Long before there was America, there was Sanatana Dharma.
Long before there was Niccolo Machiavelli, there was Chanakya.
Long before there was Elon Musk, there was Gautam Adani.
Musk paid out some $120 million to the Donald Trump campaign.
We have had our electoral bonds and may one day get to know how much Adani paid over and above them.
People elected Trump; Musk only got a job.
Adani selected the Maharashtra government in 2019, installing our own pro-big-money nationalist right-winger as chief minister, according to reports of a public revelation now made by one of the chief protagonists in that clandestine, closed-door confabulation among the spoilers for office, namely Amit Shah, Devendra Fadnavis, Sharad Pawar, Praful Patel, Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde, mentored by our own richest man, Adani.
So it transpired that the very next morning, in accordance with the richest man’s wishes, Fadnavis took the oath of office as chief minister and the confessor, Ajit Pawar, crossed over from the opposite camp to become deputy chief minister, even if only for some happily eventful 80 hours.
We may recall that once the many cases against Ajit Pawar came to be peremptorily shelved and Sharad Pawar not crossing over, the happy prodigal promptly returned to rejoin the comrades he had briefly deserted.
Thus, Adani obtained his desired chief minister and Ajit Pawar his freedom from the prospect of “chakki peesing and peesing” (crushing grain between two stone slabs – a punishment that Fadnavis had thought fit for him as a prospective jail bird).
Also read: Gautam Adani Arrives in the Maharashtra Elections
All told, be it the Musk-Trump combine in America or the Adani-Fadnavis one in Maharashtra and beyond in New Delhi, that old 1930s tradition when the Krupp-Thyssen industrial houses among others had helped install Adolf Hitler has come to be nicely revived.
Never since then has democracy worldwide been as much in the doghouse as now.
The wheel of history, as Oswald Spengler had said, turns back to before the Second World War, before the post-war liberal covenant (if such indeed it was in substance) to private economic powerhouses on one side and their protective black, brown and brighter-hued shirts on the other, as what were intended to be upright, autonomous watchdog institutions gladly jettison their uncomfortable onus to the powers-that-be.
Interestingly, in our case, the elder and profoundly sphinx-like Sharad Pawar has not yet spoken to the revelation made by his mercurial nephew.
His daughter, the likeable and sanguine Supriya Sule, has said she knows nothing about the meeting that her cousin Ajit spoke of.
Do we know as of now how this revelation may pan out both in the political arrangements of Maharashtra and the forthcoming elections on November 20?
It would be a fearless prophet who would say we do.
Do we know that “we the people” will determine to shore up constitutionalism over cronyism, temple, mosque, church or gurudwara any time soon?
I wish I knew.
It may be that only the final catastrophes wrought by climate change will bring about a new world.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
