Deprived of revenge, destined to mediocrity: Shazia Ilmi is the real tragedy of the Delhi polls

Revenge is a dish best served cold; right? If our traditional wisdom is justified, if the idioms we have heard all our lives are based on anecdotal evidence, Shazia Ilmi should have felt vindicated after the end of polling in Delhi. The elections, after all, were her grudge match against Arvind Kejriwal; her much-anticipated comeuppance for being deprived of the just rewards of the Anna andolan. But, Shazia is not smiling. She clammed up soon after exit polls indicated that her mission may have been thwarted by Delhi’s public display of affection for Arvind Kejriwal. “@NupurSharmaBJP AK himself killed the women security commando idea after promoting it,” Shazia whined, before understandably going on a maun vrat after the exit polls. [caption id=“attachment_2087867” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  PTI[/caption] Since her last tweet we haven’t heard a word from Shazia; neither on TV, her original claim to fame, nor on social media where her critics are playing a nasty game of blame and shame. ‘Hello, where are you, Madam…Please smile once…Don’t salt her wounds…Gaddar…,’ there has been an avalanche of taunts, jibes, commiserations and provocations for her on twitter. But, all quiet on the Shazia front. Indians have a robust fascination for people who switch sides at the last minute in a decisive battle. Mir Jafar, who betrayed Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey, Jaichand of Kannauj, the man who allied with Mohammad Ghori against Prithviraj Chauhan, Ravana’s rebellious brother Vibhishan and the only Kaurava to join the Pandavas, Yuyutsu, are all important footnotes of history and mythology. So, when the history of Delhi’s elections is written, Shazia may also find herself the subject of a footnote. But, you’ve got to feel sorry for her. Just a few years ago, Shazia was meant to be a metaphor for a change in Indian politics. She appeared destined for a bright future as a symbol of Indian secular and liberal values when she almost pulled off a victory from RK Puram, where the number of Muslim voters is insignificant. But she lost by just a few hundred votes, primarily because her own brother campaigned and contested against her. Soon after she was sent to Ghaziabad, perhaps against her wish of fighting with Sonia Gandhi, to contest against former Anna sipahi General VK Singh. She lost again by a huge margin. But she tried her luck yet again. Since joining the BJP, she railed against her former colleagues, called the media biased, questioned the integrity of top journalists, indicated that one of them had almost ‘accepted an offer from the AAP to contest from Mumbai’, and carried out a spirited fight on TV and twitter. shazia ilmi ‏@shaziailmi  Feb 7 @Hindu_hai_hum Rajdeep cant deny that he almost accepted aap LS Ticket fm mumbai . And ashutosh used Ibn 7 to promote aap to get a LS ticket View conversation0 replies1,219 retweets402 favorites From the suave, urban woman whose victory would have been an ode to the cosmopolitan, secular, liberal Delhi, Shazia also underwent an image makeover, becoming instead the typical token Muslim in the BJP. But, like other famous dal badlus of this election—Krishna Tirath, Vinod Kumar Binny, MS Dheer who are all likely to lose according to an ABP-Nielsen exit poll—she is likely to end up on the wrong side once again. When Narendra Modi popularized the word ‘badnaseeb’ he may not have had Shazia Ilmi on his mind. But, Shazia is likely to become an embodiment of Modi’s contribution to the political lexicon; as the ill-fated woman who has remarkable expertise in always choosing the wrong side of the bread to butter. Shazia will now be banking on the other famous Modi jumla. Her only hope, as the Indian Express said in its Sunday headline, would be that all exit polls are bazaaru.