In the last few months the Indian Political scene has witnessed more drama than what Ekta Kapoor could cram in to a lifetime of her soaps. The whole nation has fragmented over this issue. Everyone seems to have an opinion on it which is right and everyone else is wrong. I knew we love making mountains out of moles but such a big fuss over an atomic issue?

“It’s as easy as 1-2-3”, how many times have we heard it? Well it has gone for a toss now. 123 will never ever be related to easy in future again. It has been anything but easy. It was supposed to be just a treaty which would have given us the weapons to scare the shit out of our pesky neighbors and oh yea helped us generate more power, no not the one that corrupts but the one that keeps the AC running. When it was initially signed the media went berserk for weeks. You could not surf the TV channels or tune in to the radio or pick up a newspaper without dealing with the N word. In fact we were being fed so much N-deal crap I am sure that if you had gone for a blood test it would have come out to be N +ve or N –ve, depending up on which side of the argument your loyalty lies. It was hyped like it was the greatest or the worst thing to happen since independence. But then the same media runs to us with “breaking news” if it turns out that the dog that finished 4th on the London hound racing circuit had a great, great, great grandfather who once up on a time was born in the colonial era India.

So when the UPA government signed the Nuclear Treaty with the US government it was hailed as a great step not just towards improving the US-India relationship, after all its always nice to have a sugar daddy, but also a step towards becoming a formidable player in the global game of power. Of course that’s not all the reasons behind it. There was also the lure of side effects like foreign trips, kick backs and the usual parts of the package. NDA was miffed. The fact that UPA achieved what they couldn’t, left them seeing orange. They were bent up on proving that this deal in some way or the other was definitely anti-hindutva. How could the UPA do something good, right? If it was not anti-hindutva then definitely it was against the National interest. They don’t know how but they are sure it was. Since when has “national” become a synonym for “personal” I don’t know but they probably use a special edition political thesaurus. They are the opposition leaders. It’s their job. That’s what they are paid for, with our hard earned and easily taxed money.

The Left are a different story altogether. They are a member of the ruling alliance. Ok more like a distant cousin but still they are supposed to support the government. The Nuclear deal made the Left see red because, well they always see red. When the Left party was formed someone played a cruel prank on them. All the leaders were given tampered editions of thesauruses where synonyms and antonyms were exchanged. Hence what seems like a progressive step for us was regressive in the eyes of the Left front. Don’t you see how much “progress” has the state of West Bengal made since it has been under the Left rule? Not just their thesaurus, they seem to have got their ideology also reversed. Since when did Communism stand for increasing the gap between the rich and the poor? What Left did was that to bridge the gap they decided to make the rich poor. They did succeed in that but their policies also ensured that the poor became even poorer. The gap between the rich and the poor became a chasm. They even coined a new term for this chasm. It’s called the SEZ or the Special Economic Zone. The SEZ program didn’t make any sense to me so I came up with my own interpretation of it. It’s a part of public up-skilling program. It works in this way. A farmer is good at, well, just farming. To up-skill farmers what you do is to take away their fertile lands and sell it to Multi-Billion dollar conglomerates for dirt cheap prices, even though they can afford to pay the actual price for it, and relocate the farmers to a land totally alien to them. With no fertile land to till they will be forced to learn some different trade to survive like, say hunting or pottery or robbery. So now the farmer is not just a farmer but he is a robber too. So now he is qualified for two kinds of jobs. That is up-skilling. On the other hand the controversies and demonstrations against SEZs will ensure that the Companies that buy the land in SEZs will probably end up abandoning it. So, with the money from sales already in their pocket, the politicians will let someone else capture the land. Brilliant isn’t it. What is even more brilliant is that by opposing the nuclear deal and threatening to end their support to the government they also divert all the attention away from the SEZ irregularities and its side effects like the reactions to it at Singur and Nandigram.

But the Left has been running the government in West Bengal for years so they must be doing something good, right? Left! Just look at what have they done. They have turned a state which had the potential to become an industrial powerhouse in to a crippled loom. Years and years of the Left rule have made the state so dysfunctional that even Pfizer could do nothing for it. And yet you can count on Left getting a clear majority when West Bengal elects its next state government.

Democracy is the proof that people don’t learn from their mistakes.