The Art of Political Scavenging

Do vultures have claws?

Yes. They have beaks and feathers as well.

They also have brains.

Unlike the two-legged scavengers we have been seeing at the door step of a dead soldier in Delhi yesterday and Bhiwani today.

They simply don’t go away.

They want to be seen scavenging. That is the only skill they have. Only, they call it politics. They play it well.

Remember that girl, Nirbhaya, who was gang-raped by thugs whose hanging was stayed by the judiciary with as much alacrity it displayed to hang terrorists?

After Nirbhaya died, there was a public protest in Delhi. The Delhi Police beat up the protesters, used lathis against women and girls to disperse them.

The home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, defended the police action.

Shinde also said he didn’t see the need to meet the protesters himself.

Four years later, the scene replayed itself in Delhi with a different subject – a former jawan who took his own life because he was not getting OROP money.

The Delhi Police acted without thought or compunction against those protesting the suicide.

For good measure, they also manhandled and detained the family members of the dead jawan.

The home minister, Rajnath Singh, defended the police action.

Singh also did not see the need to meet the protesters himself.

Rahul Gandhi was on protest too. He must have thought it funny, being detained inside a police station for most of the day and evening.

I didn’t hear him say precisely why he was protesting. I only heard him shouting at the policemen.

I did notice the eternal smirk on his face.

The smirk is of 2012 vintage, when he did not join the Nirbhaya protest at India Gate in Delhi.

All he thought fit to do was to meet a small group of protesters briefly along with his mother Sonia Gandhi.

His party was in power then, not now. That perhaps explains the selective protest.

Arvind Kejriwal was not even chief minister in 2012. He was an aspirant. So he joined the protest, flayed the ruling Congress and after elections, formed a government in coalition with that party.

In 2015, as chief minister, he brushed off all protests and decided to provide eligible state assistance to Nirbhaya’s juvenile rapist out of jail.

In 2016, he found himself unable to leave the closed gates of a Delhi hospital without seeing the dead jawan. No other reason comes to mind other than that he relished another confrontation with the Delhi Police.

Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi select the protests they wish to support.

Those in government, whether of the BJP or Congress or anyone else, select the protests they wish to control.

The Congress paid a price for such foolishness.

The current dispensation is yet to begin listing its acts of foolishness.

1.Like culture minister Mahesh Sharma being allowed to visit the home of the murderer of Akhlaq of Dadri, while Rahul and Kejri couldn’t see a dead soldier.

2.Like the police finding no fault with that murderer’s family draping the corpse with the national flag, while the government defended the police roughing up the dead soldier’s family .

3.Like minister VK Singh, who once headed the army, tactlessly questioning the motive behind the ex-jawan’s suicide, while he was embarrassingly quiet on whether OROP was skewed more in favour of officers.