Baba Bharti's Fear Comes True in the RSS's Washing Machine Durbar |
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Large-scale political defection is a uniquely Indian institution. Other democracies see the occasional crossing of the floor; India has perfected the wholesale migration of legislators. But not all defections are the same. Some betray a party, some betray a leader. These are the ordinary sins of politics, as old as politics itself. The third kind is different. It betrays neither a party nor a leader but something far more fragile: the public’s trust. And that is the kind of defection that now defines our era.
To understand what is at stake, remember Sudarshan’s immortal short story, ‘Haar Ki Jeet’. Baba Bharti, a saintly man, owns a magnificent horse, Sultan. The bandit Kharag Singh wants it desperately. So disguised as a crippled beggar, he pleads for a ride. But the moment Baba Bharti helps him onto the saddle, he gallops away, snatching the horse away. Baba Bharti runs after him. Not for horse, but with a request: take the horse, but tell no one how you took it. “If people hear of this,” he says, “they will stop trusting the poor and the helpless. No one will ever again stop to help a cripple by the roadside.”
Sudarshan’s insight was profound. The real theft was not of the horse. The real theft would have been of trust, of the social instinct that makes a stranger stop to help a beggar. Baba Bharti could bear the loss of Sultan; he could not bear a world in which compassion itself becomes suspect. Even the bandit understood this and returns the horse in the night.
But our political defectors have understood nothing of the sort. Consider the breed of defection represented by a Jyotiraditya Scindia or a Saayoni Ghosh. They were the most articulate defenders of secularism and constitutional values in public. And then they walked over to the other side, without a pause or a pang, into the very ideological formation they had spent a lifetime denouncing.
No explanation is offered. No apology is tendered to the supporters, who reposed their faith in them, who argued for them in mohallas and drawing rooms, who fought elections in their name, who believed that their words........