It sounds like the Shakespearean line about the killers of Julius Caesar: "They are all honourable men." Except that no irony was apparently intended by Sheila Dixit when she referred to certain leaders lately rehabilitated in her party as "Congressmen of long standing" and "experienced politicians".The DPCC president was actually trying to defend persons associated in the public mind with mass killings of a most shameful kind staged in Delhi over 14 years ago. She need not be taken seriously, of course, when she says the party was not bringing these `netas' back "into the poll arena", but only seeking to exploit their experience and "expertise" in other, unspecified ways.Nor when she suggests that the Congress is being correct in leaving their political future to be decided by the course of law. The purpose of the pre-election move is obvious. So is the fact that the step is a reversal of the party line till the other day, which did not wait for the final court verdicts on cases of the Capital'santi-Sikh riots of 1984 to keep the same worthies out of Congress affairs.What cannot be taken lightly at all, even if laughable otherwise is her logic for bringing back to political life the band of four - H.K.L. Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler and Dharam Das Shastri. For, her case for doing so amounts to nothing less than contempt for the people. She has talked of their experience. The question is about the country's experience of them - as also of others like them, and the species of politics they symbolise.It was a shocking, sordid experience. Their role in the post-Indira riots, which Rajiv Gandhi likened to the tremors caused by the fall of a big tree, is yet to be judicially indicted. The later Congress leadership, however, did not even try to deny credence to widespread apprehensions in this regard, when it sought to distance the party from them. The people saw in the riots evidence of an experience of the foursome's kind.Experience in politics of sycophancy, practised and pursuedwithout qualms of any kind, without limits of legitimacy. In politics of cynical strongmanship, of muscle and money power. The people saw "expertise" of precisely these leaders' kind displayed in the monstrous atrocities unleashed upon a hapless minority. The alienation of the Congress had a lot to do with the fact that this gang of four and similar other groups elsewhere were allowed to become "Congressmen of long standing".S.S. Ahluwalia of the erstwhile "shouting brigade" may, of course, amuse when he assails "sycophants" for the move. But, there is nothing amusing about the manner in which the avowedly secular Congress is going out of its way to take back its tacit apology for the minority-lynching of our own Orwellian year.The calculations of the party high command - without whose vigorous nod a step of such nationwide import would have been impossible - are hardly concealed. The smugly cynical assumption is that the proverbial shortness of the public memory must have played its part by now. Thatelections are a game and that the "experience" and "expertise" of Bhagat and company in playing it, whether by the rules or not, can be safely exploited now. It is for the people to prove the premise wrong, and to punish it suitably.
