Inside a world out of joint

Last month, Congress `delegates' chose Sitaram Kesri as their party leader by an overwhelming majority. While the votes were being counted,...

Last month, Congress `delegates’ chose Sitaram Kesri as their party leader by an overwhelming majority. While the votes were being counted, however, the president-to-be was not waiting in silence with frayed nerves and jerky tics shaking his octogenarian frame. Reports say that he was so supremely confident as to expound the difference between political cultures within the Congress.

In contrast to some of the ebullient, outspoken, heroic and exciting party presidents of yore, Kesri appears to be full of shadows. Here is a man who has crafted voice and gesture to give the impression of meekly toeing the line. But mark how his acts belie his earlier servile stance. When he strikes, he does it with the deadly accuracy of an able ironsmith. Sau sunar ki, ek luhar ki, as the Hindi saying goes. The goldsmith works in measured strokes, gentle and searching. The ironsmith needs just one fell stroke. If Nehru is to be compared to a nail — straight, heroic and able to penetrate the issue with one good drive — Kesri is a well-waxed screw, moving up circuitously through dialogue and negotiation. There is little initial impact, but once it begins to slowly negotiate the grooves, it is difficult to pull out without damaging the whole rubric.

Unlike the nail, the screw’s progress shall never be fluid and unproblematic, but mincing, oily and cyclical. It is all whispered entreaty and cajoling undertone, but no good craftsman will deny that a screw alone can hold problematic joints together. It does not need heroic flying nails, but screws that create a path that no nail shall thereafter be able to use.

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Sacrificing the lure of being a heroic nail is where younger leaders like Pawar and Pilot lost out to Kesri. They wanted to project themselves as rebels in shining armour. They also revealed the sad yearning of aging men for a lost, pristine world, where deals may have been violent occasionally, but were made without subterfuge.

But obviously Congressmen thought otherwise. As Kesri said in his first press conference as president, they voted for him in spite of his age, perhaps because of it. And from Bhopal to Delhi, the excitement was palpable as state after state threw up new leaders in place of old.

The chosen ones are all leaders of the Kesri mould in that, instead of confrontation, they will opt for dialogue (the real decision having been made much before the formal meeting). Instead of war, they will speak of family-style rapprochement and consensus. They will prefer secret conclaves that work late at night, and use human weaknesses to break and join. Instead of hostile takeovers, they will effect a gentle infiltration, applauding a Mayawati here and solemnly lunching and agreeing with a Moopanar there, and ultimately leaking it selectively to the press.

A screw is a lonely soul. It has few real desires. One of them may still make it crave the strength and purity of a nail. But it knows that the simple, clean world held together by nails is lost forever. Its profound longing for that heroic age will perhaps only be painfully visible in a head that must remain divided into two halves. That which causes a split psyche is a necessary pre-condition for easier propulsion here.

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The screw’s world is bereft of grand ideologies. Watch how day after day it is guided and recreated by the media. Here the new leaders may secure what little gains they can make only by secrecy and silence. Territories that were theirs are today being fast lost to global market forces and bigoted religious leaders. So they must not only be devious and slow, but also leave behind a winding and well-lubricated path for retreat, if necessary.

Bemoaning unbridgeable ideological divides is passe, when it is obvious that you cannot rule on your own. Already, Jitendra Prasada is talking of the exploitation of the poor UP Dalits by the backwards. The implications of this could be scarcely lost on Mulayam, who has also begun his own retroactive journey. He has criticised V.P. Singh and his men for conspiring against him and declared that in UP, Mayawati is encouraging only one Dalit faction.

Times and the Morcha are both out of joint, what with fuming Laloos and sulky Naidus. And when there are so many difficult joints to be put together, it is the screw who shall be the natural leader.

Mrinal Pande is a senior journalist