Some years ago, I was required to regularly call on the then treasurer of the Congress, Sitaram Kesri. He invariably received me while eating his morning meal: garlic pearls spoon-fed to him in dollops of honey. His concept of the truth reflects his diet: cancel the bitterness of garlic with the sweetness of honey, so that no one knows what you mean.Sonia Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee are only the last in a long list of victims of his deception. He promised in an agreement brokered at 10 Janpath to make Mamata chairperson of the West Bengal Congress Election Committee and dissolve the existing Pradesh Election Committee. Within hours, he dropped the latter clause and within days amended "Election Committee" to read "Campaign Committee", thus reducing Mamata from the arbiter of the party's destiny in West Bengal to a mere factotum of the high command. Kesri likes his Congressmen like his pomeranians: on all fours.He became party president through a palace coup. His predecessor, P.V. Narasimha Rao, taken in by Kesri's penchant for throwing his Gandhi topi at Rao's feet (prior to placing his head where the topi had landed), nominated Kesri his successor. Kesri promptly stabbed his benefactor in the back and called it a chamatkar - miracle. Subsequently, Kesri got himself confirmed as president through an exquisitely fraudulent election. In state after state, those who might have voted against him were dispensed with by the simple expedient of getting them summarily disenfranchised (details from Vazhapadi Ramamurthy).Between the two of them, Rao and Kesri have taken but six years to shatter a party it took 106 years to build. They could not have been more different one to the other. Rao is educated, urbane, a linguist with books to his name, something of a statesman, something of a philosopher. Kesri is boorish, uncouth, uncultivated, so proud of his problems with reading and writing that the Congress could well coin as its key slogan for the coming elections: "Garv se kaho hum anpad hain (Proclaim with pride that thou art unlettered)." Yet, neither the one's sageness nor the other's machinations have done anything for the party but hurry it to its doom. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}The last time I spoke to Kesri (not knowing that I would not be encountering him again, thank God), he said if the party were defeated, he would be blamed ("Kahenge Kesri ka kasur hai," neatly put) but if it won - pointing at me but really gesturing through me to 10 Janpath - "the credit will be yours".He has a startling habit of switching from Hindi to English whenever he wishes to go profound. When all those years ago I had to call on him regularly, I discovered he invited me to watch him eat his brunch (a spectacle calculated, as P.G. Wodehouse may have said, to ending the myth of man as nature's last word) because that gave him the time to give me the message he thought I would transmit to Rajiv Gandhi.The message was only one, couched in aphoristic Angrezi and repeated ad nauseam: "Society se compromise kijiye" (pronounced "Shoshaiyati se compromije kijiye"). It took me a while to work out this gibberish. What he meant was: forget the man, just look to his caste. He would triumphantly produce the proof of his case, saying Gandhiji knew how to "compromise" with "society" but not the Nehru-Gandhis. Consider, he would say, the composition of the Congress Working Committee in the Mahatma's day: not a single Thakur member. Consider what has happened since: Ram Subhag Singh, V.P. Singh, Arjun Singh - all betrayers. Keeping Kshatriyas out is, apparently, "compromising" with "society"; bringing them in is not to understand India. Recently, I was bemused to find Kesri instructing a hapless Ajit Jogi, additional spokesman of the Congress, in the mysteries of "shoshaiyati" and "compromije". Nothing has changed in all these years.That pet phrase has, however, now taken second place to Kesri's most recent nostrum. To those who call on him, he solemnly says in English: "I common man. I have common sense. I believe common law. I make commonwealth." If you beam at this nifty turn of phrase, you are elevated to high office; if you look a little bewildered, you end up with the Trinamool Congress. It is a pity he is never going to be prime minister. For if you giggled at H.D. Deve Gowda, you would have rolled around in the aisles at Kesri. It would have been hilarious watching the face of his Ruritanian counterpart as Kesri warmed to his theme of "compromising with society". And rib-ticklingly funny to study the audiences in former British colonies as they heard him expound his concept of the "commonwealth".You, alas, are going to miss out on a Kesri premiership; I have been a ringside witness to his management of the party. He brought down a government because of the Jain Commission's report - without caring to inform himself of what the report says. His copy of the report is still with me, the 17 thick volumes innocent of even Kesri's fingerprints. I saw him receive the report's virgin copy. His eyes widened, not at the bulk of 5,000 pages of Rajasthani English but at the thought that the report was even longer than Arjun Singh's half-page letters.Naturally, I am off to keep Mamata company. She is the opposite of Kesri: he is 83; she 38. As for where to put Kesri to grass after this election, I've a suggestion: he's the right age to be chairman of Prasar Bharati.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Jan 5, 1998--- ENDS ---
