Watch the turncoats

With the election process in progress what will be most interesting is how our political leaders will start jumping from one party to another. While some of them will shift from one camp to another on sensing that are not likely to get nomination from the parties they have been with for the past few years, a second group will switch over soon after they find that their respective parties have denied them tickets. This game of switching allegiance from one party to another and also from one ideology to another makes interesting time-pass for the common people. There will be one bunch of leaders who will call the top leaderhship names immediately upon being denied tickets. The people of Assam has already seen what Tezpur MP Ram Prasad Sharma has done and said even as he discovered that his name was not sent by the state screening committee for renomination. He particularly targeted senior BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma and made several critical remarks against him. He also lambasted chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal for remaining 'silent' when his name was not sent. RP Sharma is only one example. There will be dozens of them who will also jump to other parties. For such people, ideology and respect for the party which he or she served, for the party which had made them MPs for five years, become suddenly irrelevant. They refuse to accept the fact that they were inefficient, ineffective, nom-performing, insensitive towards the needs and problems of the people of their respective constituencies and so on. The fail to realise that their election to Parliament five years ago had not brought about any kind of significant change or improvement in the lives of the people who belong to their respective constituencies. What they can least understand or realise is the manner in which people despise them, make fun and caricature of them, and in some cases also feel ashamed of telling others that they had voted for such persons. Incidentally, this is also a part of this wonderful game called democracy, with many of our politicians providing some kind of entertainment, if not anything else, to the hapless voters.