BJP really took the cake

For one thing, the NDA was choc-a-bloc full of rhetoricians. The UPA, apart possibly from a Laloo Prasad Yadav or Jaipal Reddy, is singularly bereft of inspired line-deliverers. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee punctuated his every pause with poetry, Jaswant Singh could take the hind-legs off a donkey — and its fore-legs too — with his expanded figures of speech and usage that had as much circularity to it as the road to Shimla. If Venkaiah Naidu came to speak in improvised rhyming couplets, Dalip Singh Judeo kept one or two couplets handy for a lurking handycam to capture for posterity. Even Bollywood has found it difficult to better his ‘‘Paise khuda to nahin par khuda ki kasam, khuda se kam bhi nahi’’ dialogue.

Khuda ki kasam, no one in UPA ranks can measure up to NDA levels of verbal velocity. Shivraj Patil is too much of a safari suit to be a genuine motormouth. Ditto, Ghulam Nabi Azad. Manmohan Singh’s prose appears to emanate from a UN document, full of earnestness and rationality but completely lacking in spontaneity. P Chidambaram wears his lawyerly gravitas like an over-starched shirt and Renuka Chowdhury’s displays of indignation appear too staged to carry conviction. Mani Shankar Aiyar had possibilities, but ministership seems to have extinguished them. He needs to be in the Opposition benches for the fire in his belly to blaze forth. Today’s Oily Mani is, alas, a tame version of the original.

When it came to raw lung power, Desi Bahu Sushma clearly outperformed Videshi Bahu Sonia; just as one Meira Kumar cannot summon up one-hundredth of the theatrics of an Uma Bharati. And while Pranab Mukherjee tries hard — his famous ‘‘eat lizard’’ phrase could yet get him into the quote books — he pales decidedly when compared to the rhetorical excesses of George Fernandes, who as defence minister defended himself with fluorescent verbosity. Arjun Singh may fancy himself as the true political antidote to Murli Manohar Joshi, but his enthusiasm appears tame when pitted against the feverish Vedic fantasies of the professor from Allahabad.

This is not, I repeat NOT, an assessment about boring things like the quality of governance, or the performance of individual leaders. It is about a government’s commitment to keep its citizens enlivened, entertained, and constantly on edge. When it comes to creating that feeling of imminent out-of-body experiences (which could be a riot or a rally, a nuclear explosion or an archaelogical exhumation), the NDA government — and the party that had fathered it — wins hands down.