Opium Wars

Remember Bill Clinton’s defining statement, “I didn’t inhale”? Now we have Jaswant Singh, normally never at a loss for words, scrambling to explain himself. He says there was no opium in the brew he served to his guests at that now legendary lunch in Jasol, his ancestral village, and that it was a mix of harmless ingredients like gangajal, kesar, jaggery and tea. What he did not care to mention but perhaps should have, was that it was laced perhaps not with opium but with something equally potent: political dissent. In fact several of his guests that afternoon who imbibed the offending potion from the cup of his hand were sworn opponents of Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje.

On Monday, a Jodhpur sessions court ordered that Singh and his guests be investigated for alleged substance abuse under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. In another Jodhpur court, not too long ago, a case had been filed against a legislator known to be close to Raje. The man had allegedly brought out posters depicting the chief minister as Annapurna, goddess of harvests, showering blessings all around. It so deeply offended Jaswant Singh’s wife, that she sought court intervention on the grounds that it “hurt Hindu sentiments”. Now this Case versus Case could just be a curious coincidence, or it could be a contemporary version of the Opium Wars. Raje maintains that she has nothing to do with the case against Singh. However, we know that there has been of late a lot of frost building up on Rajasthan’s desert sands between the former Union minister of external affairs and the former minister of state for external affairs. It was not always like this. At one point, Raje acknowledged Jaswant Singh as her guru, and the latter, for his part, had made it a point to attend Raje’s swearing-in ceremony as CM. But power, or the lack of it, works in mysterious ways. The moot point, of course, is that India’s main party of opposition today appears to be under the thrall of petty personality clashes rather than substantive national debates.