes to where things have been Modi-fied gives a damn about returning!