Tickled into Parliament

Politicians may not be particularly known for their wit,but sometimes their angry jibes can go a long way

Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata

A Chilean pornstar once promised to demonstrate her naked bosom to colleagues in parliament if her pre-election campaign became a success. It wasn't relevant whether she kept her word or not: the striptease, she argued, would be a ruse to stop her deputies from quarrelling in the House. Whenever the respected legislators began scrapping, she exposed her bosom, and order heaved into existence.

Can anyone think of such a thing happening in the Indian Parliament, where members hurl chairs and tables at the Treasury Benches and rush to the Well threatening to conk each other? However, taking cue from the rambunctious tradition of British humour, it's possible to take heart: the more vibrant the politics, the more biting the mockery. The 18th century was witness to the rise of the Tory and Whig parties; it was an age of pamphleteering and newspapers that set the London taverns on fire.

The perverse relish 18th century writers and caricaturists displayed while portraying politicians defecating, urinating, fornicating, being disembowelled and suffering from flatulence can take a modern reader's breath away. Doing anything close in India would invite lawsuits (if not extra-Parliamentary thrashings).

Take, for instance, the famous print of the Whiggish Sir Robert Walpole — who served for more than 20 years as Britain's first prime minister and to whom the phrase "every man has his price" has been attributed — straddling the gates of government. The cartoon is titled "Idol-Worship, or The Way to Preferment" and depicts a servile place-seeker kissing Walpole's enormous butt.

In Animal Farm, a fable satirising communism, George Orwell uses English farm animals to excoriate Russian communism and its leaders. For Indian communists, animals were the tools to jibe at their adversaries. Their later recantations later are the object of much amusement: it might be fitting to recall how, during the freedom struggle, when they were at their "vicious worst", they described Subhas Chandra Bose as "Cur held up by Goebbels" or "Mere mask for Japanese ogre" or as "a running dog of Tojo".

At the height of orchestrated xenophobia as an election tool, bad political humour backfires miserably. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad's (VHP) banshee, Praveen Togadia, once associated Congress president Sonia Gandhi with a species of four-legged animal. One wonders whether Togadia, on his part, has read Book 18 of the Mahabharata, where Lord Dharma took the form of a dog to accompany Yudhishtra to heaven.

In his book, Parliamentary Wit Humour, and  Subhash C Kashyap, former Secretary-General of the Lok Sabha, hands out rich anecdotage. He recounts how Jawaharlal Nehru even carried his sense of humour to the breakfast table. Seeing Nehru peel a delicious apple, veteran parliamentarian Mahavir Tyagi told him that the skin of the apple contained vitamins. Pat came the repartee from Nehru, "Tyagiji, you concentrate on the vitamins, I will eat the rest of the apple."

But Tyagi got his retribution. Once, when Nehru referred to Aksai Chin as an area where not a blade of grass grew, Tyagi was quick on his feet and, pointing towards his bald pate, retorted, "There is not a single hair on this head but shall I surrender my head to the enemy?"

Indira Gandhi wasn't particularly known for her jesting, but as is usual with poker-faces like hers, there are a few memorable wry takes. Her answer to an American journalist in 1971 about why she had refused to meet with Pakistan's General Yahya Khan was, "You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist."