Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar is an oft-mocked man these days. Especially since the man he derided as a Chaiwallah, ended up becoming the PM. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar is an IFS bred diplomat who, mesmerized by Rajiv Gandhi, joined politics in the 80s. Since then, Mani Shankar Aiyar has been a steadfast Gandhi family loyalist. Mr. Aiyar also runs a blog on NDTV, wherein usually he drips pessimism on the present, and sings odes to past glories. Most of his articles are pretty useless, but Mr. Aiyar does have a flair for writing. He makes strong arguments but given his political convictions, they are seldom logical or believable. In his latest post, Mr. Aiyar talks of the Parliament becoming an Akhara.
It is a pretty impressive write up. Honestly, without hurting his own political masters, Mr. Aiyar, craftily weaves a narrative of how the functioning of the Parliament has degenerated. His thrust point is that the Press and therefore the masses are getting what they love-A good round of shouting, sloganeering and blocking legislations rather than drab legislative debates and hence that is what is happening. Somewhere in his write up, he also talks of the degeneration of Parliamentary procedures owing to the fact that our MPs and leaders are all ‘Indian’, that is to say unlike the generations that followed the British Raj, our leaders are no longer Oxbridge educated, they do not follow British Parliamentary procedures, they are unaware of the sayings of great British Parliamentarians etc. etc. Obviously thus, a sort of vernacularization of politics has set in, resulting in scenes that we frequently see in the Parliament and legislative assemblies.
So this is what it has come to. No longer governed by white men, women and their slaves, Indians have distorted democracy, made it “Indian”, or as Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar puts it “Vernacular” and thus totally ruined it. As inferior people, we are incapable of governing ourselves in line with the great tenets of democracy. As second class people, we have reduced democratic institutions to Akharas and we are doing what we are best at- arguing and fighting. Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, I would attribute this vernacularization of India in great part to the party you represent. Not because ensured a wash out of the session (which you did), because this is what you did to India. Your political masters made monkeys out of us. Instead of making a strong, confident India, you made India a synonym of poverty, sycophancy, corruption and disunity. Your political masters, for 60 years, ruled India by pitting vote banks against each other. You are the true legacy of the 2 centuries of British rule. You ensured that their divide and rule succeeded. You ensured that we continued to be slaves, before Independence we tended to the British and after Independence we slavishly followed your political masters. Your political masters were astute politicians but they never had India’s best interests at heart. All they wanted was a continuation of their political dynasty. Nehru handed over the throne to his daughter, Indira to her son, Rajiv to his wife and now Sonia to her son. Those minor political personages who came to power in the interregnum between Nehru-Gandhi handover of political power were conveniently erased from history books. And how did this happen? Because of slaves such as yourself. The largesse that your political family bestowed upon you ensured that you never once wavered in your duties towards them.
Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar, you are wrong when you say the Parliament is being vernacularized. India has had democratic traditions before the time the English language was even born. It was your political masters who chose not to respect that. Instead of working on those long lost traditions, your political masters chose to ape the Western social and political thought. Your political masters ensured that India remained intellectually backward so that they could continue in power. In fact, your leaders stifled democracy while claiming to be strengthening it. You perpetuated the right to rule for your political masters based on bloodline, while at the same time singing paens to the glory of your party’s democratic traditions. And right now, It is your leaders who are disrupting sessions and your leaders who are actively subverting democracy!
A blind and a deaf man can tell you Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar that your current leader is unfit to even be a citizen of India, let alone be the Prime Miniser. Yet you persist in deifying him. The same blind and deaf man would have told you that your Party’s empress openly humiliated the only technocratic PM India has ever had, by plotting behind the scenes, and reduced him to a mere pawn in her political machinations. Yet the likes of you continue to slavishly toe their line. On one day, you clap your hands in glee and claim to deny Arun Jaitley the passage of GST, on another day, you mock Modi’s Pakistan policy, and on yet another, you shed copious tears on the death of a terrorist. Rise, Mr. Aiyar and be worthy of the education that you claim to have had, open your eyes to the reality and legacy of 60 years of mis-governance and shake off the yoke of the family that controls your thoughts, your speech and your actions!
Arise Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyar and be a worthy son of your motherland!