As the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate zips through several constituencies on Friday, TV reporters thrust their mike into her face. Kiran ji, please Kiran ji, they exhort her to say something; anything. But Bedi has taken a vow: Main Chupp Rahungi.
It is the season of the cold virus; throat infections are common and Bedi doesn’t go around wearing a muffler. So, she is not immune to ailments. But throat infections do not last forever; sooner or later she will have to break her silence.
Otherwise, people will continue to talk. “She is fighting the election from Dr Harshvardhan’s turf, who is an ENT specialist. Still the BJP says she can’t speak because of a throat infection,” Adarsh Maheshwari says on Twitter, signing off with LOL.
Others uncharitably comment that she has been prescribed a few days of silence by the specialists in her own party. The BJP, it seems, had factored in Bedi’s silence in its contingency plan.
Just a day before Bedi was incapacitated by an infection, it had summoned some of its best speakers to Delhi—Arun Jaitley, Nirmala Sitharaman, Rajiv Pratap Rudi and Smriti Irani—to do the talking.
On a more serious note, many ask if the party doesn’t find her good enough to speak or to interact with the media; how will it trust Bedi with the CM’s job?
We will know the answer in a few days. If the gag order has come from the party, if Bedi is not allowed to speak again till the election, the BJP will certainly rethink its decision to make Bedi the chief minister if it wins the election.
That is a lot of ifs. But the signs are ominous for Bedi. While she continues to speak in the sign language, the BJP has signaled that it is moving beyond Bedi. She has been quietly omitted from the party’s posters and the speeches of its other prominent leaders.
According to this report in a leading daily, the BJP seems to have changed its strategy and is now back to where it had started: with Narendra Modi as the face and voice of the campaign.
“Many BJP posters in Delhi constituencies now feature only Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Mr Shah and the local party candidate. While Ms Bedi – who joined the party just days ago and was immediately announced presumptive CM – continued to criss-cross Delhi with her roadshows, the party’s focused attack on her main rival Arvind Kejriwal is being fronted by senior party leaders,” the report says.
But Bedi continues to fight on bravely. On Friday, she fired a series of tweets sharing her vision for Delhi. Before that she had shared her vision of a safe and secure Delhi.
Elections become a farce when the discussion turns to ailments—both chronic and acute. But the political discourse in Delhi—home to the country’s elite and intellectuals—has often turned to the zaniest of subjects.
Kejriwal’s cough has been a recurring theme. Even his brief bout of diarrhea soon after he became the chief minister generated a lot of mirth among his critics.
And now the throat.
But this is today’s politics: sometimes it gets dirty, often it turns personal.
There was a time when politicians used to be polite to each other. They fought hard but the rivalry rarely turned personal. When Jawaharlal Nehru died, Atal Behari Vajpayee delivered a speech in the Parliament that is considered a shining example of Indian democracy.
A few years ago, when Congress leader and former Rajasthan chief minister Harideo Joshi was admitted to a hospital in Jaipur, his rival and critic Bhairon Singh Shekhawat sat in the hospital for hours. Those were gentlemen politicians, who set the right examples for their followers to emulate.
To expect such civility today would be wishful thinking. Politics today is full of rancor, ill-will and intense personal rivalry. Perhaps Bedi got it right.
