Hypocrisy Comes Back to Haunt the Nation

There was this joke going around after the recent state election results that Modi and Amit Shah would have already started working on the next set of states… while Rahul Gandhi would be headed abroad for yet another break.

The way Goa and Manipur played out, it looks like that’s exactly what happened. Two states where nobody got a majority, where the Congress got more seats than the BJP… and yet the BJP got invited to form the government. That, of course, is a very gray area: there are no clear rules on who gets invited first. The largest party? The one with the “best” chance of forming a government? How does the governor even decide that? No wonder the case has gone to court.

The obvious things have happened for sure: horse-trading, and money must have changed hands. That apart, as Mihir Sharma wrote:

“The BJP simply appears to have outwitted the Congress… (Because) whatever actually happened, the Congress moved too slowly, and the BJP moved swiftly.”

Why didn’t the Congress “get its act together enough to write to the governors”, asks Arun Jaitley. Sharma wonders:

“What was the Congress thinking? That state governors are still 10 Janpath appointees instead of coming from Nagpur and Ashoka Road? It still has the entitled lethargy it displayed in government, and none of the hunger that a party that has practically no governments to its name should display.”

He may be perfectly right when he says:

“The BJP is winning because it is still hungrier, and as willing to subvert institutions and turn them to its side as the Congress was in its heyday.”

And in the ultra-polarized world we live in, the morality angle is irrelevant. Because supporters of both sides point out that the other side did the same thing:

“The BJP is quite right to say that the Congress' behaviour in the past has been despicable. The Congress is right to point out that the BJP's behaviour in the present is no different.”

The left leaners lost the moral high ground long ago. They were OK with the party that imposed the Emergency; but screamed Modi is a dictator… based on what? Not actions but their fears. They tolerated the arbitrary dismissal of state governments by Indira Gandhi; and now complain that governors aren’t neutral. They called the party that killed 3,000 Sikhs in 1984 a secular party; thereby turning “secularism” into a term of hypocrisy, instead of an ideal. They claimed to like meritocracies, but always cheered family based parties.

The sins of the left leaners have now come to haunt the nation… the pendulum has swung to the other end; and yet the anger on the right is showing no signs of abating.