WHERE MONEY TALKS
It’s an intolerable insult. A crore of rupees was offered for the head of a mere (black, to quote the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tarun Vijay) “Madrassi”, albeit chief minister of Kerala. Yet West Bengal’s first woman chief minister, an international player, is rated a measly ~11 lakh. It’s worse than the sop of a solitary Black Cat while political nobodies strut around surrounded by a dozen sinister-looking, gun-toting commandos. Can any other Indian politician snub a foreign prime minister as Mamata Banerjee did again last week? Can even Narendra Modi, leave alone Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan, rock the electoral boat in another country?
Not content with lynching Africans, persecuting North-easterners, and sitting on the ~10,469.01 crore owed to Bengal for several centrally sponsored programmes, cow belt activists are trying to sell Didi cheap. Jaya Bachchan rightly accused Modi of devaluing women. The daughter of a Bengali newspaper reporter who knew the price of everything might not otherwise have represented Mulayam Singh Yadav’s (or is it Akhilesh Yadav’s?) Samajwadi Party in the august retirement home of the Rajya Sabha. “You can protect cows, but atrocities against women continue!” she thundered at the government. She knew from Sharad Pawar that Veer Savarkar, the Hindutva guru, recommended the “destruction” of cows past their milching years as “a human or national dharma”.
The authorities are unhelpful. The animal husbandry people won’t entertain Jayadi’s charge that cows are treated better than women. The Human Rights Commission murmurs that with 940 females per 1,000 males in the 2011 Census, women may now have ceased to be a minority. The Centre for Self-employed Women absurdly regards chief ministers as employed by the people. The Centre for Equality and Inclusion pleads pressure from the Men’s Rights Movement to protect husbands, sons and brothers from exploitation by women.
A Trinamool knight errant — was it Saugata Roy or Derek O’Brien? — added fuel to fire by trying to placate her by explaining that Yogesh Varshney and his Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha are of no consequence. Didi needn’t feel neglected. Backed by wealthy Calcutta businessmen, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which promised a crore for Vijayan’s head, would have given ~100 crore for hers. That piled insult on injury. Why didn’t it then? No wonder Tapan Kumar Sen, the Marxist member of Parliament, wonders if a new heads-I-win industry is emerging. Nurur Rahman Barkati, the red-bearded imam of Calcutta’s Tipu Sultan Shahi Mosque, demonstrates it is. Notorious for fatwas against Modi and Salman Rushdie, Barkati promptly counter-offered to pay ~22 lakh for Varshney’s head.
Of course, the RSS quickly distanced itself from Kundan Chandrawat, Ujjain’s RSS mahanagar prachar pramukh, who promised a crore for Vijayan’s murder. One of Modi’s junior ministers condemned Varshney. But the 12th century English king, Henry II, who is believed to have exclaimed, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest”, didn’t actually order the murder that raised Thomas Becket to sainthood. It is interesting to speculate what the highly politicised prelate might have achieved if the death threat had only been made but not carried out. Perhaps not much, for Becket’s position depended on royal patronage, not on currying favour with voters, who are impressed by politicians masquerading as martyrs.
That’s how Lenin scored. The two shots that only wounded him in 1918 sanctioned a wave of brutal reprisals against political rivals and firmly established Bolshevik supremacy. Although world leaders from Vladimir Putin to Barack Obama condemned the killing of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, in 2016, at least one conspiracy theory suggests the murder was staged to keep West Asia on the boil. Predictably, there were sceptical whispers in 1970 when a mysterious gunman’s shot only grazed Jyoti Basu’s finger (killing a Communist Party of India-Marxist worker instead) but proved a shot in the arm for Bengal’s floundering Marxists.
The unending drama of Banerjee’s excitingly narrow escapes is as tantalising as crying wolf. For a long time the red rag round her head recalled the Marxist goons who allegedly tried to bash it in. More recently, she screamed of a military coup and another murderous conspiracy. Questioners at her rallies or even TV interviews are suspected of deadly intent. Now, with signs of the BJP rising in Bengal, Varshney’s timely intervention gives her a chance to lash out, which is what she does best. But he needn’t have been such a skinflint. He should have offered vastly more than ~11 lakh. That would have saved Didi’s izzat and earned her eternal gratitude without any fear of the bounty ever being claimed.