Adding insult to invective

I mean, in most democracies, the choicest insults are generally reserved for the Opposition. One has heard of Winston Churchill swiftly burying a verbal rapier into Clement Atlee8217;s all-too-yielding flesh: 8220;He8217;s a modest little man, with much to be modest about.8221; And the internationally recounted observation that President Ford could not think and chew gum at the same time, presumably,emanated from Opposition windmills.

What is distinctive about the Bharatiya version is that the best, the brightest, the meanest, the muddiest insults are always directed at a coalition partner. If this isn8217;t what social scientists mean when they speak about deepening the democratic processes, I don8217;t know what is.

The Subramanian Swamy-Ram Jethmalani duo has deepened Indian democracy by at least six fathoms and each has promptly proceeded to hurl the mud emanating from such excavating activities at the other. It8217;s time we the people stood up and saluted the selfless task they have undertaken for the greater cause of the nation. Each, in his single-minded endeavour to demolish the other, has obviously invested huge amounts of personal energy, burnt litre upon litre of midnight oil, consulted all manner of dictionaries and thesauruses, and presumably practised the art of spitting and swearing before the shaving mirror in the privacy of his bathroom.

The two have differing styles of hectoring. SubramanianSwamy scrambles on to every dung heap he comes across and crows with all the passion of a cockerel at sunrise. Since the Indian political scene is well nigh pockmarked with dung-heaps and the sun is constantly rising over them, Swamy has a great deal to crow about.

Jethmalani8217;s invectology, in contrast, borders on insectology. His knowledge of the lifecycle and behaviour of those creeply-crawlies, distinct from anthropoids in that they are generally possessed with a winged thorax, would do a zoologist proud. But notice how he adds value to his formidable data base by the skillful requisitioning of adjectival ammunition. Swamy, he pronounces, is not just an insect, he is a diseased insect whose natural habitat is the gutter. Then, with all the logic that a formidable legal mind can muster, he concludes that since the aforesaid insect flourishes in the gutter, it is insufficient to just spray it with disinfectant. It needs to be crushed and its messy remains incinerated forthwith. Whoa.

If you did not knowit already, this glorious exchange of rapid-fire ammunition has set new highs in the standard of political discourse in the country. It has rendered redundant earlier attempts by courageous politicians to storm the silence barrier, beginning with stalwarts like K.K.Tewari, Congressman and English literature professor, who recalled his Milton and hurled the word 8220;Beelzebub8221; at a startled Parliamentarian on one memorable occasion. The Swamy-Jethmalani dual even makes former Congress President Sitaram Kesri8217;s characterisation of H.D.Deve Gowda as a nikamma pale into politeness. The observations of BJP8217;s Venkaiah Naidu that Kesri is mad and that 8220;only people in the lunatic asylums can talk like this8221; seems, at worst, harmless banter. Menaka Gandhi8217;s observation that Sonia Gandhi waves her hands like a car wiper sounds like a kindly tea-time conversation. Even the crude attempts of a Bal Thackeray appear positively tame.

But there is always room for refinement, a little more wit perhaps, some humour maybe.An evolving democracy requires an evolving dictionary of diatribe. Like other art forms, this too needs dedicated practitioners willing to devote themselves and their reputations to drinking deep at the wells of venom. The Vajpayee government would do well to set up a coordination committee to help this project along. It should be one cause that all its 19 constituents would be happy to espouse.