‘Alas, poor thing!’

At the outset, let me proffer my humble apologies to Shakespeare, Hamlet and poor Yorick’s skull, which was Hamlet’s object of profuse sympathy. Yorick was the court jester and, I daresay, was a barrelful of laughs as he and his master downed many a tankard of the blushful Hippocrene at the nearby King & Crown. My current quote is of more recent vintage and can be attributed to the mother of the Leader of the Opposition (LOO) Sonia Gandhi, who was caught on camera saying ‘She could hardly speak, poor thing.’ The present Grande Dame of the Grand Old Party, Sonia Ji was moved to express her heartfelt commiserations in those ill-chosen words to the President of India after a long and presumably tiring speech to open the Budget session at the Lok Sabha prior to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman occupying centre stage. Whether she meant to say the President’s speech was physically tiring to President Murmu, or was found tiresome to Sonia Gandhi and her near and dear ones, we shall never know. Tiring and tiresome. Two words that sound so similar and yet convey very different meanings. Evidently the lady thought she was speaking off the record outside the Parliament’s impressive precincts but you know what they say, ‘Stately columns have ears.’ Off the record, but on tape. Next thing anyone knew, her somewhat innocuous jibe, if indeed it was a jibe, had become a national cause célèbre.

The ruling BJP party, with an eye on the main chance, moved in on Mrs. Gandhi’s remark like a pride of starving lions circling their victim prior to the kill. With the all-important Delhi state elections very much on everyone’s mind, every morsel of opportunity thrown at them had to be snapped up avidly. The Congress Party was already reduced to the margins and viewed as a bit player at the forthcoming hustings, with AAP and the BJP being the perceived frontrunners. This off-the-cuff remark on the President by Sonia Ji was a godsend to the BJP. What is more it might also have spelt the death-knell for the Congress Party as far as the Delhi elections were concerned. Not that they were in with a shout in the first place.

 It’s all politics, of course. The BJP leaders would have known full well that Mrs. Gandhi did not really mean to throw an insulting broadside at the President. However, why look a gift horse in the mouth when it is handed to them on a platter? That is the way they would have looked at it and who can blame them in our dog-eat-dog world of political backbiting. As for the materfamilias of the Gandhi family, she could have exercised a bit more restraint, seeing as she was confronted by a hostile battery of media scribes and cameras. Her choice of words, probably not meant to wound, came out all wrong. One unguarded moment, one word out of place and there is hell to pay. At least her son, who is quite accustomed to dropping bricks over the years, the remnants to be picked up by his minions, could have advised his mother on the perils of sounding off in front of microphones and cameras. ‘Hot mics’ they are commonly referred to and they can singe, as the lady from Vicenza discovered to her cost. The scion of the Congress Party’s first family was untouched by all the brouhaha. He strutted about in his white tee-shirt, flexing his biceps, with nary a care about the consequences of his mummy’s, possibly unintended, faux pas. As far as Rahul Baba was concerned, it was comme si comme ca, if his French was upto scratch. Just another day at the office.

I do not wish to take a political stance on this. When it comes to dropping bricks, our politicians across party lines, frequently keep saying things when they would have been better off maintaining a discreet silence. Then again, discretion may be the better part of valour, but our politicians, for the most part, are not conspicuous for being discreet or valorous. A few years ago, the health minister of Bihar, Mangal Pandey found nothing wrong in Patna’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences asking applicants to declare their virginity as, in his wisdom, virgin meant unmarried and pure. Else their admission could have been in jeopardy. Surely, nothing to make a song and dance about, he felt. Since the report was short on detail, one assumes the stricture applied to female applicants only.

The late Samajwadi Party supremo, Mulayam Singh Yadav sought clemency while opposing the death penalty for a gang of thugs facing the noose on a gangrape and murder charge with this throwaway line, ‘boys will be boys, they commit mistakes.’ He even went on to cast aspersions on the victims suggesting that the girls frequently come on to the boys and when things get ugly, they cry rape.

A junior minister in the BJP government some years ago, termed all south Indians as blacks. This was in response to a group of Africans in Delhi being assaulted within an inch of their lives by a mob for alleged acts of cannibalism, which resulted in Indians being branded as racists in an international forum. While that might have gone down as a wild generalisation, the minister’s response was startling to say the least. ‘If we were racist, why would we have all the entire South (India) which is… you know Tamil Nadu, you know Karnataka and Andhra… why do we live with them? We have black people all around us.’ Just priceless.

Lest you get the wrong impression, this foot-in-mouth disease is not confined just to our country, notwithstanding that this piece was prompted by an Italian lady who has made India her home. It has an endemic quality where the good and the great have been known to commit unpardonable solecisms in such far-off lands as Great Britain and the United States. Allow me to give you a few samplers. The late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a past master at saying things that would doubtless have made Queen Elizabeth II blush a nice shade of crimson. Whether he intended to or not is not for me to surmise. To a young policewoman wearing a bullet-proof vest, he commented, ‘You look like a suicide bomber.’ At a reception at Buckingham Palace for a group of British Indians, the Duke peered at the name badge of businessman Atul Patel and remarked, ‘There’s a lot of your family in tonight.’ Addressing a group of British students during a royal visit to China he said, ‘If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty eyed.’ Sino-British relations might have taken a nosedive after that gem. Finally, here’s one on which the whole world would have agreed with the great man, ‘British women can’t cook.’ A serial offender, the Duke.

American Presidents are no slouches when it comes to saying the wrong things at the most inopportune moments. During the Nato summit in Washington in 2024, President Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin.’ A remark he might have had a huge problem living down. Anyhow he stepped down from the Presidential race not long after. Long before that, when Richard Nixon famously declared, ‘I am not a crook’ after being found guilty in the Watergate scandal, people did not know whether to laugh or cry. In 1992, President Geoge H.W. Bush Sr. vomited on the lap of Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa during a state dinner in Tokyo. Reports suggest the meal consisting of raw salmon and caviar made his stomach turn. My tummy would have behaved no differently. The American contingent, including the First Lady Barbara, was sick to its stomach after the incident.

Clearly, Sonia Ji is in distinguished company. As the Congress Party apparatchiks mull over their former President’s unfortunate choice of words while apparently expressing sympathy for India’s President Murmu, they will also be wondering what went wrong in the just concluded Delhi assembly elections. The party could not even muster a single seat and lost their deposit in a staggering 67 out of 70 seats. Evidently, this represents a double hat-trick of ducks in Delhi for the party. A rare, if dubious, record. One’s heart bleeds.

Alas, poor Sonia!