When the Sengol was installed in the new Parliament House with great fanfare and dollops of piety in May 2023, the prevailing narrative was that Sengol had originally been presented to N**** (name censored by competent authority) at the time of Independence representing transfer of power from the British colonial masters to Indian successors, but, being a philistine, he had cast it aside and sent it to the Allahabad Museum where it remained labelled as his Golden Walking Stick.
Actually the Sengol was not a mere prop used at the time of transfer of power. It is disparaging to think of it as similar to the cane that changes hands when army officers take charge, and much less as a baton in a relay race. In ancient Tamil kingdoms, the Sengol (sceptre) was a symbol of justice — rigid, unbiased, fierce justice, that can punish an aberrant monarch as easily as it punishes a deviant commoner.
The Tamil epic Silappadhikaram describes how the Sengol got deformed and doubled up when Kannagi (a legendary Tamil woman who forms the central character of the Silappadhikaram) proved that her husband Kovalan had been unjustly killed on the orders of the Pandya king, and how the warped Sengol miraculously straightened itself, marking restoration of justice, when the king collapsed in a heap of remorse and shed his mortal coil, along with his unfortunate consort.
Also read: Behind Modi’s U-Turns, Nitish and Naidu’s Unreliable Track-Record as Allies
While many were sceptical about the design behind the installation of the Sengol in the new Parliament House, it does seem to have cast a completely unexpected spell, in keeping with its original role as a voice of conscience. Consider the following:
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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which could do whatever it pleased with absolute impunity considering its seeming invincibility, lost its majority in the subsequent election. The government has been forced to be more accommodative of allies and receptive to public sentiments. It has acquired eyes and ears that it seemed to lack earlier.
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The Lok Sabha speaker agreed to refer the Wakf (Amendment) Bill 2024 to a Joint Parliamentary Panel to be constituted in consultation with leaders of all parties. The very fact that a two-hour debate preceded this decision is momentous, because many other Bills had been passed in the past with no debate in the absence of Opposition members who were either suspended or had walked out in frustration.
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The draft Broadcast Bill meant to ‘regulate’ (i.e. censor, according to critics) content creators for digital news, OTT and social media has been withdrawn. This was a draft privately circulated among a handful of industry stakeholders who were discouraged from sharing it after they realised that they were given watermarked versions of the Bill with a code unique to each of them to identify the culprit who leaked. (Why can’t they try this for the next NEET and UGC NET examinations?) The cognoscenti are of the view that this does not mean we have seen the back of the Bill. However, if it is re-introduced, at least it will not, hopefully, be one that bears the thumb prints of a coterie.
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Following discontent expressed over the budget proposal to remove indexation benefits on long-term capital gains (LTCG), the government partly rolled back the proposal, without the need for thousands to lay siege to Delhi as was seen during the farmers’ agitation.
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The Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) published prominent advertisements announcing recruitment of 45 persons through lateral entry in the rank of joint secretary or director / deputy secretary for a wide variety of responsibilities ranging from organic farming to emerging technologies. After criticism that the principle of reservation has been given the go- by, the government firmly stepped in and nixed the recruitment drive.
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Talking about the UPSC, we had the spectacle of the chairman resigning years before the end of his term to devote himself, apparently, to the Anoopam Mission, a Swaminarayan sect offshoot. No wonder speculation surfaced that this was on account of the UPSC allowing itself to be hoodwinked by Pooja Khedkar’s exploits of furnishing a host of bogus certificates. This appears to be just a coincidence. The UPSC’s loss may in fact be the Anoopam Mission’s gain. However, the sacking of the chief of National Testing Agency (NTA), as it passed through some testing times of its own in the NEET-NET row did come as a surprise because this represented a new phase of an unusual acknowledgement that things could go wrong – a startling veering off from the idea of ‘Never admit a fault or wrong,’ and ‘Never accept blame’ .
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Kangana Ranaut, a renowned historian, who announced to the world that India got its independence only in 2014 and that it was Netaji and not the other N**** who was the first prime minister of India, instead of being eulogised for her remarks that the farmers’ agitation was marked by rapes and dead bodies, has been reprimanded by the party, much to the chagrin of her admirers and other hard core faithfuls.
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Reversing a 21-year-old reform of India’s civil services pension system brought in by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, a Unified Pension Scheme (UPS) has been announced, bearing strong resemblance to the Old Pension Scheme.
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The prime minister has apologised to Chhatrapati Shivaji and all those who were hurt by the collapse of Shivaji’s statue eight months after it was inaugurated in the presence of the prime minister himself. This is a deviation from the principle, ‘Never show remorse.’ Even Manipur did not trigger this. In pre-Sengol days, “anti-nationals” would have been blamed for the disaster and locked up. Applying the time honoured principle of, “If something goes wrong, hang somebody,” the structural consultant engaged for the erection of the statue has been arrested on a charge of attempted murder. Luckily for him, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) was not invoked. Still, the charge of attempted murder seems difficult to comprehend because police generally used to look for concepts like intent, knowledge, motive and the presence of a possible victim within killing range either in space or in time or both but then laws are now very elastic. Remember how a hapless car driver was arrested in Delhi, for causing the tragic death of three even more hapless civil service aspirants in the basement of Rau’s IAS Study circle — for the reckless act of driving past the building at a breakneck speed of about 10 kmph (which appears to be the speed when one sees the video — unless, of course, it had been recorded in slow motion) plunging through a waterlogged road? Having had no role in the construction of the road or rains or the waterlogging or the weakness of the gate of Rau’s, he has been set free but not his car — an IIT team is reportedly evaluating whether its wheels could have generated enough force and momentum to produce a Niagara in the basement.
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For over a decade, the word ‘secular’ had come to be regarded as a profanity. But now the prime minister has come out in support of a secular civil code, thereby restoring a measure of dignity to the seven-letter combination.
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Let us now turn to foreign policy. After having abstained on a US-sponsored United Nations Security Council resolution and a United Nations General Assembly resolution that censured Russia for its military actions in Ukraine, and after having hugged Vladimir Putin during a visit to Moscow, the prime minister has now thought it fit to visit Ukraine to give a comforting pat or two on Volodymyr Zelenskyys’s shoulder apart from the conventional hug — conveying the idea that the largest democracy in the world would like the sovereignty of all nations to be respected.
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The Sengol has wrought its magic on the Supreme Court too. After having shelved the matter for years, the Supreme Court finally declared the electoral bonds scheme unconstitutional.
There may be some in the establishment who think that considering all these developments, the Sengol has proved inauspicious and that its rightful place will be the Allahabad Museum. But would Yogiji welcome it back to his realm, considering its deadly potency? After all, the largest losses suffered by his party in the Lok Sabha elections were in his state, thanks to the Sengol aura.
On the other hand, others may think it would be a good idea for replicas of the Sengol to be kept in all legislatures and secretariats and courts. May be even Kamala Harris, considering her Tamil genes, could get one installed in the White House, assuming she gets past Donald Trump. She is from Chola land where the ideal of the Sengol is supposed to have originated.
K. Ramanujam is a former Director General of Police, Tamil Nadu.