YOU ONLY GET THE POLITICIANS YOU DESERVE
I saw this on a website and i remember reading it in one of the dailies while in Delhi. Very interesting and quite well written too. But what is worrying is that we tolerated him for so long.
Says a lot about us too doesnt it??
Enjoy .
Vish
THE FALL & FALL & FALL OF A 'LEADER'
If one looked at Subash Ghisingh closely, gaunt, bare-boned, unsmiling and perpetually wrapped in the sartorially killing feather-jacket and tie combination, nobody could remotely imagine he was capable of such atrocious lies or flabbergasting flights of fancy.
A sample: Gautam Buddha was 18 feet tall and each of his ears weighed 10 kg.
Another sparkling gem: Earthquakes occur when gods angrily stomp in the heavens and so it’s essential to periodically get Ganesha drunk on tongba, the local beer.
Ghisingh, who’s just stepped down as the strongest, often meanest, power centre in the Darjeeling hills, lording over 20 lakh people for 20 miserable years, could well have been India’s own version of Papa ‘Doc’ Duvalier, the Haitian dictator of the 1950s who believed more in voodoo than vox pop and once got all black dogs killed in his country because someone told him Clement Barbot, his rival, had turned into one to avoid prosecution.
In the years since Ghisingh marched for Gorkhaland and got Bengal to submit to a settlement that was half way between independent state and autonomy, the Gorkha Hill Council, no dogs were killed in Darjeeling. Darjeeling went to the dogs instead.
"There was nothing to look forward to except Ghisingh’s bizarre take on life, history and religion," says Deepak Pradhan, a businessman in Darjeeling. "People initially didn’t complain because they were too busy putting together pieces of their shattered lives after the violence of the 1980s. Later, when they did, GNLF (Gorkha National Liberation Front) goons physically throttled protest voices." By the time Ghisingh finally relinquished power, all that the former soldier of the elite 8th Gorkha Regiment was left with was a legacy of eccentricities, a long list of corruption charges, horrifying tales of excesses and, as his cohorts say, a severe bout of diarrhoea.
The man who once unified the more than one crore Nepalese in India and had grand, if suspicious, visions of Greater Gorkhaland, a warriors’ swathe that would straddle Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Darjeeling, had by the end of his eventful but abject rule become a caricature of himself. He was his own mascot. The Ghisingh mystique had morphed into burlesque.
"Who said Durga has 10 hands," he would thunder during Darjeeling’s famous Dussehra festivities. "She has 18." The goddess metamorphosed, too, as artisans implanted extra limbs, the new ones clutching frightful weapons. At other times he harangued about evolution as hapless audiences feigned interest.
"The earth was formed on June 20," he said, without either care or concern for Darwin. "And in 15 years there won’t be any mosquitoes in the world." Not that he spared anthropology, theology, medicine and quantum physics.
"Some of us," he announced earnestly, "have come from Ukraine."
In more adventurous moods he would insist global warming happened because Shani had made the sun its home. The solution: Rubber plantation. When he got tired with flying rocks that became nations, he would take on medicine and ask people to clap their hands if they wanted to beat tuberculosis. But one of his most bizarre and fantastic notions revolved around a folk singer from Nepal called Ani Tshering Doma. "Three lakh restless spirits have found peace after hearing her spiritual songs," he told a gathering once.
"That’s what it became finally," says Roshan Giri, general secretary of the rival Gorkha Janmukti Morcha. "Our hills became a fool’s paradise."
There was no talk of poverty alleviation, unemployment, corruption and the dying economy." Another GJM leader, H B Chettri, sees this as the beginning of the end of Ghisingh and his GNLF. "There’s finally light in the dark mountains," he says. A GNLF man, who changed sides timing it with the changing mood, said it was Ghisingh’s pride that did him in. "Just like the foolish emperor and his new clothes, our leader was blinded by power. And he had no one with courage to advise him better." It’s almost certain Ghisingh’s maddening run of the hills is over. The 72-year-old, who’s still not dared to return to his land, may have given the Nepalese identity, unity and dreams of Gorkhaland, but there’s little hope for himself. He could get back to writing—he’s written 21 novels, many distinctly titillating and, pen an autobiography that could be called Nothing Hill.
Unless, of course, Durga with her 18 hands comes to his rescue or a flying stone miraculously turns into a kingdom he can rule, naming it ‘Ghisinghland’.
