Don't knock the Janata Dal. After all it is a political formation that has given this country more prime ministers than any other party, more entertainment hours than television and more mantras than the Rig Veda.For years it went on and on about how secular it was. Today, that very secularism has led it straight into the arms of the Sangh Parivar. For years, it screamed from roof tops about its social justice plank. Yet what was meant by this was soon discovered to be social justice for its netas and empty schools and ration shops for everyone else. For years, it beat its breast about its commitment to the Mandal Commission report. Today, its Mandal Messiah is in political oblivion, left painting pretty pictures.But make no mistake about it, the party had its moments. It produced the Gujral Doctrine and the Humble Farmer, it enabled Mulayam Singh Yadav to log more frequent flier miles than any other politician and provided Maneka Gandhi a national stage on which to campaign for the fundamental rights ofrabid stray dogs.The problem, I believe, is that we have not recognised the Janata Dal for what it is. All these years, we mistook it for a political party and thereby did it a grave injustice. May I therefore humbly suggest that we correct this impression forthwith. The truth is that the Janata Dal is not a political party but a biology lesson.We have all heard about the amoeba, the lowest form of life, but we haven't sufficiently recognised how closely the Janata Dal is related to this one-celled organism in the phylum Sarcodina, kingdom Protista. Like the amoeba, the Janata Dal is composed of a thin membrane (its leaders are notoriously thin-skinned and go into long sulks at the slightest of slights), a semi-rigid layer of ectoplasm, a jelly-like endoplasm and a nucleus in the shape of a wheel.The average size of the amoeba is 0.0025 mm. The average size of the Janata Dal is never more than a handful of Parliamentary seats. Like the amoeba, the Janata Dal has long survived in sewer water - thesewer water of politics in this case. It is also, like its forbear, known to thrive in unstable conditions and can easily enter into parasitic relationships with other political animals without a qualm.There has been a great deal of research done into the methods the amoeba adopts to transport itself. It does this, I believe, by extending some cytoplasm outward to form pseudopodia, or false feet. The Janata Dal too takes recourse to similar methods of locomotion. By extending some cytoplasm outward to form a pseudopodia, Sharad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan find themselves cheek-by-jowl with Samata Party's Nitish Kumar and George Fernandes in Bihar. Similarly, there is wily old J.H. Patel extending a pseudopodia in the direction of Lok Shakti's Ramakrishna Hedge on one day and holding on to his arm for television cameras in Delhi, the next.The digestive system of the amoeba is a fascinating process. Like every living thing, it lives to eat and eats to live. The Janata Dal in keeping with this tradition hassimilarly displayed strong capabilities of ingestion and excretion. At one point of time, Laloo Prasad Yadav's Janata Dal government digested huge quantities of stuff meant strictly for buffaloes, cows and chicken, with its specially designed digestive acids quickly transforming the ingested material into a certain liquidity that was then absorbed with such felicity by the party leadership's cytoplasm that even U.N. Biswas of the Central Bureau of Investigation could do very little about it.Yet, all said and done, it is the sex life of the amoeba that is truly worthy of political comment. It is well known that the single-celled amoeba demonstrates a simple method of asexual reproduction. After a process of growth, it divides into half by a process called fission, producing two smaller daughter cells. After a period of feeding, these two daughter cells will themselves divide in half. The Janata Dal too displays an identical promiscuity. How else could one Janata Dal produce 10 Dal formations in as manyyears, each of which promises to divide and sub-divide until kingdom come?But don't knock the amoeba. It may not be highly endowed with principles but it is likely to be around long after you and I are history. Certainly Indian politics has not seen the last of this particular life form.
