Season of side swipes

As the Gujarat elections loom large on the horizon, political discourse can sometimes take on the colour of mud. What gives a decided edge t...

As the Gujarat elections loom large on the horizon, political discourse can sometimes take on the colour of mud. What gives a decided edge to the proceedings this time is the fact that it is largely a bipolar affair, with the two main parties — the BJP and the Congress — locked in mortal combat. So citizens, and specifically Gujarat’s voters, must be prepared for the silly season of side swipes, insinuations, innuendoes, allusions, apart, of course, from open thrusts and parries.

Which is as it should be. As they say, one campaigns in verse (and worse) and governs in prose. Except for the one proviso that electionspeak must be governed somewhere by the rules of common sense. Now you may hate the Congress and detest its leadership, but to go into a catatonic fit over a lecture its president is slated to deliver at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, to attribute dire motives to such a programme, to hint darkly on an Osama bin Laden connection, is plain silly and an insult to the voter’s intelligence.

The Congress, as scared as a rabbit pursued by hounds, has launched an elaborate defence of the visit. It is at pains to point out that world notables like Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan have spoken at the centre, that bin Laden’s family had long disowned its prodigal son and therefore has nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden and that the UK government has obviously found nothing objectionable about such funding to the Centre.

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More importantly, the Congress argues that if the BJP government and its home ministry saw nothing objectionable about the Leader of the Opposition speaking at such a forum and had cleared the visit, the BJP has no business raising such a ruckus over it, or it would cast grave aspersions on the competence of the Union government.

But that’s just it.

Rational argument rarely convinces those who believe they have discovered a good stick and BJP president, Venkaiah Naidu, has promised the nation that he is ‘still gathering facts’ on the issue, presumably to make that stick even better to beat with. However, in the interests of saner politics, the BJP would be advised to avoid chasing chimeras and stick to the more relevant issues at hand.