patricia mukhim
ASSAM chief minister Tarun Gogoi is a veteran Congress warhorse. His claim to fame is that he is senior to nearly all the cabinet ministers in the UPA-2. And that includes Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Gogoi was a minister in the Union cabinet during Rajiv Gandhi&’s time and held the food and civil supplies portfolio. He is holding the reins of Assam for the third consecutive term and this gives him some sort of a political halo. He is past his 80th year and thinks he can talk down to just about anyone who challenges him.
When confronted recently by citizens about the unmanageable garbage in Assam&’s upcoming metropolis – Guwahati — Gogoi made the most ridiculous statement ever. He told the media that garbage was a sign of prosperity. He implied that the people of Assam could now afford to buy packaged food, packaged goods, packaged products of all kinds and that they obviously had to discard the containers. All these packages and containers were, he implied, what constituted garbage. No one has taken on Gogoi for this abominable statement. Does this mean the citizens agree with what their chief minister is saying? If indeed garbage is a sign of development and prosperity then all garbage should be dumped at the gates to the Secretariat at Dispur. Gogoi can then showcase to all visitors how his state has developed amidst the stench and filth that no modern city would be proud of.
But garbage is not the only thing Gogoi has slipped on. His political battle with former favourite acolyte Himanta Biswa Sarma, presently health and education minister, is out in the open. It&’s a daily free-for-all between the two. Fortunately the Congress in the state is not yet in free-fall mode because the political alternatives have not emerged. So Gogoi is correct when he asserts that in 2016 the Congress will return to rule Assam with a vengeance; that the Congress will throw up many more MPs from Assam in 2014. All these statements reek of megalomania but right now they sound like gems of wisdom because the people of Assam believe in them.
However, this is a problem that does not beset Assam alone. The whole country is agonising over an alternative to the beleaguered UPA-2, now on its last legs and unable to show any credible leadership in countering Chinese belligerence or in giving a new fillip to the sagging economy. The only emerging alternative to the UPA is the BJP-led NDA, which is now projecting Narendra Modi as its poster boy for 2014.
It is a sad development that huge sections of youth looking for a more aggressive leader at the helm of India&’s affairs are turning to Narendra Modi. This is evident from the kind of  “likes” Modi gets on social networking sites each time he utters something. But does the Congress derive any lessons from these developing events? No, it doesn’t.
A superficial refurbishing of the Union cabinet recently with a Prime Minister who no longer makes sense with Gen-X is not exactly a good recipe to win the 2014 elections, as far as the UPA is concerned. The electorate across the length and breadth of this country wants a leader who leads from the front, not a night watchman keeping guard over the “gaddi” until crown prince Rahul Gandhi takes over. But even if he takes over, does he give the impression of being a “leader”, as we understand leadership in its real sense and not as a dynastic prince of the Congress who gets to sit on the throne not because he is capable but because he is the anointed one?
Dynasty is incongruous in a democracy. Yet we have suffered dynastic rule for decades since Independence, except for a brief respite in 1998-2003. But the tragedy is that if the NDA is to be led by Narendra Modi, large swathes of this country will feel alienated by the BJP&’s rightist ideologies. Godhra remains a deep psychological scar (when the state colluded with the forces of communalism and completely abandoned a section of its citizens, leaving them to nurse their wounds). Although many today argue that Gujarat has remained violence-free since Modi has been in the hot seat, some memories do not fade with time; not for those who have lost their all. These memories are what will make it difficult for the NDA to win enough seats to lead this country in 2014.
The third front comprising non-Congress, non-BJP parties are in such ferment that they are unlikely to emerge as a cohesive force, strong enough to dismantle traditional Congress or BJP vote banks. I am saying this with a sadness and bewilderment that grips the average citizen of this country. Being an avid traveller for many different reasons, one gets to listen to a wide spectrum of views which one stores in one&’s memory bank.
Quite a number of leading industrialists in this country have suffered from the sluggish economy and the indifferent policies of the UPA towards the manufacturing and other sectors. Some of these big names are now willing to throw their weight behind Modi, not because they have forgotten Godhra but because they believe he can put this country on to a more economically sound and vibrant trajectory. Now how this is going to play out in the next 11 months is something to watch out for.
In the USA, the Republicans and Democrats are equally strong forces countering each other with equal political muscle. This is not the case in India. We are a fragmented polity and hang on to political parties for our own petty reasons, such as caste, religion, tribe, region and what have you. This is weakening democracy. Or have we adopted the wrong template of democracy unsuited to our temperament? Is a different model of democracy, tailored to the heterogeneous nature of our polity, the need of the hour? Surely a mere display of democracy which is today symbolised by a “once-in-five-years” election, cannot be enough to sustain democracy.
In the absence of clarity on governance issues and who is supposed to do what, as we grapple with the democracy we have, and strive for the ideal we want; as we try and stitch together different elements that we claim are democratic in nature but are not; as we ignore the problems that threaten democracy such as the manner in which the Congress is run; as we try and explain away dynasty as a real need for the country to remain cohesive, as if a non-Nehru/Gandhi leader in the Congress would send the country into complete anarchy, the more likely we are to have people like Tarun Gogoi taking the electorate for granted and pushing the responsibility of governance to citizens who have neither the wherewithal nor the resources to resolve the garbage crisis of Guwahati city. There is a system of civic governance in place.
If there are mountains of garbage around, Gogoi should pull up those responsible for the mess and give them an earful instead of the oxymoron he mouthed. This is like throwing the ball right back at the tax payer! Indeed, Gogoi&’s exposition on garbage will go down in history as the most ludicrous statement of the year by any chief minister in this country. But just as Mark Antony argued so cogently and with exceptional oratorical skills as to why Caesar had to die at the hands of Brutus, similarly Tarun Gogoi will survive the most outrageous verbalisations of a mind that has gone unmistakably senile. It is sad for the people of Assam that Gogoi can get away with such political profanities!

The writer is editor, The Shillong Times, and can be reached at patricia17@rediffmail.com