Cleaning the CM's shoes

The story goes that an English aristocrat was shocked to see Abraham Lincoln polishing his shoes. “In England , no gentleman polishes his own shoes,” the aristocrat remarked. “Whose shoes does he polish then?”, the 16th President of the USA quipped. Some kind of answer to that query was provided last Sunday in Naunipur village by UP chief minister Mayawati's PSO (personal security officer). The officer and gentleman was shown on television cleaning the CM's footwear with his handkerchief even while Mayawati stood patiently. Later, Nawab Ali, an MLA belonging to UP's ruling Bahujan Samaj Party, stated that the CM had never asked for her shoes to be cleaned and that the media was over-reacting to a very spontaneous gesture. “If I go to a village tomorrow and step into a puddle, the people there might spontaneously want to help clean up my shoes. There's nothing wrong in it,” the MLA argued.

It could, the investigative media found, be not just a case of spontaneity but extension! The shoe-cleaning official had just received a post-retirement extension after serving as Mayawati's PSO for 15 years. And shoes are an extension of the feet. Ergo, cleaning Mayawati's shoes could be considered equivalent to touching the chief minister’s feet, something which is in tune with the prevailing ethos. If Uttar Pradesh state Congress president Rita Bahuguna did not go to town on the incident, it could be because she remembered a previous occasion when her then-party CM Narain Dutt Tiwari was seen adjusting the footwear of the AICC general secretary Sanjay Gandhi at Lucknow airport. That was also during an Emergency (pun intended !) , though not exactly like the latest one when the threat posed to the Mayawati footwear by the Naunipur mud had to be tackled by the ever-vigilant PSO. And so what if the members of the US Secret Service are expected not to clean the shoes of American presidents but merely to stand in the line of fire!