A smile from South

May the 13, shone warm and benign. Earlier, it had been February-like: rambunctious, wet and cold. In the silent hours of that lovely Palampur morning, while savouring the avian symphony and the hard-arrived, shy summer’s virginal bliss, I was giving final touches to my ‘Ms Biology’ blog. But a cloud hung over my head. For, every now and then, the thought of Karnataka’s election results washed over me like a suspenseful wave. “What if?” This question rose and fell making it difficult to get my focus right.

The morn melted into forenoon. My eagerness was mounting. What were the initial trends, I was wondering but daring not to access the google news, or approach the darkly staring TV screen a finger-tap away, eager to break into its familiar bluster. Later when my wife broke the first news that the Congress was leading, a wry smile came over my face, only to be displaced by vague fears. “What if?” assuming myriad forms and shapes, resumed its assault. What if the lead slips? What if the margin is narrow, even if the lead holds on? Moreover, haven’t ‘they’ already and so brazenly sounded us out on Plan B being muscled in if they didn’t get the magical numbers?

When you have been through the darkness of melancholia for a protracted spell, an obstinate sense of disbelief takes hold of you; so when some ray of light sneaks into the dystopian abyss, your senses dismiss it as a mere hallucination at first. Therefore, late in the afternoon when the Congress’s emphatic win had become a foregone conclusion, I remained skeptical. “What if?”, like a ghost, wasn’t yet in the mood to quit. In half-belief when I phoned my kin to share the news, his first query was also a morose: “What if?”

Be that as it may, at the end of the day – to echo a telling comment by a wit – while Congress-mukt Bharat had to wait awhile, the South had become BJP-mukt!

But why am I being so audaciously political today? Am I a Congress acolyte? A double-faced hypocrite? Tweak my ears if you like, but since the present-day political discourse has turned into an Armageddon of sorts, therefore, shedding our play-safe status-quoist stances, we have to take sides, lest the NextGen curses us for compliant complacency, I thought.

“Rome never had more cause!”

To me the Congress win in Karnataka is not a simple matter of one party vanquishing another. This change of guard has many manifestations and implications. It is to my mind the defeat of so much that was getting ugly and sinister. It is the triumph over the demon called fascism whose tentacles were spreading menacingly far and wide; of “muhabbat” over the toxins of hatred; of multiculturalism, inclusivity and humility over dogma, bigotry, megalomania, cultism and hubris. It is a clap of joy for secularism, freedom and rights. It is a toast to Tagore’s dream of holding our heads high and keeping our minds without fear- fear of bulldozers, hate speeches and a lot more and much worse.

The Congress hasn’t always smelled of roses, I know. No political party does. But “we the people” can only hope that having won this hard-fought election, it provides a refreshingly new political narrative that serves as a beacon of light for a brighter modern India rid of the narrow domestic walls; where the clear stream of reason, amity and liberty flows merrily and unbidden. 

Our vibrant South has sent North a smile of change. Let’s welcome it and broaden it into a beaming grin.

*