It has been a one-way street, downhill all the way, as the political discourse has rapidly descended from neech to “buffoon”, “clown prince”, “court jester” and a string of other impolite terms that today’s self-styled leaders take such pride in using. Indeed there appears a competition among them to establish who is better equipped with a vocabulary that would pose headaches to newspaper editors of yesteryear who drummed it into their reporters and “subs” that theirs’ was a publication read by the entire family, and yet simultaneously strived hard to tell it as it was.

The distinction now is not what is “parliamentary” or otherwise ~ not when the remarks of a Prime Minister are deleted from the record of the apex legislature. No wonder that out of print is the secretariat’s compilation ‘The House Laughs’, for the humour of an Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Piloo Mody is no longer in vogue, not indeed does an S Jaipal Reddy force recourse to a dictionary.

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Today the stress is on the nasty, hurtful, insulting, degrading. The malaise had proved contagious ~ ministers, party presidents and spokespersons (regardless of gender) stridently indulge in what is anything but comic. It is no longer an aim to “bring the House down” with laughter, the preferred goal is character-demolition. Attacks on policy have given way to personal vilification. And the smiles ~ or a hug and wink ~ at the end of each episode testify to the inexpensive thrills lapped up in the legislatures, TV studios, social media etc.

Where will all this end? The theory of divide-and-rule no longer applies to the colonialists of the previous century ~ it is very much part of contemporary politics. The people are divided on the basis of language, region, religion, caste, eating-habits and political parties have made a fine-art of manipulating such divisions for electoral advantage.

The first thing they note before any election is the caste composition of the constituency: and that influences the selection of the candidate to be fielded. Then money and muscle-power are added to the battle-plans. Is it surprising that no elected person ~ a Prime Minister included ~ is accepted as being “ours”? The Election Commission may frame rules, evolve codes of conduct and so on but they add up to nothing when playing dirty is the order of the day.

Democracy is being subjected to destruction of the people, for the people and by the people ~ there can be no running away from that. Back to some of the tirades. Arun Jaitley has greater flourish with words than economic aptitude, and Rahul Gandhi suffered a memory-lapse when recalling galli galli me shor hai ~ that ditty had triggered a furore when first recited by a kid on ever-inefficient Doordarshan the Bofors bombshell was exploding, the chor she spoke about was Rajiv. So does “buffoon” or “clown prince” sound so terribly unreal?