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  State legislatures and parliaments are a rich source of humour in all countries. This particular brand of humour requires a ready wit so that the retort can be fired back as soon as a remark is made, not thought of much later: what the French call the staircase wit -something you think you should have said going down the stairs after the party is over. We have some Parliamentarians who were quick-witted in their repartees but for the life of me I cannot recollect anything really memorable. Let me narrate some that have stayed in my memory. One of my favourites is from the Haryana Assembly. A lady member of the opposition was fiercely attacking the chief minister and his government. The chief minister lost his temper and described the lady member as charitraheen -woman of loose character. The lady was understandably furious and roundly abused the chief minister describing his mother, wife, sisters and daughters as charitraheen. There was an uproar in the House. The Speaker had the exchange of abuse expunged from the record and ordered both of them to apologize to each other. The chief minister made amends and asked the lady to forgive him and added: ‘I regard her as my own sister.’ When it came to the lady’s turn to apologize, she said: ‘I concede your sister is not charitraheen. But I cannot say anything about your other family relatives who I don’t know.’

  Mrs Gandhi’s late husband, Feroze Gandhi, was known for his sharp sense of repartee. But the one repartee most often quoted seems to have been thought out well ahead of the time of its delivery. The unhappy recipient of Feroze’s barbed shaft was the then Finance Minister T.T. Krishnamachari. Old TTK, as he was known to friends, had a very acid tongue and had been known to refer to Feroze Gandhi as Prime Minister Nehru’s lapdog. Feroze’s opportunity came when he had to open the debate on the Mundhra scandal in which TTK’s name was involved. As he came into the House he went up to the treasury benches and addressed the finance minister: ‘TTK, I believe you have been describing me as a lapdog. You no doubt regard yourself as a pillar of the State. Today I will do to you what a lapdog does to a pillar.’

  These make a very poor collection when you compare them to the sallies of wit and humour fired by A.P. Herbert, Aneuran Bevan and above all Winston Churchill in the British House of Commons. I will not narrate them as most of you are likely to have heard them before. But let me tell you an absolute gem of a retort that I picked up from, of all places, the parliament of Uruguay. An opposition member was attacking a minister. The minister got up to intervene. The member shouted back, ‘But I haven’t finished yet.’ This was repeated many times but every time the minister rose to defend himself the opposition man yelled, ‘Sit down! I haven’t finished yet.’ When at long last the man finished his speech, the minister asked: ‘Have you finished now?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man taking his seat.

  ‘Then pull the chain,’ snapped the minister amidst thunderous applause.

  Poverty in Indian Life

  One sultry summer afternoon in Calcutta I was entertaining an English lady I had known in my college days in England at lunch. She had never been to Calcutta but had seen Louis Malle’s documentary and read about Mother Teresa’s work among the poor. She had travelled extensively in Africa and Asia, seen Arab refugees’ encampments in Lebanon and Syria and met ‘the boat people’ in Malaysia. ‘I’ve had all the culture shocks sociologists talk about,’ she said smiling confidently, ‘I am shockproof.’

  We were in a large glazed veranda on the first floor of Calcutta’s gourmet restaurant, Firpos, overlooking one of the city’s busiest streets, Chowringhee. Being a Sunday, there was hardly any traffic. A line of taxis were parked across the road with their sleeping drivers’ legs dangling out of their open doors. Beyond the cab rank was a vast esplanade of emerald-green grass with massive raintrees with people sprawling in their shade. It looked very calm and peaceful. The chilled lager had made me drowsy and I was finding it hard to keep up with the cheerful chatter of my lady companion.

  All at once there was hubbub in the street below. Men were running from different directions towards the rank. I saw a dozen men slapping, punching and kicking a man who was reeling between them like one drunk. I ran down the steps of the restaurant followed by my companion. We pushed our way through the crowd. Two burly Sikhs held a small, dark Bengali clad in a loincloth by the tuft of his hair. He was whining piteously. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘What has the fellow done?’

