Going forward in firm reverse gear

When asked by his superiors why he had retreated on the battlefield when his specific orders were to advance, a commander known as much for his grasp of semantics as of military strategy, replied that he had, in fact, advanced — to the rear, a stratagem that would have been approved by the Duke of Plaza Toro who led his troops from what in local parlance is known as the ‘backside’. Such back-and-forth dialectics were recently demonstrated by Chandrababu Naidu and other members of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) when they walked backward in protest against the ruling YSRCP government that they charged has put the stalled Amaravati project in indefinite cold storage.

The TDP’s ‘reverse walk’ was an ambulatory response to the government’s policy of ‘reverse tendering’ that, by the scrapping of old tenders and asking for fresh tenders, had put the brakes on the ambitious project. That backwards and forwards can be interchangeable directions is evidenced by what might be called the reverse social engineering of a system of reservations in which the fast track to progress is often seen to be that of backtracking, in a process of competitive casteism to ever greater degrees of backwardness. To sum up such social dialectics, we could paraphrase a parade ground order: by the left, backward morcha!