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"If not Modi, who? Name ONE leader."
A veteran journalist, pro-BJP, popped that favourite question of late 2018/early 2019. He expected me to say RG, which he could then proceed to hoick over long-on.
I said: "Siddaramaiah."
Wish INC brass could see his reaction thereafter... https://twitter.com/kazhugan/status/1298074512852836352">https://twitter.com/kazhugan/...
A veteran journalist, pro-BJP, popped that favourite question of late 2018/early 2019. He expected me to say RG, which he could then proceed to hoick over long-on.
I said: "Siddaramaiah."
Wish INC brass could see his reaction thereafter... https://twitter.com/kazhugan/status/1298074512852836352">https://twitter.com/kazhugan/...
First laughter...he genuinely thought I was joking. Then a brief moment of incredulity, because it WAS a shock. Then silence, as he realised I was serious, and as he played over the scenario in his head. Being a chap from the south, he knew enough to stop laughing....
The only wonder is that something like this is not even considered an option by the Congress. Indeed, what& #39;s there not to like? Political vitality and nous, a genuine Bahujan social base, a record of people-sensitive administration during drought years, non-chauvinistic....
The one misstep was the Lingayat card, overplayed to the extent that it backfired. On the ground, if I read it right, he responded creatively to the drought by shoring up dairying. Farmers there got a handsome support price for milk, while Maharashtra next door was in distress.
The capacity to think like that comes from real, first-hand knowledge of what a small rural farmer& #39;s life is like. And of animal husbandry. His politics is not that of peddling a trophy caste-name, but part of a socialist gene that& #39;s the only thing that can revitalise the INC.
The Congress showed a dim recognition of the fact that it must look south for sustenance when RG chose Wayanad. But all the signs of circumscribed thinking and pessimism marked it. The south is not simply a refuge, a band-aid. It& #39;s a field it left fallow, and must till again.
A genuine site of politics, a whole zone hospitable to it in many ways. And the way to sow that seed is not merely for the & #39;first family& #39; to forage there -- which it might well do -- but to let a bonafide politician with a mass base to express that politics.
