Mayawati, thank you for allowing us in

I don’t understand the fuss around Mayawati’s humungous Rs 1000-note mala. Is it because she is anti-Congress that the television channels have gone berserk? Maybe.
The lady is someone who has fought her way up through hardships. Such people along the way build up a sea of slights- real and imagined- so powerful that when they finally get power, they go completely insane in their quest to ‘up yours’ everybody.
But the moot question still remains one of whether the mala was as big a shocker as TV channels are claiming it to be.
Now this lady has spent over 2 billion dollars making monuments to who was at the end of the day a frustrated lost politician by the name Kanshiram. The case is in the Supreme Court but justice would be if people – and mind you they should be Dalits since they have gone most hungry in Maya’s reign- come forward in hordes armed with pickaxes and demolish each one of these monuments, parks and statues. Has that happened? No.

Praful Patel’s name is being thrown about as one of the bidders for the two new quarter-billion dollar IPL teams that are expected to join the IPL circus next year. Have their been any protests? Even despite the fact that his constituency Gondia in Maharashtra is one of the most acute hit by misery and is in the middle of the natural menace of drought and man-made menace of Maoism.

Kripashankar Singh apparently has two Pan Cards. There were stories of how some sundry police constable in Navi Mumbai has the power of attorney of several houses he owns in the city. These are not secrets I’m telling you. Just rehashing stories that have appeared in newspapers like Mumbai Mirror, Times of India, and Asian Age etc. Is Kripashankar Singh hauled over the coals? No. Last I know he has made his chair as Mumbai Congress head even more powerful thanks to the successful visits of Sonia and Rahul to the city.

Senior journalist MJ Akbar once wrote a fabulous cover page story in the Covert magazine headlined ‘The fabulous wealth of Pwar saheb’. Did it make one bit of a difference to Pawar? Did the people of Maharashtra burn his effigies or ensure that he lost his deposit? Not that I know of. From what I hear, Pawar is enjoying the ‘fully made to order but don’t tell the public’ tournament of cricket called IPL. Price rise? I’m sorry but that is surely not Pawar saheb’s main area of concern at this point of time.

Then there are the Pramod Mahajans, Mulayam Singh Yadavs, Jayalalithas, Karunanidhis. What has happened to them? Nothing much except that they are slowly moving into the zone of political legends once reserved for the saintly likes of Gandhi, Sardar, Babasaheb Ambedkar and JP.

I can give you a hundred more such examples. Madhu Koda, Shibu Soren and the likes. But what difference does it make.

So let us not waste a lot of time with Maya’s mala. Let us collectively promise ourselves that we will not be shocked by whatever expose’ any element of the media comes up with.
Corruption no longer shocks us. For any politician it is just a speed-breaker on the road, never the end of the journey.

Till then let us enjoy the magnificent spectacle of Mayawati trying to pull off a Jean Bedel Bokasa not in the impoverished lawless governance-neutral Central African Republic but in the world’s largest, most populous, wiaitng-in-line-to-be-superpower India.

No woman has ever tried anything this spectacular anywhere in the world ever I believe. Let us just be grateful we are part of the world that Mayawati chose to show up in. Probably no one deserves a Bharat Rtana more at this point of time that the lady of Lucknow.