Tarnish needs the Varnish - The
Silver Jubilee of ‘Jungle Raj’
Reddish Brown Rustings
are visible at the Janta Parivaar Hustings
as the same old Iron chain of Secularism have tied them together throughout
these 25 years of ‘Jungle Raj’ at which Sir Rudyard Kipling would have written
a sequel to his famous Jungle Book had he been alive. This time the characters
replaced by members of the species of Homo sapiens belonging to the subspecies
specific to the region known as the nucleus of the mighty Magadh Empire of
Ancient India. The Flag of Anti-communalism is faded now and the whole plank
seems to be jaded. This October the elections in Bihar will be celebrated alongside
the main festivals of Dussehra, Diwali and Chhath Puja. The zeal and fervour
will touch a new high when cultural and democratic festivals converge in a
multiphase election, the result of which is slated to set the tone for upcoming
elections in other states in India.
Time now for a new Flag that symbolizes Hope for a glorious
Bihar like it was during the utopic days of the mighty Magadh Empire and the prosperity
like the famous rivers of Bihar descending from the Himalayas bring with them,
deposit the alluvium and irrigate the “Land of milk and honey”. I have no
hesitation in nailing my colours to the mast as all of them are nothing but fifty shades of Saffron.
The major spinoff will be a paradigm shift in the way Bihar
is perceived as her image has taken a beating in the last two and a half
decades. It is now time to shift gears and vroom onto the road of development
at full throttle in order to match up to the performance of other states. Bihar
lies at an interesting location where it provides a highway for Nepal to the
coast, a passage through the Chicken Corridor to Assam, Sikkim and Bhutan and
the gateway to North-East for the regions of the west.
It is in the interest of other parts of India that development
occupies the cockpit of state government and is stably ensconced in Bihar
Politics which has long been mired by caste-based equations in which their
members vote en bloc to a particular party which usually panders to that
community, as a consequence of which in certain sections of the society vote is
a matter of rote learning which
doesn’t require any serious contemplation and the association of caste as a
stimulus and party as a psychological response to it has given way to a kind of
conditioning that is difficult to unlearn.
I just wish development should be a non-discriminatory tide
that will even raise the nondescript boats of certain communities hitherto
underserved after which it is for them to decide whether to keep sailing or
not.
The constituents of the rainbow coalition (read Parivaar)
have never lost an opportunity to help each other in times of crisis while
jostling for power and elbowing each other out just to keep up with the joneses
in achieving new feats of mal-governance. The tug-of-war they were indulging in
all these years was phony and was only meant to deceive the voters. Now that all
of them have come together under the banner of “Holy alliance of secular
political forces” led by the The Pied Piper (of Hamelin) giving a clarion call
for wiping out the communal forces who must be fairly paid for getting rid of
all the political rats as a result of tying up with his former bete noire which
has increased the chances of his defeat. Let us reward him this time by giving
a tag of “former” before his name which secures a tax payer funded fortune
though in monthly doses before he misleads the naïve and gullible voters
through the charm of his “son of the soil” tunes that waxes lyrical about the
dreams of special status for Bihar, powerful enough to be a lullaby for the
uninitiated.