Will the 100% Real Real PM stand up puhleez?

Now, as I said, this is a question that has flummoxed most of us and, in fact, when they ran one of those sample surveys the other day they discovered that 1 per cent of Indians believes that their real prime minister is A.B. Vajpayee, because it is he who appears to address the nation from the Red Fort every Independence Day; another 1 per cent believes that the real prime minister is L.K. Advani, because it is he who got to eat all those congratulatory sweets on the day he was named deputy prime minister, and the rest of the 98 per cent answered very truthfully that they didn’t know who it was.

This is a dangerous situation. I mean here we are, the world’s largest democracy and all, and we still do not know who our REAL prime minister is.

I hate to give you something more to worry about, apart from the children’s school fees and the national drought, but maybe we do not have one REAL prime minister. Maybe we just have two half-prime ministers yoked together by circumstance. You can either worry yourself silly over what this means for the nation or you could — like I do — look at it as a bargain, one of those buy-one-shirt-get-and-another-free kind of offers.

To reassure you further, I’ll try and address your anxieties in a reader-friendly question-answer format:

How do two half-prime ministers arrive at one REAL decision?

This is a well-established procedure. They don’t. They don’t arrive at a REAL decision, that is. Instead, they come up with two half-decisions, add them together and divide the sum by two.

Like one of them will decide that infiltration on the border is down and the other will decide that infiltration is up and Nirupama Rao will be instructed at the MEA briefing that evening to say that ‘‘Infiltration is coming down but, contrary to international opinion, it is also going up.’’

Or, one will say Narendra Modi is a great chief minister and the other will say that Narendra Modi is a bad egg, and they will both agree that Narendra Modi is a bad egg who is a great chief minister and that — there’s no question about it — he should stay on as chief minister.

But what if the two half-prime ministers end up having one REAL argument?

Now that’s a tricky question and there have, I must admit, been some tense moments, with journalists friendly to one half-prime minister putting out stories to embarrass the other half-prime minister and vice versa.

However, it has been noticed that most intractable disputes that have arisen between our two half-prime ministers have been solved by Vajpayee ringing up Mrs Advani to ask her what she is cooking for lunch. If it happens to be kichdi, prepared Sindhi style with plenty of cashew nuts in them, and jalebis and rasmalai for dessert, there is every chance that the dispute would be solved aimicably. Because Vajpayee would just invite himself to Advani’s for lunch, all irritants forgotten.

But how do we know that these two half-prime ministers are really two half-prime ministers and that we do not have two fully unreal half-prime ministers at the helm?

We don’t. But to get the right answer, put this question to RSS sarsanghchalak K. Sudarshan, whom some suspect is the REAL prime minister of the country.