#TheDailyToast: The yoga of statesmanship
It is a trooth universally aknowledged that all politicians are comon men until they do something uncomon. Such as saving the nation from colonisers. Or carving out an entire state. Or ushering in liberalisation in to a closed-door economy. Or pushing us into superpowerdom. This is one way to become a statesman.
Another way, increasingly popular, is to have protested corruption by refusing to allow the corrupt to be caught. You can do this by staying silent at the corruption around you while being of outstanding moral character yourself. This is called the Lily pose. Not unlike the Lotus pose, in which one travels the world as Clean India salesman while being blind to the tonnes of garbage collecting underneath one's feet back home. All great politics is good posturing anyway. The third option, only just discovered, is to thrash about in the pond till no one can see the suspect until it is through the sputtering fumes of his steadily departing getaway car. This is the Psycopath pose. It thrives on wild gesticulation when pointed at.
You can achieve the Psycopath pose in numerous phases. People imagine that the first phase is focus or dhyana. You ignore graft charges being raised against a person in your employ. Removing all distraction, such as finger-pointing and question-raising IAS officers, is key. But it is not. That is the second phase.
The first phase is vowing vehemently to remove corruption, avering the ACB must do its job, and grant organs like the CBI autonomy to function independently. Of course, you must say this such that people being stolen from believe you to be the protector of their assets and elect you to power, much like snake-bite victims must be injected with the venom they are dying from in order to live, or it won't work. It helps to utter a mantra like "sab maya hai" or "sab mile hue hain" if you prefer.
In the third phase, one must upload the maya or conspiracy theory to the Cloud. For this, you can always take the assistance of the Delhi haze, for special effects. But it is always good to refer to the works of other gurus, such as the esteemed INC, which is acquiring an adeptness in disrupting Parliament in the name of personal vendetta by even claiming the courts are the instruments of individuals in governments and opposition parties.
The aim, you must not forget, in statesmanship, is to achieve the haze, not dissipate it. A goal to keep in mind is the obfuscation of original anti-corruption bills like the watered-down-till-the-milkman-can-adulterate-milk-with-it (giving new meaning to doodh ka doodh and paani ka paani) Lokpal.
If you can manage to pull the ACB back to its original purpose: taking out public awareness advertisements in sinking newspapers for the greater good, the CBI to crack cases in which they show up the ineptness of the nation's police forces first and their officers later, you will have achieved a full circle of stability, or the snake-eating-its-own-tail stage. You will know when you have achieved this when you have staged a protest against one's own government so successfully that one has impeached oneself from power. There is no higher sacrifice than this and it is unlocking a level of statesmanship that even Sharad Pawar aspires to.
In stage five, you and the corruption accused you are defending become one. All action against him is action against you, which you will realise in your newfound state of enlightenment, in inverse will mean all charges against him will be charges against you.
In stage six, having realised the folly of what you have achieved in stage five, you just surrender your efforts to the mother goddess, seeking protection. Some call her "Didi".
This is attainment of the cowardliness state of being, the ultimate nirvana for the Psycopath pose.
Statesmanship is the domain of those who quickly realise the perks of being uncommon men, often with an uncanny ability to eat their own words. For less mortals, political equality will do.