<b>T N Ninan:</b> Pigs on two feet

A newspaper had a telling cartoon this last week. The first frame had Rahul Gandhi crying to his mother that his grandmother's book had been stolen. The book, the cartoon's second frame tells us, was titled "356 ways to destroy the Constitution", or words to that effect. That captured succinctly the irony in the Congress complaint against the imposition of President's Rule in Arunachal Pradesh. After all, no one did such arbitrary dismissals more often than Indira Gandhi. As for playing such political games in a sensitive border state, it is worth recalling that the conspiracy-ridden dismissal of Farooq Abdullah's government was a part of the build-up to the alienation and unrest that exploded in the Kashmir valley in 1989. If the Congress sees the Arunachal Pradesh governor as the villain of the piece, in Kashmir it was no different.

The operative stance, in this and other areas, is tit for tat. The Congress says "You wouldn't let us pass the GST Bill, so we won't let you pass it either." In opposition, the BJP's leadership had declared that blocking Parliament was a form of democracy-an assertion that has now come back to haunt the party as the Congress plays the blocking game. The Congress used gubernatorial positions as parking lots for the faithful who needed sinecures; the BJP now does the same. The Congress named loyalists for the Padma awards, indeed Nehru instituted the Bharat Ratna and promptly gave it to himself. Now it's the BJP's turn to honour its loyalists, deserving or not.

The Congress named every other government programme after one or other Nehru-Gandhi, so the BJP has started renaming them to take away references to individuals, and named a programme after Vajpayee. The Congress packed public institutions with its favourites, now the BJP goes around appointing its own to these bodies. The Left protests, forgetting conveniently that in the long decades of Left Front rule in West Bengal you could not hope to get a university appointment if you did not sign up as a member of the CPI(M). As for thuggery in politics (aka reducing scope for dissent), didn't the Left specialise in it in West Bengal? If the talk today is of the BJP destroying institutions of learning, what did the Left do to what was then called Presidency College?

The Congress claimed a monopoly on credit for the country's freedom, and played up the role of the Nehrus; the BJP now seeks to adopt and play up Patel, Bose and Ambedkar, for no purpose other than to stick it into the dynasty. The Congress made public media outlets its mouthpiece; now the BJP (which had once wanted an independent Prasar Bharati) appoints party hacks to turn it into "his master's voice". So, at the Repubic Day parade, Doordarshan cameras focus repeatedly on the minister of state for information and broadcasting.

In short, even as the Congress and the Left protest too much, the BJP shows with every passing day that when it comes to setting or copying bad precedents, it is no different from the Congress--except that instead of a "parent" dynasty it has a "parent" organisation. If the tables get turned and today's protesting Congress finds itself back in power, any guesses on how it might behave? One is reminded increasingly of Orwell's Animal Farm.

Try as one might, it is hard to imagine the UK's secretary for education writing to the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, asking him even once, let alone five times in a matter of weeks, to look into complaints against a research scholar whom a minister had chosen to characterise, on the basis of no evidence, as "anti-national". So why not pick up lessons from the right places? Or is that suggestion anti-national?