A Game of Chess

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” Franklin Roosevelt’s honest and candid admission of political events as pre-planned has never been truer than what had happened in Bihar in less than 24 hours. Even Vishy Anand will have to salute the political masters whose planned moves on the political chess board of Bihar have successfully spaced the board with saffron pieces that augurs well for the saffronization of the National chess board, come 2019. So now we have a modified version of the popular nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty had a great Fall

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall

Humpty dumped Dumpty who had a great fall.

All Rahul’s men and all Lalu’s men

Could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

   The arrow, that was lighted jointly by the hand and the lantern 20 months back has no need for either and is now absorbed by the blooming lotus. It has been a bloodless surgical strike, drowning the Gandhi scion and the Lalu scion in its saffron bath. The saffron deluge, powerful as the Kosi floods, has washed away the Mahaghatbandhan before it could be raised to resist it. Like The Sorrow of Bihar that shifted its course from flowing westwards to flowing eastwards, the arrow has shifted its course from the Mahagatbandhan towards the Lotus.

 The history of Bihar has now got a new script, meticulously worked out where the alignment is     between foes and not friends. The allies of the past are the new opponents and the saffronites are the newfound frenemies. The astute game that had been played on the Bihar chess board reminds me of of  T.S.Eliot’s ‘ A Game of Chess’ in his modern classic The Waste Land.

 ‘A Game of Chess’ begins with a description of a woman sitting on a beautiful chair. Both the woman and the room are magnificently attired, perhaps to the point of excess. One of the paintings in the room depicts the rape of Philomela, a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the original story, King Tereus’s wife bids him to bring her sister Philomela to her. Upon meeting Philomela, Tereus falls instantly and hopelessly in love; nothing must get in the way of his conquest. Racked with lust, he steals away with her and rapes her in the woods.  He then ties her up and cuts off her tongue so that she may not tell others of what had happened. He returns to his wife, but Philomela is able to weave on a loom what has befallen her; she gives the loom to her sister, who, upon discovering the truth, retrieves Philomela, and takes revenge on him. Tereus flies into a rage, chasing both Philomela and his wife out of the palace, and all three of them transform into birds. The speechless Philomela becomes a nightingale.

One does not have to look for a one to one parallel, though such a comparison is notwide off the mark. The Modi-Shaw duo sits pretty in New Delhi looking at the painting of Bihar, depicting Crown Prince Nitish with his twin partners, the Lalus and the Ragas. The Lalus were his early friends, who had in recent times influenced him to take the Ragas also into his durbar. Racked with ambition to become the PM with the help of the Lalus and the Ragas, he decides on the Mahagatbandhan . But Nitish suspects Lalu of playing a different tune and so cuts off both Lalu’s tongue and Raga’s hand and goes in search of Dilli durbar to bolster him.

 The section in Eliot’s poem depicting the painting of the rape of Philomela – an example of love cascading into brutality and violence – is the scene in Bihar today where one sees an example of friendship cascading into betrayal and trickery. Crown Prince is lured by the promise of privileged status he could enjoy in their company- a promise that in reality is more menacing than beautiful. He fails to see how the duo trapped  him by calling him the MVP(most valued person) and made him choose the company of foes turned friends but at a heavy price of relinquishing his ambitions to become the PM  and being sneered at as a turncoat.

 “A Game of Chess” is from Thomas Middleton’s seventeenth-century play of the same title, which posited the said game as an allegory to describe historical machinations –- specifically the brewing conflict between England and Spain. Here the political machinations to abort the Mahaghatbhadan in its foetal stage are clearly seen in the political chess game that is being played. When the Crown Prince asks the Modi-Shaw duo what he should do, they tell  him “We shall play a Game of Chess”. Chess recalls “lidless eyes,” as its players bide the time and wait “for a knock upon the door.” The first knock- and that a felling knock- was on Lalu and his children by the Enforcement Directorate to nail the Lalu clan as corrupt. Chess becomes the quintessential game played on the corrupt board of Bihar, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of all moral scruples. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board.

Crown Prince is hailed by the Modi-Shaw duo as the shining Knight in a saffron armour, striding across Bihar putting out the lantern flame and the hand that had lit it. The narrative scripted by the Modi- Shaw duo has a new message given through the Crown prince- It is no longer the hand that rocks the cradle, but it is the cradle that rocks the hand.