THE FATUITY IN CO-OPTING LEGACIES

Despite huge differences in their métiers and moorings, Rahul Gandhi used some tools that Jayaprakash Narayan had deployed half a century ago. Borrowing Karpoori Thakur’s title didn’t help either

- SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU

HE Bihar assembly result has spawned serious commentary, a slippery gradation of bright-to-dull analyses, and half-serious conspiracy theories. There is little need to revisit them or add a dead layer of another perspective.

However, for someone who viewed the polls from a distance, there was a hazy historical comparison forming at times on the horizon. The comparative picture was also dissolving as swiftly as it was getting formed. Perhaps because it had weak legs of believability, and perhaps it was anathema to put an already-canonised figure next to a struggling revolutionary. But, like a recurring dream and an obsessive thought, it kept persisting through the few months of the poll season. It constantly triggered the question if it can really be the way one is trying to read it, or if it isan embarrassing misread.

As events unfolded, the picture that was throwing itself up was of Rahul Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan. The question floating around was if Rahul was trying to be a JP in the buildup to the Bihar polls. Was that the final symbolism and weapon he was trying to unleash against the NDA regime?

JP had created a movement against Rahul’s grandmother Indira Gandhi, and the themes he had worked on then are largely the ones Rahul has been trying to make a success of his utter un-success now. JP, too, had been as fabulously unsuccessful as a political leader—that is, until he had embarked on a revolutionary project in the mid1970s. JP had walked out of party politics in the 1950s. However, one should hasten to clarify that there is a Himalayan difference between JP and Rahul’s political failures, confusions, and anarchic instincts.