Will Rahul say 'Mere Paas Ma Hai'? Or will PM have his way?

I remember reading an interview with director Shekhar Kapur years back in which he described his experience with Javed Akhtar during the making of Mr India.

When Akhtar first recited the line “Mogambo Khush Hua” to Kapur, the latter wasn’t impressed. This was the main line of Mogambo, the villain of the movie. As Kapur recounts on his blog “Hmmm, I thought - there must be more to that.”

But Akhtar was convinced about the line. “Shekhar Sahib, when Kapil Dev hits a six over the grounds, people will shout Mogambo Khush Hua, and when people play three-card brag (teen patti) and, if they get three aces, they will shout “Mogambo Khush Hua.” “You trust me on that,” Javed Akhtar assured me,” writes Kapur on his blog.

Kapur ran with what Akhtar told him and the rest as we all know is history. Mr India was a huge hit. Such was the power of the line that people started to use it during the course of regular conversations, whenever they felt happy about something. As Kapoor writes “And some time later as I was watching Kapil Dev hit a six over the Sharjah grounds I saw a huge banner go up in the Indian supporters. It said : “Mogambo Khush Hua.””

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[caption id=“attachment_363935” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“It’s time for Singh to payback to the country for all that the country has given to him. AFP”]  [/caption]

“Mogambo Khush Hua” became one of the most famous one-liners that Hindi cinema had produced. But this wasn’t the best one-liner that Akhtar ever wrote. His best one liner clearly has to be “Mere Paas Ma Hai” from the movie Deewar. The line is simple, yet so powerful.

Deewar was released on 1 January 1975. Around six months later on 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India declared a state of emergency.

During the 21-month period of emergency Indira’s younger son Sanjay almost ran a parallel government along with his cronies. One of his major areas of concern was overpopulation and the government under his instructions forcefully carried vasectomies all over the country. This phenomenon got Atal Bihari Vajpayee all worked up to write a poem titled “aao mardon na mard bano”. Those were the days.

Sanjay Gandhi wouldn’t have been able to force vasectomies on thousands of Indian men without the “love” and the “backing” of his mother Indira Gandhi, who is said to have had a soft corner for her ill-tempered son. “Mere Paas Ma Hai” was a line written for Sanjay Gandhi rather than Ravi, the character played by Shashi Kapoor in Deewar , who speaks the line in the movie. Chances are that if Deewar had been released six months later during the emergency, the line wouldn’t have made it past the censor board.

India is at the same stage again. The love of a mother for her only son is holding the country back. The moves are already being made. Pranab Mukjerhee has been packed off to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The next decision that is to be made is who will replace him at the finance ministry?

Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, wants to run the ministry with his team of economists: Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, C Rangarajan, Chairman of the Prime Minister’sEconomic Advisory Council, and Kaushik Basu, the Chief Economic Adviser. He is also hoping that Raghuram Rajan from the University of Chicago, a former Chief Economist at the IMF, will join the team.

But will this be allowed to happen? The answer is no. Sonia Gandhi needs a politician as the minister of finance. A politician who can, like P Chidambaram did, come up with schemes like the Rs 71,000 crore farm loan waiver. A politician who can get the Right to Food Act up and running.

A politician who can get onto a helicopter and drop bucket loads of money from it. Okay, not quite that. But a politician who can ensure that voters of this country have been bribed enough in the name of poverty and economic development, so that when Lok Sabha elections happen in 2014, they vote for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) and the Congress. All this to ensure that Rahul baba takes over the reins of the world’s biggest democracy.

This means that the fiscal deficit of the government of India will continue to go up. The government will continue to borrow more and more. And interest rates are likely to remain high. Economic sense be damned.

And in the next few months you might hear of an AK Antony or a Digvijaya Singh or a Jairam Ramesh or a Kamal Nath or a Sushil Kumar Shinde, or even the all-guns-blazing-all-the-time Kapil Sibal, taking over as the finance minister of this country. The name doesn’t really matter because none of them have voices or ideas of their own. Even if they did they have long been put on the backburner because all that matters now is that “Rahul Gandhi has to be made the PM”.

Manmohan Singh is the only person who can stop a seasoned Congress politician from taking over as the finance minister of India and limiting the serious damage to the Indian economy that would come with it. The good “doctor” has got more and “much” more than he would have ever bargained for. He can resist moves to appoint a politician as finance minister by threatening to resign. That is the one thing that the Congress won’t be able to handle. It would set the cat among the pigeons.

It’s time for Singh to payback to the country for all that the country has given to him. But the question is will he be as docile as he has been and allow a mother’s love for her son to take over? Will Rahul Gandhi say “Mere Paas Ma Hai”? Or will Manmohan Singh, by resisting a full-time politician taking over the ministry of finance, give us - you, me and everybody else - an opportunity to say “Mogambo Khush Hua”.

Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com