Condemnable

To be sure,Mayawatis own rhetoric has been sorely lacking in grace. At a rally in Gorakhpur last Monday,she called a woman who tried to wade her way through the crowd to meet her,the Oppositions paltu kutta. Sumitra Devi,a resident of Bharwalia village,as this newspaper found out,had only been trying to draw her chief ministers attention to the polices refusal to lodge an FIR in the case of her dead son. Yet,by referring to Mayawatis sanskar a term heavy with feudal pretension and conceit that has no place in a democracy Jaiswal has countered the UP chief ministers ungainly use of words with what can only be termed as a crude,casteist offensive. In the process,he provides valuable ammunition to critics of his party who insist that the Congress has only reluctantly and superficially acknowledged the Mandal revolution that radically unsettled and overturned political equations in UP and in the Hindi heartland in the 1990s.

Weve seen political rhetoric plunge during election campaigns. In the just concluded elections in Punjab,we heard macho threats,barely veiled,being exchanged between the rivals for power. But the UP fracas underlines that the Grand Old Party would do well to learn to appear combative without sounding like a relic from an earlier age. Jaiswal should apologise or be instructed by his bosses to do so.