Sleep on the House!

Deve Gowda: Introspecting?

Raju Korti
Gaffes and bloopers apart, I must admit that I am developing a soft corner for Rahul Gandhi these days. Nothing seems to be going right for the young man who seems to have struck a lean patch.
After his party’s disastrous showing in the recent elections, he was caught (apparently) snoozing in the Lok Sabha during a fierce debate on price rise. The rival BJP was quick on the uptake to point out that this was perfectly in sync with what his party had been doing on the issue for the past few decades. Political sparring aside, I am prepared to give Rahul the much needed benefit of doubt for several reasons.
First, he is not the only elected representative to have been stealing those forty winks in the august House, although that is not an argument on which I will plead his case. But then, what is good for the goose is good for the gander as well.
I am also pliable to the view that at his impressionable age, Rahul was actually reflecting or introspecting – as is usually the line of defence -- on what was happening around him though he had nothing substantive to say on the issue. This is, of course, given that Rahul can actually reflect or introspect.
There is also considerable beef in the belief that Rahul’s diffidence could also stem from the basic fact that things like price rise don’t affect him at all. Price rise doesn’t hit the very rich or very poor. The country’s famed middle class is the sole claimant to that misfortune.
Those who poke fun at his penchant for foot-in-the-mouth, forget that they are actually belittling their own contention that it is better he keeps mum than make a laughing stock of himself. Rahul has regaled the countrymen for a long time and if it has occurred to his occasional good sense that he must give politics-weary people some respite, you cannot fault him there. If one is kind enough to give Devil his due, why deprive poor Rahul of that largesse?
I see an unassailable logic in the Congressmen’s cantilevered support of Rahul that a person of the integrity of Atal Behari Vajpayee – no less – was found catnapping often in the Parliament. “When Vajpayee does that, it is introspection, if Rahul does it, it is sleeping. How fair is that?” Somebody should have reminded the wailing partymen of Sohrab Modi’s evergreen dialogue from Dilip Kumar’s Yehudi “Tumhara khoon khoon, hamara khoon paani?”  (Your blood is blood and ours water?), a satirical way of protesting discrimination.
The man who actually institutionalized sleeping inside the Parliament and gave it a cult status was former Prime Minister Deve Gowda. In fact, so sleep-deprived did he look that you would find it hard to believe that the man could ever be awake. All those Raagi (millet) balls that he ate to keep himself fit and active seemed to add up to nothing though he mentioned this to reporters in his sleep- induced heavy voice in (then) Bangalore during his PM stint. The only time that one saw him very animated and charged was when he stood up to reply to the no-confidence motion against his poorly stitched coalition government. Gowda lost the debate and his government fell – the same way his head flopped and fell during the parliamentary sessions. Gowda will go down in the country’s history as probably the only leader who forty-winked his way through his tenure with the aplomb that he was known to.
From time to time elected representatives cutting across party lines have been caught by candid (and insensitive!) cameras sleeping their way through parliamentary debates. It has reached a stage where nobody gives a damn about it anymore. The issue was never a big deal before the sessions of the Parliament were televised since the only pictures that people got to see were of unruly members creating a ruckus inside or the Prime Minister or Speaker making a point. It didn’t occur to the lens men then that an elected representative caught napping made for a newsworthy picture.
It is hard to believe that elected representatives kept their eyes and ears open all through their tenure in the period between 1950 and1990. Remember the China war fiasco in 1962 when the entire government was caught napping and day-dreaming of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai even as the Chinese almost trampled our territory in Arunachal. Perhaps the then Defence Minister VK Krishna Menon mistook it for Hindi-Chini Bye Bye.
All the hue and cry about the ministers in the Narendra Modi Cabinet looking bleary-eyed because of lack of sufficient sleep may be making headlines for right or wrong reasons but what happened during the earlier years when parliamentary reporting was straight-jacketed and never went beyond its accepted realms? Although I have cited just one but concrete example, one still needs to close eyes and reflect!