Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: In October 1977, dislodged Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s short-sighted arrest was viewed as the Janata Party Government’s first major political blunder.
When she provoked the then Union Home Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, the stubborn Jaat leader decided to teach her a lesson. Despite Prime Minister Morarji Desai cautioning him against such a misadventure, Singh ensured that Indira was thrown behind bars, even if briefly.
But Singh did not realize that by getting Indira arrested, he had only played his limited role as per her own political script. He actually red-carpeted the road for her return to power. Out of a ‘vamp’ of the infamous Emergency era, Singh managed to restore her as a heroine!
Learning his lesson as the then Foreign Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, as the PM in the NDA-1 regime (1999-2004), carefully avoided taking any drastic action against the Gandhi dynasty, despite pleas from several leaders, including George Fernandes.
Another Gandhi in the wilderness, Rahul, has also been trying to follow his grandmother’s dog-eared script in a bid to return to power. Since 2004, he has been frantically attempting to incite PM Narendra Modi by launching vicious, personal attacks. But Modi is no Charan Singh.
Now, ejected from his ‘fiefdom’, former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah is also attempting to reboot his dynasty’s political business. Using ‘secular’ media friends he had been hosting over the years, he is dishing out sponsored ‘interviews’ left-right-and-center, seeking China’s help to restore “special status” of the state he fancies as his father’s property. He hopes this would be construed by the BJP as sedition and that the NDA-ii government could ‘oblige’ him with an arrest.
But, again, Modi is no Charan Singh. He is expected to let Farooq stew in his own juice! Some are demanding action against Farooq but no senior BJP leader has spoken up.
How do times change? And how adversities expose one’s true colors?
In the first week of August 2019, the same Farooq and his son Omar were claiming to be patriots, and abiding by the Constitution of India, when they met Modi, requesting him not to disturb the status quo in J&K. Within days, Home Minister Amit Shah scrapped the Article 370 and 35-A, with the likes of the Abdullahs and the Muftis safely under house arrest.
Now, like a headless chicken, these discredited leaders are frantically trying to restore their lost businesses. With the Abdullah Senior walking away with the ace, the ‘China card’, expect Mehbooba Mufti to also lob her own ‘bombshell’ in the political arena once she is out of ‘home quarantine’.
For now, however, Farooq Abdullah has put the patriotic Indian Muslims’ credibility in line. By inviting Chinese interference in India’s internal affairs, he has reminded everybody how the Slave Dynasty’s Sultan Ibrahim Lodi had invited Babar in 1525, and Mir Jafar stage-managed entry of the British Raj in 1757.
Farooq Abdullah has successfully enlisted himself in the ‘chequered’ list of global Quislings. Particularly at a time when India, and the world, are fighting against the global hegemony ambitions of a war-mongering China.
His ‘secular’ claims, and that he got his MBBS from Jaipur, that his son Omar and daughter Sarah married into Hindu families, have all come to naught.
For the various political parties he has been hobnobbing with for decades, he could now only be a political pariah.
The doctor did not read Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.
The Abdullahs were destined to go wrong. And they have!