Great Expectations

• Why should your perception about people who are yet to enter public life precede the first-hand perception the voter will get as and when they do enter public life? Is it fair to subject them to a veritable trial in a kangaroo court, whose sole purpose is to undermine their credibility in the public mind, before they enter public life? How many sitting MPs and Union Ministers have you targeted with such questions? And, how many of them were in a position to give an appropriate reply? Have you asked these questions to other politicians, who are yet to enter politics?

• You, as a journalist, must have travelled through the length and breadth of the country more than once. What is the nuclear constituency of the nation, which needs to be represented by everyone who gets into politics? Should it be mandatory for everyone in this country to support or oppose or have a stand on the nuclear policy and give secondary priority to the drinking water problem or the problem of unemployment?

• Do you see the need to quiz the various stars — of Bollywood and the cricket world — who descend on the voter to campaign or contest and become ministers occupying important portfolios? If the children of the Gandhi family are expected to have answers to all questions and solutions to all your problems, because of their family history, then by the same logic and for the same reason, the Congress party and the nation should look up to them for leadership.

• Why and under what tenets of jurisprudence do the children of the Gandhi family owe an explanation to the nation for inadequate expenditure on health and education during the Nehru Gandhi period?

• Would you now ask the same questions to Varun Gandhi?

Ms Singh wants to know why the Congress’s chief preoccupation appears to be playing nanny to the Gandhi siblings. Isn’t the party entitled to its icons? The family’s historical role in the freedom struggle and subsequent institution building does have a certain public resonance. Our cultural consciousness has a hero stereotype. The family commands respect in the public mind, founded on the perception that its members have laid down their lives in defence of the nation. All parties derive their vision from their icons — be it Ambedkar or Golwalkar. The Congress party derives its vision of nation building from the family’s understanding of India, which it has absorbed from its glorious history so meaningfully and uniquely intertwined with the history of modern India.

Ms Singh, amongst the various jobs our society offers, the most difficult is the one of a politician. Unlike nobody else in any other job, a politician’s CR is reviewed on a minute to minute basis by people and for reasons he or she may never know of. Is it therefore not unreasonable for us to start writing and making public the CRs of two young people who have not even publicly aired their desire to enter politics?

The writer is Officer on Special Duty to Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit