The ruling party is fond of trappings of power
NK SINGH
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi
Vijayan visited Bhopal last week to attend a party programme and a felicitation
organised by the local Malayali community. MP does not have direct connectivity
with Kerala. The trains passing through Bhopal take 40 hours to reach
Trivandrum.The Kerala CM took a commercial flight, spending enroute a night in
Mumbai. The 71-year-old communist leader
had to get up at 3 am to board the flight to Bhopal. He spent the day attending
programmes and then quietly caught the night flight to New Delhi.He did not
want to waste public funds on a chartered plane.
Another CPM chief
minister, Manik
Sarkar of Tripura, has become a legend in his lifetime due to his simple
lifestyle. Chief Minister of Tripura for past 19 years, Sarkar donates his entire
salary to the organisation and gets in return a monthly ‘subsistence allowance’
of Rs 5,000. He does not own a house or a car. His bank balance is less than Rs
10,500. His wife, a retired government employee, is prohibited from using his
official vehicle. She goes around Agartala, the state capital, in a
rickshaw.
News
about a chief minister taking a service flight or his wife travelling in an
auto touches a raw nerve in Madhya Pradesh. Can one imagine such a thing
happening here! Chief Ministers of the State have always had a special fascinationfor their fleet of jets and helicopters. When the Congress was in power, the
BJP would criticise it for wastage of public funds and when the BJP comes to
power it is vice versa. The State owns a plane and two helicopters and process has started for
wet-leasing a second jet. When there is shortage of plane, it often resorts to
hiring chartered flights to fly its VIPs. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan,
during his Opposition days, was known as “pav-pav wale bhaiya”, a sobriquet he
earned for his long foot marches traversing the countryside. Now, like all his
predecessors, he travels by road only if bad weather prevents air journey. He prefers
to fly even to Vidisha, an hour’s drive from Bhopal.
Trappings of power have little to do
with ideological orientation. Marxist Jyoti Basu was known for his bourgeois
life style. Kushabhau Thakre, the man who built BJP from a stretch
in MP, was known for his Spartan lifestyle. He used to live in a small room, dilapidated
but sparklingly clean, that opened on a noisy street in Bhopal. That small room
in Peergate area also served as his bedroom, office, visitor’s room, dining
room and guest room. The furniture was a wooden cot in one corner, a few chairs
and an earthen pitcher (ghada) for drinking water. He used to share a
table fan with his neighbour, Kailash Sarang, the office secretary, whose
family would use it whenever Thakre did not need it. I would often be invited
for lunch in that room. Food, a very simple affair, came in a thali from
Sarang’s house. This was the life style of a man who could make or unmake a
chief minister.
Many
may argue that Thakrey was essentially an organisation man and the office of a
chief minister has its own demands and pressures. But BJP also had had its
share of chief ministers who were free from trappings of power. Monohar Parrikar’s preferred mode of
transport for reaching Goa Vidhan Sabha, when he was the State’s chief
minister, was a bicycle. It was not a photo op for him.
(In MP Ministers would ride a bicycle to their office to protest against fuel
price hike, get photographed and then forget all about it.) Goanese could often
see their IITian chief minister boarding a bus or travelling in an auto
rickshaw. A photograph of Parrikar standing in a queue at wedding reception of
a friend’s son at Pune had gone viral soon after he took over as country’s
defence minister two years ago.
Originally published in my column, Powers That Be, in DB Post of 18 December 2016
(Emaiil: nksexpress@gmail.com ; Tweeter handle: @nksexpress.)
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