Wanted to write this for a long time, but never found the patience. On the first day of my just-concluded vacation, I went around town with a couple of congresspeople. Both of them belong to “political dynasties”, with their fathers having being MLAs or MPs. The entire “session” threw up a number of insights. And before going around with them, I had told them that I used to be a member of the RSS and hence might not share their political views.
I’ll cut the story and just put the insights here:
– Understandably they couldn’t fathom why people are so opposed to dynastic politics. In fact, one of them went to the extent of saying that in this day and age, politicians have to be “born” and not “made”!!
– The land reforms act has led to corruption in politics! Apparently, earlier, politicians had enuff land holdings that they didn’t need to make any money from politics. Now after the act, the land is not enough to sustain the politician and his family and he thus looks to make money from politics!
– They also couldn’t understand how sonia gandhi can be a foreigner! And true congresspersons they were, they worshipped sonia. “She slogged her ass off for the last election and definitely deserved to be prime minister” (in response to my “why did you guys have to have that much of a drama in parliament? manmohan is any day better than sonia. i think everyone watching it on TV was hoping sonia wouldn’t become PM”).
= They were also not ready to believe that people don’t like sonia
– They didn’t mind bitching about other congresspeople. They were pretty open about their dislike for a few congresspeople and just hoped that they weren’t on the record!
– Taking this forward, they also bitched about some of their allies, notably the RJD! The feeling I got was that the congress is actually happy that Lalu lost in Bihar.
– They believed that playing the secular card would easily get them the minority votes (at least in Karnataka)
Many more insights were there but this is all i remember now, 3 weeks down the line.