But they are ours...!

‘Yahya maybe a bastard but he is our bastard’.

A supposed comment made by the US President, Richard Nixon, when the facts of the Pakistani army’s war against the Hindus and Awami League supporters in East Pakistan became known.

To the genteel, such comments may seem horrifying, particularly when this b****** was committing a genocide in East Pakistan. However, what gets missed is that even if in varying degrees, each one of us is blessed / cursed with such sentiments. For one, parents are supposed to be oblivious to shortcomings of their children, friends are supposed to stand up for each other even when in wrong. After all, what are bonds if they are so weak that they cannot stand the strain of some human frailty!

Yet, human culture celebrates as heroic those acts, where actions and their consequences are weighed for their intrinsic worth. Those instances where a mother overcomes her maternal instincts to turn over a renegade progeny aka real life Mother Indias, where a wife kills her husband for his crimes, where one overcome your patriotism and attempt to kill a monster aka Count Stauffenberg, are stuff which legends are made of. The very fact such instances are few indicate that ordinary humans find it easier to turn a blind eye or rationalize acts which seem condemnable when committed by others.

Very soon after the Indian National Congress (not the current namesake but the vanguard of National struggle for Independence) had tasted power in the provinces, it was clear to both the leaders and the general public that the Indian office bearers were not very different when compared to their British counterparts as far as arrogance and a proclivity to enjoy the fruits the fruits of power were concerned. In fact, many of the office bearers saw no harm in using their new found powers to indulge in acts which even in the politest forms, would be called acts of nepotism and corruption. While these developments dismayed Gandhi, other leaders with a high moral quotient and the general public, there was little which they could do. At one level, there wasn’t any alternative to the INC and probably even more importantly, condemning the rogue acts would have been an admission that their beliefs in greatness of their leaders was misplaced.

Such trends continued and with hardening of political identities, party supporters very frequently find themselves indulging in all sorts of reasoning theatrics in attempting to defend the indefensible. This does not necessarily mean that all these supporters have a misbalanced sense of the right and the wrong. The reason could be as mundane as one’s perception of lack of better alternatives, belief in a particular ideology or a probably a deeper instinct of self preservation which makes people unwilling to accept that they had made bad choices. However, the ability of a human being to condone faults and overlook mistakes being limited, it does not take long before a vocal defence makes way for a sullen indifference.

For those who supported the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Jana Sangh and even the Swatantra Party, BJP’s ascendancy to power was seen as culmination of a decades long struggle. Hence, all these people who supported this political stream with all their might even in years when it had no chance to come to power, were willing to condone a tactical stepping back on those issues which made the BJS/RSS/BJP different from all the other options available in the market. However, which each passing blunder – Tehelka arms sting, the Kandhar hijack, China border agreement give-away, the erstwhile unalloyed support started giving way to convoluted reasoning, chiefly around a comparative logic – ‘Just look at the Congress, they are much worse’. What happens when such logic is stretched to the extremes? You start resembling the one you despise.

Most of the time, exceptional performance in the field of arts, sciences and sports are not a result of a breakthrough but of incremental improvements – a tweak here, a betterment there. It is the collective impact of all minor but continuous improvements spread over a period of time, that differentiate the exceptional from the ordinary.

What holds true for incremental improvements, holds equally true for decremental changes too. A compromise here, a mis-step there, a blunder at yet another occasion – all these together ensure that your USP is lost. The same way, the six year old Vajpayee government, though better in relative sense (vis-à-vis the current dispensation), came to be seen as a Congress clone. The result was a silent disassociation of its core support base and loss of its innate appeal to its natural constituency – the youth, the middle and the intermediate classes.

What we are seeing today is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. The AAP surge was powered by the youth, inspired by its promise to fight corruption. Today, the party is seen to have started adopting those very practices which it stood against – pandering to communal and casteist emotions, tokenism, readiness to grab loaves of office, willingness to compromise with corruption etc. The very vocal volunteers, who have invested so much in making the party a success, are even more vocally defending the party against criticism. The point is – for how long? AAP is running the risk of diluting its core plank of corruption and be seen as another clone of the Congress. If only its supporters realize even if the transgressing b****** is our b******, some course correction is required, for its own good and for the greater good of the country!