Tavleen Singh writes: Potted plants don't grow tall

Indian Express

6 days ago

It was with deepening gloom that I watched the shenanigans outside Parliament last week. I cannot understand why our Opposition leaders have not yet realised that they should be inside the House and not prancing around like spoilt children outside it. They were elected to sit inside the Lok Sabha, so every time they bring Parliament to a halt, they let down the people who voted for them. Protests of the kind we saw over the 'death of democracy' are now routine. All that changes is the issue over which our Opposition leaders behave so badly inside the Lok Sabha that it is adjourned repeatedly. This gives the Leader of the Opposition the chance to complain again that he is not allowed 'to speak inside the House'. He would be if he made his case less childishly inside Parliament instead of in its courtyard.
This time as I watched the protest, I observed, not for the first time, that nearly every Indian Opposition leader is a political prince or princess from a political family. All three members of the mighty Gandhi dynasty joined the protest. As I brooded over the damage that political dynasties from Kashmir to Kanyakumari have done to Indian democracy and to our political culture, I remembered something that Prashant Kishor said at an Express Adda. He called leaders who came from political families 'potted plants.'
When Prashant Kishor came to mind, I also remembered that he has spent the past couple of years or more wandering through the villages of Bihar, explaining to voters what their democratic rights are. He now leads a political party called Jan Suraaj and because I believe that India desperately needs political leaders like Prashant Kishor, I posted about this on X. I said that if I were voting in Bihar, I would vote for his party and, with a little exaggeration, said he was the most inspiring and important Indian leader I had met and that we need a hundred more like him.
What I did not expect is to touch a chord in the public square of social media. My tweet was viewed by more than 1,00,000 people, liked by nearly 2,000 and retweeted 500 times. There were also more than 500 comments and other than the usual 'go to Pakistan' jibes and complaints that I had no right to be a political columnist, I noticed that some of those who attacked me did it out of the fear that Kishor could be another Arvind Kejriwal. They said that they knew India needed a new kind of political leader, but were apprehensive of being let down once more.
This interested me. Personally, I always saw Kejriwal as a fraud and never supported his antics or his politics. I happened to be in Varanasi when he gave up his job as Delhi's Chief Minister to come and challenge Narendra Modi for the top job. I saw it as dangerous narcissism rather than concern for the people. He sat totally ignored under a banyan tree on Assi Ghat and that is where I spotted him for the first time since the drama in Ramlila Maidan, all those years ago, when he stole Anna Hazare's movement against corruption and became its hero. He was, in my view, always megalomaniacal to a scary degree. Men like him do not put in the long years and hard work needed to become a real leader.
It is only real leaders with a genuine interest in understanding the problems ordinary Indians face who do this. Prashant Kishor has shown not just that he can put in the hard work, but also that he has a genuine interest in helping India become a better country. On his rural travels in one of our poorest states, he would have seen the horrific conditions in which ordinary people live. He would have seen the broken-down schools like the one that collapsed in Jhalawar, burying small children in its debris. There are schools like that all over rural India.
There are health centres that have been turned into cowsheds and rural hospitals with filthy wards and stray dogs wandering through them. He would have seen the hovels in which poorer people are forced to live. He would have seen that despite all this, they continue to hope that one day a leader will come who will bring real change into their lives.
Change can come only when we start electing better leaders. It came for a while in Narendra Modi's first months as prime minister. There was the Swachh Bharat campaign that transformed rural sanitation and the building of rural roads, but then these efforts got dwarfed by the Hindutva cultural revolution. The building of temples became more important than the building of the tools that help people living in extreme poverty escape from it.
Had our Opposition seized this opportunity to start recruiting better people into their ranks, they would today have been in a much better position to win elections. Instead of complaining ad nauseum about the Election Commission, they need to try and understand why they seem never to get their message through to voters. The problem with dynastic political parties is that they keep real leaders out as far as possible so that the heir never sees a threat to his authority. This is why 'potted plants' are truly the biggest threat to democracy.