By A K B Krishnan

And even as the SP and the RJD are taking the matrimonial route to find common cause, a few others who almost equally despise Modi are also desperately seeking to come together to mount a combined fight against the ruling dispensation in Delhi. The communists and the Trinamool Congress are as much inimical to each other as they are to Modi but are now looking for any possibility to join hands though, if you ask them, they would reject any such thoughts out of hand.

In this they have the Congress-Left pragmatism of Kerala versus the Centre as an example when Harkishen Singh Surjeet was heading the CPM. Sworn enemies in Thiruvananthapuram, the two had worked closely in Delhi for nearly five years during the first instalment of the Manmohan Singh government before Prakash Karat, who succeeded Surjeet, spoiled the party for all by withdrawing support following the Indo-US nuclear deal. But then again power was the glue that kept the two together in Delhi but the Left and the Trinamool will sorely miss this vital adhesive component.

The other two disparate formations that are planning to jump into the motley anti-Modi bandwagon are the Janata Dal (United) of Bihar led by Nitish Kumar and the Janata Dal (Secular) of Karnataka led by Deve Gowda. Leaders of all these regional parties, except Mulayam Singh Yadav, came together recently to join the Congress Party’s celebration of the 125th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. While all of them paid the usual encomium to Nehru and waxed eloquent about how much the country has deviated from the dream of its first prime minister, the subtext of the gathering was how to fight the Modi juggernaut.   

Apart from Gowda, who is more famous for his 40-to-400 winks during any meeting, most of those gathered are eloquent speakers. So is Modi, for that matter. But what sets Modi apart is the fact that he has understood a young India’s thirst for progress and is ready to address it every time he is in front of a microphone. (Hopefully he is addressing it on ground too, but the results will take time to reflect). Modi won’t deny that Nehru was a great first prime minister. But he would argue, and argue convincingly, that Nehru’s socialist economics, while it served its purpose in the first two decades after independence, has no place in modern India. The winding up of a leviathan called Planning Commission is part of that argument.

Strange as it may seem, the likes of Mulayam and Lalu also would not subscribe to Nehruvian economics. As one wag put it, they subscribe to only one economics and that is their own! Socialists they may claim to be but both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar hit the bottom of the social index pyramid under their long watch even as their own personal and family wealth saw a steady climb to the top. Now they have been jolted out of their cosy perches by an indomitable challenger who is all ready to drown them into oblivion. So the Nehru straw is good enough to clutch at if that will help them stay afloat that bit longer. 

Only just a bit longer, because the eventual drowning now looks almost a certainty. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Karnataka together send 148 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The SP, the RJD, JD(U) and the JD (S) combined have just 13 members in the lower house. Naturally, if something radical is not done, drowning is the only end that is staring at these parties. And there is nothing on the horizon that even remotely suggests that these parties are ready for radical shifts from their known positions. Except perhaps for the JD (U) all others are steeply and deeply invested in family-first politics. For instance, all five seats that the SP has in the Lok Sabha are held by the Mulayam family. 

Mulayam blames the laptops his chief minister son Akhilesh Yadav distributed free of cost to students for his party’s virtual demolition in the Lok Sabha elections. He says the laptops helped the people to better understand Modi and what he stood for because the BJP made sure that all his speeches were available on the Internet. In short, keeping the people ignorant was the core competence on which the SP had thrived. But the irony is that while the people got enlightened, the SP continues to remain ignorant. The party has not realised that there are fewer and fewer takers for its pseudo-secularist plank and it is bereft of even its traditional Muslim support. And still it continues to flog those dead horses.

Both the SP and the RJD have been controlled by individual families. Now what Mulayam and Lalu are planning is to bring the two under one umbrella and make a larger family party. Ironically this could be the undoing of both. The waves are fast closing in. If Modi’s promise of development begins delivery in the next eight to ten months, the next assembly elections in Bihar (November-December 2015) and UP (2017) could virtually see the end of the two Yadavs. The ever-falling crude and commodity prices look set to help Modi achieve his targets far faster and easier than when he took charge in May. 

When the various splinters of the erstwhile Janata Party met at Mulayam’s house earlier this month, reporters were told that there will be a new party in the New Year. No one knows if there will be a new political party, but a big, fat wedding party is definitely on the cards. The 75kg cake on Mulayam’s 75th birthday last week has set the right tone for everyone to have a piece. Everyone in the family, that is. They play it a little differently in UP. It’s the Marie Antoinettes of the state who eat the cake.

‘Fixing’ a better game than the game itself

First there was cricket. Then there was the Indian cricket fan. And later, much later, there was the BCCI. But if you were to ask any member of the cosy club called the Board of Control for Cricket in India what the correct order should be, they would have you believe that it all happened in the reverse sequence. That’s no wonder though. Anyone who wants to control - for that’s what this Board claims to be doing - would want to have things his way, isn’t it?

For long not many complained, except when the national team selection showed some blatant favouritism for one particular region or player. And in most cases these were hush-hush, single-column, bottom-of-the-page affairs. And then in 1983 India won the World Cup beating the West Indies, till then the Goliaths of cricket, against all odds. The limited-overs game became the craze of the nation. The crowd came in droves to watch. Television stepped in. Sponsorship deals, for both the team and the individual player, ran into millions and millions of dollars. The Board and the players wanted more of the same. So was born the Indian Premier League (IPL) where cricket was transformed into entertainment on the pretext that that was the best way to provide money’s worth.   

It would have been so had the players and those who ran the “show” were strictly providing entertainment. But the lure of money is too strong for most men. More so for businessmen and politicians who make up the BCCI for most part. So even as the millions poured in, a bit of extra on the sidelines became more alluring. “Fixing” became a better game than the game itself. After all it’s a private club affair so why should the authorities bother? That was the question Board chief N Srinivasan raised when the Supreme Court wanted to know why he should not be thrown out of the BCCI altogether in the wake of the match fixing scandal.

Yes, the BCCI is indeed a “private club consortium” that replaced the Calcutta Cricket Club way back in 1928. It is registered under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act.  But the privacy ends when you are representing the country in international events. And for all practical purposes you have touted your team as the Indian team and done whatever you wanted with it in the name of the country. You went a step further and got your son-in-law to do whatever he wanted. Then you claim you cannot be held responsible for somebody else’s acts. Well, we know one prime minister who said similar things a little while ago and you know what the people of India did to him.