Good Cop-Bad Cop Routine

The coveted ‘good cop’ in any situation is our Yuvaraj Rahul Gandhi. He does not react to anything that happens in this country - be it the Coal scam, 2G scam, Commonwealth scam, Helicopter scam or anything. But he will be available at hand with the coveted job of damage control at the eleventh hour

It is an age-old popular routine in police circles. First, a cop encounters the party. It gives a jolt to the offender. He wilts under pressure. And then the usual exploitation follows. Suppose he resists. Suppose the victim turns against him and the situation becomes nasty. Suppose the encounter turns into an embarrassment. The good cop jumps into action. He starts the damage control exercise. This second cop makes all the right moves, chides his colleague, cautions him against the indiscretion and apologises to the victim, patronises him and disappears with the so-called bad cop. This is a time-tested method to neutralise the situation. Painting the original cop as the bad cop by the interfering cop is a routine - specialised as insulation to an otherwise slippery situation. It is Commedia dell’arte, the 16th century Italian mask theatre, an improvisation with a ‘mask’ on.

Congress being a party with decades of experience has the wisdom and machinery to resort to this theatre time and again. The coveted ‘good cop’ in any situation is our Yuvaraj Rahul Gandhi. He does not react to anything that happens in this country - be it the Coal scam, 2G scam, Commonwealth scam, Helicopter scam or anything. But he will be available at hand with the coveted job of damage control at the eleventh hour. When things go wrong, he wakes up like the legendry Rip Van Winkle.

When the ordinance protecting the convicted MPs and MLAs was cleared by the Union Cabinet and when all opposition parties rose in one voice that it was immoral and unconstitutional, when President Pranab Mukherjee called the Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde and Kapil Sibal to seek their clarification - the good cop Rahul Gandhi gate crashed into the press conference of Ajay Maken, in charge of the Congress media communication and shocked the entire nation as also the party ranks by terming the ordinance as nonsense and deserve to be torn and thrown away. He categorically condemned the step taken by the government saying that this ordinance born out of political considerations, and the political parties - including his own - should stop this kind of compromises. “We should stop this nonsense’’ were exactly his words. And as an afterthought he called the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who was in conference with President Obama in the United States, saying that he had great respect for his acumen and leadership. Who can do this turn around except of course - the good cop! And the ordinance was promptly shelved.

And when all hell broke loose after the categorical indictment of the committee which went into the Adarsh Scam that there was an obvious mala fide and trespass of law, the Maharashtra Government summarily rejected the report taking shelter under the refusal of the State Governor to proceed against the then Chief Minister Ashok Chavan. There was uproar in political circles. Immediately the good cop entered the fray saying that the committee report has to be reconsidered. The bad cop - meaning the Chief Minister of Maharashtra - turned around and within hours relented. It is now known that Prithviraj Chavan has excluded all the politicians except Ashok Chavan and left all the bureaucrats in the lurch!

Rahul Gandhi boasted saying that in this country only one party (meaning his) is talking about creating a framework to fight corruption, forgetting of course that his party was at the helm for the last decade and it is still ‘talking’ while specialising in any number of scams!

The moot question is when this tamasha can be performed with the usual finesse? Not certainly when it is a question of fundamental shift of the national policy regarding the erring politicians. Not when the ‘Mother’ of all scams manifested with the tacit blessings of so many high-placed leaders, bureaucrats, army generals etc. This is a small time routine and is usually called ‘low comedy’ in the parlance of theatrics and must be confined only to small manoeuvres.

The pity is our good cop will be always busy in reshaping the badly maligned party cadres - not bothering about the scams that are surfacing at regular intervals and wakes up only and only when he was asked to ‘gatecrash’ to save the most embarrassing situation. But nowadays there are any number of scams - like Agusta Westland helicopter scam and Veerabhadra Singh scam etc., that the so-called good cop has to work overtime to put in his performance.

This routine, unfortunately, either becomes misplaced or brazenly outdated because it is not anymore a good cop versus bad cop; it has sunk to bad cop versus worst cop routine and the resultant ‘damage’ that is supposed to be controlled has sunk to disaster. And we are merely hundred days away from the final destiny and looking into the barrel from the other end.

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