Parliament is talking shero-shayari, hold my Arts degree

Poetry was already being used as a tool of debate by Opposition leaders like All India Trinamool Congress's Mahua Moitra and Indian National Congress's Adhir Chowdhury and Malikarjun Kharge. And with his Parliament appearance today, February 8, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also joined the party!

Mahua Moitra’s shayari: It all started yesterday (February 7) when Mahua Moitra added a shayari (couplet) to her rant against the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or “chaddi gang” as she called them. Even though she was heckled by the other BJP MPs, Moitra finally went on to deliver the shayari after many attempts. 

“Dopahar tak bik gaya bazaar ka har ek jhoot 
Aur mai ek sach lekar shaam tak baithi rahi.”

This loosely translates to,

“Every lie has been sold at the market till noon,

and I have been waiting here with a truth till evening.” 

The non-rhyming couplet is popular among Hindi poetry enthusiasts although its writer remains unknown. 

Tagore also gets referenced: The poetic quips continued till the next day when Berhampore MP and West Bengal Congress Chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury recited the lines of Rabrindranath Tagore’s Bangla poem He Mor Chitto Punya. 

A popular poem sung as one of Tagore’s many compositions (collectively known as Rabindra Sangeet), it serves as a call to unite several communities and religions against hate and prejudice. Condemning the persecution of Muslims and religious minorities, Chowdhury narrated a few verses of the poem whose English translation would read as follows: 

Oceanic expanse of the mankind lay in front,
Liven up my soul on this great land of India.
I stand erect and bow the god within mankind,
My hymnic chants ever-appraising,
Clasped hands thrust out in respect.
Musing earth, prayer-stream encircling fields,
Behold the ever-holy form of the earth -
On this vast expanse of the great mankind.
   
No one knows from where and on which invitation
Streams of immigrants gush and ease out into the ocean.
Aryans, non-Aryans, Dravidians and Chinese,
Shaka, Hun, Pathan and the Mughals -
All merged as a single race.
The western gates have been removed,
Deluge of gifts flow like boon,
Traditions exchanged, racial barriers removed,
No one returns empty-handed -
From this vast expanse of the great mankind.

Given Chowdhury’s native proficiency in Bangla, his pronunciation might have been on point but his poetic metre and recitation might not have been the strongest! After all, it is just Lok Sabha, not Shantiniketan...

Meanwhile, in Rajya Sabha, Kharge recites his own verses. Continuing Congress’s poetic protests, INC chief Malikarjun Kharge also penned a few lines to critique BJP and PM Modi’s leadership. His Hindi poem which drew a few “waah waahs” from the audiences goes, 

Nazar nahi hai nazaaro ki baat karte hai
Zameen pe chaand sitaaro ki baat karte hai

Woh haath jodke basti ko lootne wale 
Bhari sabha mei sudhaaro ki baat karte hai…”

A poor translation:

Those who can’t see, talk about vision,
They talk about stars and moon on the ground, 
They are the ones who join hands and loot houses,
They talk about development while in public

Kharge continued the poem with two more verses with similar metaphors to address his argument that the current leaders are saying one thing and doing another. No stranger to reciting poetry in the Rajya Sabha, even Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankar chuckled with Kharge’s lines, telling him that he has himself developed a “shayari habit”due to him.

And then comes PM Modi himself: While the PM had his own Tagore phase when he grew out his beard in 2021, he decided to go by a self-authored couplet attacking opposition leader Rahul Gandhi who had alleged him of favouring Gautam Adani a day earlier.

Acknowledging the fact that Gandhi had not showed up in Lok Sabha on the day Modi was to speak, the PM’s parliament speech on February 8 included him saying, 

“Yeh keh keh kar hum 
Dil ko behla rahe hai,
Woh ab chal chuke hai. 
Woh ab aa rahe hai.”

(We amuse ourselves by saying they are on their way, they are coming.) 

He then added a poem by Hindi writer Dushyant Kumar as a sarcastic remark on Congress and its decline.

Tumhare paao ke neeche zameen nahi hai
Lekin kamaal ye hai, ki tumko abhi yakeen nahi hai

(There is no ground beneath your feet,
But what's surprising is that you still don't believe it)

When it comes to “poet politicians”, the late ex-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee serves as the posterchild. But with these parliamentarians throwing jibes at each other with their own poetic references and compositions, it seems like there are new contenders for that title. It wouldn’t be surprising if future literature courses would include a model on “Parliamentary Poetry”!