  ‘He’s a thief,’ answered one of the Sikhs. The motherfucker was trying to remove the hubcap of my taxi when I woke up. These fellows won’t learn their lesson until we stick a greased pole up their dirty arses.’ To emphasize his point he gave the fellow a violent kick with his bare foot. ‘Don’t beat him,’ I pleaded. ‘Hand him over to the police.’

  ‘No! No! In the name of Rama, not the police!’ whined the man as he clutched my legs with both his hands. ‘Let them beat me to their heart’s content. But let me go. If the police take me, my wife and children will not know where I am. They haven’t eaten for two days and they’ll think I am dead. Please save me.’ He set up a loud wail and slapped his belly: ‘I am hungry. I’ve had nothing to eat for many days.’ Tears ran down his eyes; blood oozed down his nose and mouth. I offered to pay the price of the hubcap. The taxi drivers refused the offer with contempt. I pleaded with them to let the fellow go as he had received enough punishment. The police arrived, handcuffed the thief and pushed him into their black van. All I was able to get was the man’s name and the locality where his family lived. And blotches of blood on my white shark-skin trousers.

  We were able to track down the thief’s family. They had been pushed out from underneath the suburban railway bridge where they had spent the monsoon season to a sprawl of gunnysack awnings along the rail track. Dust and smoke hung in the air; the stench of sewers mixed with the smell of cooking and the all-pervasive smell of faeces and urine. Garbage emptied by municipal vans lay in mountainous heaps. Pigs, pye-dogs and naked children rummaged for cartons and leaf-cups to lick whatever stuck on their insides of food or grease. The woman was cooking rice-gruel on an open fire (her husband had lied). I told her of her husband’s arrest. She shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘If he can’t get work, what is he to do? We have to fill our bellies.’ She took the ten-rupee note offered by my friend without a word of thanks. ‘Thank you’ is not in the vocabulary of India’s poor.

  My English friend who had chatted merrily in the afternoon was strangely silent all evening. Later she confessed that she had not been able to eat her supper and had thrown up in the bathroom.

  When it comes to squalor and scenes of poverty and human degradation no city in the world can beat Calcutta. But similar sights can be seen in other cities including the richest Bombay and the capital Delhi. If one only saw the city slums, one would get what Mahatma Gandhi aptly described as a drain inspector’s report of India. But since Independence, many things have changed for the better. India has inched forward at a snail’s pace towards improving the living conditions of the poor. This may not be evident to the eye and although official statistics are not always reliable, they cannot be fouled on all the claims they make. A fair balance sheet of achievements and failures would run somewhat as follows:

  Since Independence India has had no major famine or epidemic. Production of foodgrains went up from a heavy deficit to self-sufficiency, literacy from under 16 per cent to well over 40 per cent. In the same period India’s population more than doubled from 318 million to over 800 million; the average span of life which was 32 years has become over 52; the rate of increase showed a minuscule drop. It is the explosive increase in numbers that negatived much of the progress made because the State has been unable to keep pace with it by providing the required number of schools, hospitals, transport facilities, community centres. No industry, either state controlled or privately owned, showed as much buoyancy as was hoped for. Hence we have a situation full of paradoxes. India is amongst the poorest of the poor of the world, the tenth from the bottom of the list of impoverished nations just above countries
like Upper Volta, Ethiopia, Mali, Chad, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Burma. It is also the world’s seventh largest producer of industrial goods and has next to the United States and the Soviet Union, the third largest pool of scientific and technical manpower. India today produces just about everything it needs from needles to computers, automobiles, tractors, aircraft and steamships; it has put satellites in orbit. It has exploded a nuclear device and has a chain of eight nuclear power plants. Why then does the poverty sit so heavily on India like the old man on the back of Sindbad?

