Lions in winter

What do lions do in winter? According to zoologists, they just hibernate. And hibernation, the dictionary says, means going into retreat or ...

What do lions do in winter? According to zoologists, they just hibernate. And hibernation, the dictionary says, means going into retreat or making oneself scarce. India’s political lions, however, never hibernate. They bask in perpetual summer — always ready to get up and go. Winter never touches them.

As the ideas of March loom threateningly o’er yon horizon and as all voters await the results, it’s time to see how our lions have been behaving. The lions in this study include three from the Janata Dal, two from the Congress and one each from the BJP, the SJP and the CPI(M).

Starting with the Janata Dal, all three of its lions are being subjected to the phenomenon of surround sound (mainly the sound of growling). While the humble one is growling at all the sundry at having been deprived of the top post and threatening at every turn to turn growl into snarl and snarl into gnarl, the other two are being growled at by every Mulayam, Surendra and Yadav.

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The weepy one is being jeered for floating the ideaof allying with his parent party, and for offering the peace pipe to the widow of the man he replaced as Mr Clean. As for the bearded one, he switched off his personal sound system when howls of protest grew into threatening growls after he filed his papers with the help of a regional ruling Dal.

One of the Congress lions has been reduced to a pathetic state — to be or not to be like Draupadi — as he mulls over a fate that pushed him into the hot seat when he had already packed his bags, and was now forcing him to pack his bags when, in fact, he was craving for another stab at the top job.

The other Congress lion is poring over the two “near-misses” that this biodata now boasts of. What has left him particularly flustered is the fact that just when he had brought himself to believe that he would be lucky the third time round, up popped 10, Janpath to queer his pitch.

A sentiment shared by the BJP’s lion, who had thought that the cat was already in the bag, and the bag all sewed up. Forced to wakeup, Ol’ Dreamy Eyes has a lot of hard work to do all over again. And very little time to do it in, lest he have to wait another five years (okay, okay, 18 months) to get his act together again.

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The ever-hopeful SJP lion has overlooked the minor fact that in 1996 he won his Lok Sabha seat because of the benevolence of the “communal” BJP. Having suddenly discovered that it’s better to be casteist, he is banking on the Samajwadi Party to return to Parliament. Who knows, he thinks, history may repeat its cash-and-carry blunder of 1990.

The last lion is of the red, Bengal variety and suffers from historic blunderitis. Deprived by his own comrades of the chance to do for India what he could not do for West Bengal in 20 years, he has seen several doctors (both spin and non-spin), and all of them have made their diagnoses and given their prescription if you got it, flaunt it.

That’s why this lion has been flaunting his CV before every reporter worth his shorthand book and pencil, and every namby-pamby TVanchor worth his pancake and sound-man. Having thrown his hat into the ring, he expected his party to make purring noises. When it did not, he repeated his words, this time adding that he would become PM if his party told him to do so. When his party did not, the 84-year-old lion grovelled, saying he would not mind becoming Prime Minister if the party offered him the post, this time with “health permitting” as additional codicil.

Why does he flaunt his credentials so often? Blame his doctors (of the spin variety) who have told him that this bitter medicine produces best results if taken three times a week on every television channel.

The things that winter does to lions!