What did the minister say? ``If we are so keen on having a foreigner as a prime minister, why not have Tony Blair or Bill Clinton or even Monica Lewinsky?'' Rhetorical flourish from an untrained rhetorician. Information and Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan, the most active Indian-origin mouthpiece of the ascendant Indian nationalist party, was perhaps only asking: Why are we so keen on having Sonia Gandhi as prime minister? Adding: Aren't Bill Clinton or Tony Blair or even Monica Lewinsky a better choice? Why Monica Lewinsky? He could have said Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Dole. Did he mean, by jumping from the desirable into the tastelessly low ridiculous, that Sonia Gandhi was as good or as bad as Monica Lewinsky, the one-time White House vamp who shook the American presidency - and the president - for a few months? In a strictly linguistic sense, he didn't. But he implied it. He was trying to be funny, rather knowledgeable about the international who's who. It didn't work. Poor joke, without taste,class or elegance. Minister Mahajan could not have said it better.But we tend to agree with him, partly. Why not Tony Blair or Bill Clinton? Not Mahajan or even the Mahajan-bashers within and without his party. We badly need politicians like Clinton and Blair, politicians who can turn the familiar into the fantastically new - the New Democrat, the New Labour - by the sheer force of ideas, even ideas pickpocketed from the other party. Politicians of that calibre, with their rhetorical smartness and history-seeking ambition, can turn an election into a defining moment in the political history of a nation. Clinton did it when he defeated Bush and clothed the Democratic donkey in haute couture liberalism. Blair did it when he made a market-friendly Maggie soup out of the old Labour. In the ever-vibrant political bazaars of the west, where the old definitions about the left and the right are disappearing in the cacophony of `third way' and `compassionate conservatism', politicians and parties are re-inventingthemselves by seeking out new ideas. Look what is happening here. They are talking Monica or the murder of a young woman journalist. It is pathetic.Your average Indian politician on the stump exists in a world devoid of ideas. His slogan, his rhetoric, challenges nothing. The winners of this election are going to be the chosen ones to take India into a new millennium. But where is the millennial vision? The BJP, when elected to power, could not even realise the romance of that moment, the resonance of a historic shift in politics. Power banalised it. Its only advantage is that Vajpayee, the most popular politician of India, has not banalised himself. But we have not yet received the vision thing from him, a vision that reaches the far horizons beyond the snowpeaks of Kargil. The Congress, our own GOP, is withering away, its only live idea being Our Lady of Salvation with the right surname. For all of them, it is just another election, a necessary evil, a tired - and tiring - ritual. They cannot changeIndia as long as they cannot change their words. Mahajan tries to enliven it and how.