  On People, With ‘Malice’

  I cannot resist making fun of name-droppers, calling liars liars on their faces. And I love abusing the arrogant. . . And since most name-droppers, self-praisers and arrogant men go from success to success, become ministers, governors and win awards they don’t deserve, my anger often explodes in print

  Giani Zail Singh

  When Giani Zail Singh was sworn in as the seventh rashtrapati of India on 25 July 1980, I was rash enough to forecast that despite his modest education and inability to speak English he would prove to be the most popular president the country had had thus far - outstripping the suave Rajendra Prasad, the scholarly Radhakrishnan and Zakir Hussain, garrulous V.V. Giri and Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy and the ail-too pliable Fakhruddin Ali Ahmad. He started off with a bang.

  On Thursday, 8 July 1980, he came to the Central Hall of Parliament to bid farewell to fellow Parliamentarians and announce the termination of his long association with the Congress party. He was a few minutes late and was visibly embarrassed as Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was addressing the assemblage. She further embarrassed him by her words of welcome: ‘See, he is blushing like a bride!’ So the Giani did to the roots of his glossy-black dyed beard. His farewell speech to fellow politicians was a tour de force of sentimental oratory the like of which is rarely heard these days. He ended with a reference to Mrs Gandhi’s quip about his blushing, admitting that he felt like an Indian bride taking leave of her parents, brothers and sisters when every member of the family is in tears. ‘You have decided to retire me from politics; however, mine will be a kind of a shaahee retirement,’ he concluded.

  His first few months as rashtrapati were roses, roses all the way. Wherever he went, he was welcomed by mammoth crowds. He regaled them with rustic anecdotes, Urdu couplets, Persian and Punjabi poetry, quotations from sacred Sanskrit texts, the Quran and the Granth Sahib. Here at last was a ‘people’s rashtrapati,’ earthy, one who could talk on the same level to the peasant and the artisan; enter into a dialogue with the pandit, the maulvi and the granthi. The only class with which he neither tried nor was capable of making an equation was the Westernized woggery. They cracked their Sardarji jokes at his expense at their cocktail parties. He often exposed himself to their jibes as he did when criticizing the Darwinian theory of our descent from the apes: ‘How could the Buddha be a progeny of a monkey?’ he asked naively. But few wags dared to take him on in public because they knew they could not hope to match him in witty repartee. He ignored their existence.

  The one thing that had irked the sophisticated sections of society was his exaggerated deference to the ‘royal family’. He said he would be willing to sweep the floor if Mrs Gandhi so desired and acknowledged the then seeming heir-apparent, Sanjay, as his rehnuma (guide). Few people realized that darbardari (flattery) was deeply ingrained in his psyche as he was born and brought up in the courtly atmosphere of Faridkot Raj where only sycophancy and cunning ensured survival.

  Within a few months, things began to go awry. It was his own community which had earlier lauded his elevation as the first Sikh rashtrapati that began to deride him. The Akalis launched their ‘dharma yuddha morcha’ against the government. The Giani mocked them: ‘Akali, akal ke khalee’ - Akalis are empty headed. They retaliated by describing him as a sarkari Sikh and the prime minister’s rubber stamp. Akali demonstrations against the ninth Asiad gave Bhajan Lai’s Haryana constabulary freedom to harass all Sikhs coming to Delhi by rail and road. For the first time in the history of independent India, Sikhs came to be discriminated against. It was ironic that this should have started when a Sikh presided over the country. His stock amongst the Sikh community began to decline. Then events overtook him with rapid succession - Operation Bluestar was followed by Operation Woodrose to comb the Punjab countryside for terrorists.

  Gianiji had been kept in the dark about Bluestar but the Sikhs held him responsible for it. High priests of the Takhts summoned him to explain why he should not be declared a tankhaiya. In many gurdwaras posters with his pictures were laid out on the floor at the entrance for worshippers to tread on. His TV appearance visiting the Har-mandir Sahib after the carnage wearing a rose in his sherwani caused a wave of resentment. He was virtually written off by his community. Then came the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi followed by the massacre of Sikhs in towns and cities of northern India. Being a Sikh, the Giani had to suffer the odium with which Hindus began to regard his community.

