Power is a heady potion. The natural instinct for many is also to be on the right side of those in power. Not just politicians but worthies of other hues are also no exception. Many are abruptly changing their colour like a chameleon. They show a tendency to side with the party that has a rising graph. The latest to join the BJP is Savitri Jindal, the richest woman who quit the Congress party and followed her son Naveen Jindal to the saffron bandwagon. The family runs the nation’s third largest private steel company. At a time when opinion polls predict a third term for the BJP, this is understandable. Notably, the family was among the main beneficiaries of the Congress party in terms of positions and other favours for many years. Naveen Jindal served as MP for 10 years while his mother and father had been given ministerial posts in Haryana, all thanks to the Congress. The son has been rewarded for his defection to the BJP with a Lok Sabha ticket from Kurukshethra, where he had been defeated by the BJP in the 2014 polls.
Having got the best of the deal from the Congress and boosted the family’s steel and power business with tricolour support, the family now wants to be on the right side of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. News of the day is also that Bollywood actor Govinda is joining the Shiv Sena of chief minister Eknath Shinde by ditching the Congress party that had given him positions. While the flow is mostly to the BJP, across states, defections to the ruling Congress party in Telangana, mainly from the BRS that ran government for the past two terms in the state, are also massive. The once-all-powerful BRS is thus faced with a likely extinction. Similar defections are evident in West Bengal and there was talk of Kamal Nath expressing an interest in the BJP.
By unleashing the central investigation agencies on businessmen and politicians on the rival side, the BJP-NDA government is bent on winning the loyalty of the business class as a whole and also demolishing all other political establishments. The revelations about the electoral bonds are fresh proof that the ED and CBI are being used by the Modi government with ulterior motives. The RSS has come forward to suggest that this is a wrong tendency. But, having tasted blood, the BJP-led government is unlikely to stop in its wrong tracks. The Congress party’s funds have been frozen in the run-up to the polls. Both the political and business atmospheres are being hugely vitiated by such obsessions on the part of the ruling establishment. This is tantamount to dictatorship in a new form.
