How I wish our politicians were humans too. Yes, you read that right. That's precisely how I feel about them these days and increasingly so. At least sometimes, at least for pretense sake, at least to mask their true colours, they can feign to be one among us. But no. The Uttarakhand tragedy has once again underlined, and that too in bold, the ignoble side of this breed of people and how! Our humblebrag netas who chose to take the aerial route, seemingly to take stock of the extent of devastation in the flood-ravaged land, should cringe in shame. Oh, wait a minute. Shame did I say? Guess I should stop fooling myself.
Perched on their lofty copters they were anything but in sync with the ground realities. Their pseudo show of solidarity and concern lasted only as long as they found an agenda in the whole exercise. And agendas they did have aplenty, like always. They not only knew what was making news, but also how to be a part of it. While the flamboyant Modi camp went gaga over their new-found Rambo’s rescue mission, the Gandhi scion’s late entry into the scene of action ruffled many feathers. The UPA's blue eyed boy tried touching base with ground zero rather late. And to me his visit appeared more of an attempt to seal shut the opposition's lips. In the political blame game, one-upmanship is all what matters, at whose cost who really cares.
My contention is why do these netas have to register their attendance at all? Forget any good, their presence only affected the rescue mission. After all, the VVIPs had to be treated like one, notwithstanding the listless lives struggling to survive. The victims of nature’s ferocity could have done well without any of these hyperbolic lip service. After all it's the same rehearsed and re-rehearsed lines that they parrot. And on every occasion, it's a repeat telecast, not just of the same words, but also of the same conduct. It's nauseating to see them, to hear them.
Even as the rescue teams comprising the armed forces, ITBP men and the national disaster response force stretched to their last bit to ferry stranded victims to shores of safety, often risking their own lives, our chieftains were busy laying claims on who would take up the reconstruction work of the Kedarnath temple. While Mr Modi was all out to take charge, Mr Bahuguna wanted to make sure no one else stole the limelight from him. Did they have to make the political tug of war so evident, and that too at such trying times? For the grounded pilgrims, the rescuers were godsend, but the politicians were surely uninvited.
It's said that death is a great equalizer. A naked truth that often keeps us rooted, makes us more humane, tells us about the transitory nature of life. Why is it then that our ruling class fails to understand this? Or am I being too naive? The deathbed of Uttarakhand must be the most fertile political hotbed for many of our dreamy netas, a launch pad for them to catapult to places of prominence in the larger scheme of things. Only the likes of them will know how to get the maximum mileage out of a disaster of such epic proportion. As calm settles in on a land in absolute tatters, Lord Shiva's Tandava may be over for now. What remains to be seen is in whose favour this tandava works out eventually. Let me not take names, I can only be politically incorrect.