  Hardly had the country returned to normalcy and the Giani regained his equipoise, than the new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, began to exhibit boorishness unbecoming of a young man of his lineage towards an elder to whom he initially owed his position. The Giani felt isolated and unwanted. I was pretty certain that he was looking for a suitable opportunity to resign and to go out of the Rashtrapati Bhawan with the same fanfare with which he had entered it. I was wrong. He stepped out of his mansion not with the proverbial bang, but not with a whimper either.

  In the last six months, he gave Rajiv Gandhi and his advisers a taste of their own medicine and many sleepless nights. What is more, if they had any illusions of making up for lost sleep after Gianiji quit Rashtrapati Bhawan, they were in for a nasty surprise. Unlike his predecessors, who disappeared into pastoral oblivion after their retirement, Gianiji was a retired president living in the capital and determined to level his score with the prime minister. I foresaw Gianiji becoming the patron saint of those disenchanted with the regime. Although he did not fulfil my prophecy of being the most popular president of the Republic, he will undoubtedly go down in the pages of history as the most talked about president of the Indian Republic.

  What was there in this man of humble origin and little academic learning that helped him overcome one obstacle after another and pedestal himself to triumph, to reach the pinnacle of aspiration and become the head of state? I will let incidents in his life speak for him.

  Zail Singh was an active worker of Praja Mandai of the erstwhile Faridkot state. The raja had personally ordered him to be jailed and kept in solitary confinement. When India became independent and Faridkot was merged into PEPSU, the central government was looking for suitable men to run the new state. Sardar Patel summoned Zail Singh. Zail Singh did not have the money to buy a third class return ticket from Faridkot to Delhi and had to ask friends for a loan. In Delhi, he stayed in Gurdwara Sis Ganj. He did not have money to hire a tonga to take him to Sardar Patel’s residence at five in the morning. He walked the entire four miles and was late for his appointment. Sardar Patel’s daughter brusquely dismissed him. It was the kindly secretary, V. Shankar, who let him see the deputy prime minister. Zail Singh was told that he was being made minister of state in PEPSU. He walked back to the railway station to return to Faridkot. He never looked back. The remarkable thing about this man was that he did not forget his humble origins nor let power go to his head. Success was to him a gift given by the Great Guru, not something owed to him by virtue of his abilities. One of his favourite couplets warns one of the dangers of hubris:

  Jin mein ho jaata hai andaz-e-khudaee paida Hum ne dekha hai voh butt toot jaate hain.

  Mortals who allow notions of divinity to germinate in them - we have seen those idols shattered and come to grief.

  There is not even a suspicion of arrogance or self-esteem in this man. Besides humility, his faith in religion taught him to be honest and truthful. He is one of the breed of politicians now almost extinct wh
o though handling vast sums of money never feathered his own nest nor those of his relatives. He owns no house, flat or tract of land except the little he inherited. Nobody has ever accused him of telling a lie.

  As a junior minister, Zail Singh set about assiduously cultivating the support of the lower and discriminated castes. He is a Ramgarhia (carpenter); Punjab has always been dominated by the Jat and Sikh politics constipated with caste considerations. Zail Singh broke the Jat hegemony over the state and successfully mocked Akali pretensions of being thekedars (monopolists) of the Khalsa Panth. He was able to convince the Sikhs that he was a better Sikh than all the Akali leaders put together. His speeches were always full of quotations from the Gurbani and episodes from Sikh history. No other politician, either from the Akali party or the Congress, could build this kind of Gursikh image for himself as did the Giani. By the time he made his presence felt in the state, a precedent had been established that the chief minister of Punjab should be a Sikh. There was no better Sikh than Giani Zail Singh to fill the role.

  Zail Singh’s six-year tenure as chief minister was perhaps the most peaceful and prosperous the state has ever seen. They were the years of the Green Revolution. They were also the years without morchas, bandhs or strikes.