The eternity of return

The eternity of return

As a political artist specialising in self-portraits, Vishwanath Pratap Singh is exceptionally good in airbrushing himself out of the canvas. He has done it so many times, and we have lost count. But oblivion, a place where you are not even worth a page-three paragraph, is not Singh's chosen residence. He cannot afford to be out of sight, for so long, which has never been so long, to be fair to Singh. It is not the call of the newsprint that brings Singh out of sanyas or vanaprastha or exile or whatever it may be -- journalism is quite liberal in its description of Singh's whereabouts.

It is the call of the nation, its heart bleeding, its slums swelling with deprivations, its sociology crying for justice, that brings him back not to the centrestage but to the backstage of Indian politics. Politics? No, no, Singh is not interested in politics, he has had enough of it. His interest is in redeeming politics from the Great Indian Valuelessness. He, the so-called rajrishi of profile writers, is too sacred a being to soil himself in the dirt of politics.

So he has chosen the slum to stage his latest comeback. There is a bit of Gandhi here, and this is social seva from a social engineer who retires only to resurface in a press conference.

Really, Vishwanath Pratap Singh is suffering from an existential crisis. He is permanently struggling to redefine himself. The trouble is, he is refusing to accept the fact that he has already been defined by India. And that was sometime ago: Singh as the architect of the social balkanisation of the Hindi heartland. He said social justice, and India responded by dividing itself along casteist lines. But Singh's revolution could not keep the revolutionary in the vanguard for long.

India marched past him, marched past his divisive politics. Then Singh played a gravity-defying act: he placed himself above politics, he repackaged himself as a rent-a-line sage, apolitical, moral, ethical. That was a real-politician's desperate and abundantly pretentious bid to be above politics. And once during the infamous Third Front confusion Singh the sage was less than subtle in making himself available for the nation. Today, he is making himself available for the wretched of this nation the slumdwellers.

Who is better qualified than V.P. Singh to restore justice in this social sector? And which other politician will volunteer himself for the service of mazdoor bastis? Reportedly, Singh's mission is to add a human dimension to a subhuman reality, and he will be assisted in his mission by some political parties with a socialist heart communists, RJD and JD(S). Singh, always the consensus man, is the right person to reach out to the socially abandoned as the keeper of social conscience, as the Mahatma-cum-Mandela of the dispossessed.

For he alone is the artist among politicians capable of altering his self-portrait to the requirement of the situation. Or, he alone is capable of camouflaging his politics of desperation in media-friendly sociology. Despite having been told repeatedly that his sociology is not India-friendly. Perhaps he is happy to be in the heartland of newsprint.