The chapter & worse of political remedies

Those who would endorse the felicitous prescription that laughter is the best medicine would approve of the claim recently made by a Shiv Sena MP who, addressing an audience of doctors and other medical professionals while inaugurating a new hospital in Maharashtra, said that he could cure all ailments that people suffered from by taking the patient’s pulse, reciting the appropriate remedial mantra, and supplementing the treatment, if need be, with a dose of vibhuti, or sacred ash, which he could conjure out of thin air at will.

However, the honourable MP might be held culpable by his colleagues in the political, if not the medical, profession of having wittingly or otherwise divulged a trade secret of their craft.

The panacea — or should that be placebo? — offered by politicians of all persuasions is based on feeling the pulse of the body politic, followed by the ritual incantation of potent mantras known as manifestos and pre-poll promises, made all the more efficacious by being liberally laced with the metaphoric ash to which the nostrums proffered by any and all competing therapeutists have been reduced. And, if at the end of the day, the treatment turns out to be no more than an exercise in quackery, such inconvenient facts can be glossed over easily by those who, having taken the Hypocritic Oath, have mastered the art of spin-doctoring.