Mithun Chakraborty’s allusion to Jungle Raj and BJP’s deadly bite reflect the reality

Mithun Chakraborty, the ageing Bengali film star who has joined Bharatiya Janata Party, was articulating public sentiment when he declared at Kolkata that he the politician was like a ‘pure’ Cobra, and one bite from him was enough to turn people into portraits on walls. As he dramatically said in Bengali, “Ek Chobolei Chhobi”. People for long have considered politicians as treacherous snakes and it should not have come as a surprise. Memes followed and one showed a cobra at a door with the reassuring message that it was just Chakraborty on a door-to-door campaign. The star himself elaborated that he meant to say that BJP’s bite was worse than the others. In a TV interview he added that the Prime Minister had asked him to join hands, presumably to bite rivals, in order to build a ‘Sonar Bangla’, a golden Bengal. Chakraborty, Mithun da now to BJP supporters, wondered what was the harm in joining the journey.

A former Naxalite, Chakraborty’s ‘Build Bengal’ journey has taken him from the Left to the Right without much effort. And while he was made a Member of the Rajya Sabha by Mamata Banerjee, he attended the House just thrice and resigned in the wake of the alleged ‘Sarada’ scam. There were horrified gasps that with the Prime Minister on stage, someone could invoke the curse of violence, dead bodies, crematoriums and snake bites directed at political rivals. Others sarcastically asked if the BJP represented the animal kingdom dominated by snakes, scorpions and asses and ruled by a lion. But on reflection, one must actually be thankful to the film star for calling a spade a spade. He is not the first person to equate politics and politicians as snakes. Even Mahatma Gandhi is credited with saying “Politics envelopes us like the coils of a snake and there is no way out but to wrestle with it”. Indeed, if one looks around, it is easy to identify a much more sinister animal world than in George Orwell’s more placid ‘Animal Farm’. There are wolves, some in sheep’s clothing; there are certainly foxes and hyenas. There are wild bulls and pigs. And of course, there are lions, cows and donkeys besides the vultures in politics. How can one forget chamelions, pests, bats and the owls?

To be fair, other politicians have also drawn similarities between politics and the ‘Jungle Raj’. Former US President Donald Trump would often recite from a song, ‘The Snake’, to pillory opponents and make the point that snakes would always bite and that is why it was better to cut their heads off. In the run up to the last general election, Home Minister Amit Shah compared the opposition with snakes, cats and dogs seeking refuge on a common platform following the ‘Modi deluge’.

An unnamed RSS leader was quoted by a magazine as saying that the then Gujarat chief minister was like a scorpion sitting on a ‘Shiva Ling’: you cannot remove him by using your hands nor can you use your slippers’. With politicians themselves acknowledging that their world is not very different from the animal kingdom, there should be no surprises to see the ‘Jungle Raj’ around us, where ‘might is right’ and where the rule is survival of the wealthiest. Lessons for the people are that they need to find antidotes, defang the snakes and trap and tame the wild.