The Resident Idiot returns with the Communist Pamphlet Part 2. In Part 1 his heart rending appeal was to the UPA to adopt egalitarian policies, etc. The fascist supporter of neoliberal, free market policies that I am, I called his pamphlet a joke.

The Resident Idiot is really angry. I mean, he’s anyway angry in the way only Communists can be angry. You see, Commies, especially the Indic variety who are still stuck with concepts of a bloody revolution are perpetually angry because the poor people have so much to suffer. The Resident Idiot has definitely internalized this anger, it always remains with him. But the anger he reflects in this pamphlet is different. And it makes him seek new friends never mind their hoary pasts or character.

So the Bandit of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav has endeared himself to the Resident Idiot. The Resident Idiot goes on Operation Lalu Entebbe. He maligns everybody who dared call Lalu bad. This vilification runs to several paragraphs.

1. …the RJD fielded some 40 ‘bad’ candidates at the instance of his two brothers-in-law (Sadhu and Subhash Yadav).
2. it is nevertheless creditable for Lalu Prasad to have retained a good chunk of his loyal support-base — despite the forces arrayed against him. These were formidable. Nearly every party opposed him. A good chunk of the bureaucracy, itself upper-caste, loathes Prasad’s politics.

Why does the bureaucracy loathe Prasad’s politics? The reason is left unexplained. Conveniently. Because the point the RI wants to drive home is this: because the bureaucracy is upper-caste, it loathes his politics! Not for any other reason. 90% of RJD’s candidates are criminals. And putting the word “bad” in quotes is suggestive, isn’t it? Besides, Sadhu and Subhash Yadav are themselves criminal sheeters. Now comes an interesting contrast. Earlier in the article, the RI says this about Paswan’s candidates:

…without Paswan’s 29 seats, comprised mainly of goons and bahubalis.

So, only Paswan has fielded goons while some RJD candidates were allegedly bad. But the Resident Idiot is not content. He slams the media.

The media ran a hate campaign against him, ridiculing him as an inveterate populist and a Mandalite to be written off.

Next in his line of fire is the Election Commission, which set a record of sorts by largely streamlining the conduct of elections in a rogue state like Bihar.

And even the Election Commission passed unreasonable remarks against Prasad. (For instance, it said the Banerjee report on Godhra shouldn’t even be referred to in the election campaign.) EC officials privately told some journalists they were ‘fixing’ Prasad!

Point: the Banerjee report was prepared in a hurry and is still controversial. The motive behind the report is no secret and no person with average intelligence will take it seriously. Moreover, the Congress itself had doubts about its credibility; while it didn’t take a public stand against the report for fear of hurting its valuable RJD ally, it didn’t endorse it either. Notice the marked difference between the Congress’ approach to the Banerjee report and the 1984 riots report which is still not made public. The little mischievous line about EC officials’ “words on fixing Lalu?” Standard journalistic technique. When you want to make an unverifiable claim and pass it off as truth, use language like, “as X Minister told a journalist privately.” Well, lying is nothing new to Bidwai.

But here is the clincher, one that affirms Bidwai’s new found intimacy with Lalu:

Prasad may have earned the hatred of the savarna media and anti-Mandal intelligentsia, but his politics is legitimate and relevant for many to whom he lent his voice or helped gain self-respect.

Self-respect? Have you read this, Mr. Resident Idiot?

I could go on about how the prosecution, directly controlled by the government of Bihar, a family enterprise of Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi for the last 15 years, has miserably failed to bring the guilty men of Bhagalpur to justice. How nearly two-thirds of the 700 cases filed after the riots in Bhagalpur were never pursued in the special courts that were set up. How files have simply disappeared. How the Lalu-Rabri regime has exerted for 15 years to exonerate the guilty because they were Yadavs. And how activist champions of secularism have conveniently ignored the fact that only 16 people have been sent to jail till now for the death of more than a thousand men, women and children.

You call this gaining self-respect? Is self-respect equal to treading on other people’s lives and dignity? No. The Resident Idiot is fixated on the idea of vengeance. The supposed large-scale historical atrocities meted out by the upper castes have to be corrected. What better way than this? Today the Yadavs, in their new found “self-respect” will tread roughshod over weaker sections, and tomorrow, when people below the Yadavs acquire political power, what is the guarantee that they won’t seek revenge?

Now we get the gist of the Resident Idiot’s defence of Lalu: anyone who calls Lalu bad is himself bad. None is spared: the Congress, Paswan, the media, the Election Commission and me.

This pamphlet is also revealing in another aspect. If anyone has followed the Resident Idiot’s articles, they might notice a pattern. When the NDA was in power, the RI took pains to conceal his ideological orientation and used neutral sounding langauge: hate-America, hate neoliberal policies, more power to the workers, etc. He didn’t explicitly call for a return to Leftism. His tone has changed progressively after the 2004 polls. He now calls for Left-Centre policies, and soon enough, he’ll call for an explicitly “Left-oriented” policy.

Going by the Budget, it doesn’t seem fully aware of the nature of its mandate. Despite some of its welcome schemes, the Budget by and large perpetuates neoliberal ‘free-market’ policies.
…by attracting cadres through programmes and policies that are relevant to the broad masses of plebeian classes and working people [...]To be true to its mandate, the UPA must reflect both a Left-of-Centre ‘progressive’ orientation…

The Congress is now secure that the Left is only a barking dog (in the Left’s own words). Because whatever they do, they’ll never withdraw support to the UPA because that’ll possibly mean a return of their arch-rivals–the NDA–to power. The desperation shows in Bidwai.