Many-many years ago, when Bihar was the badlands of the country (it is much better now), I had a chance encounter with a state politician. Travelling in the First AC of the Magadh Express from Patna to New Delhi, I found a middle-aged respectable-looking gentleman as my cabin companion. He was attired like a typical politician - Khadi kurta, half-jacket etc. We got talking in a short while.
The gentleman told me that he was travelling by train as the last resort. There weren’t many flights from Patna to Delhi then. I thought he was trying to impress me that he was a jet setter. So, I humoured him and asked what his problem was in travelling by train; after all we were travelling First AC. He nonchalantly told me that he could be an easy target during a train journey and might be killed easily. A gunshot was all that it took.
Taken aback I asked him why he would be killed so wantonly. The man said that he was a sitting MLA and had many enemies. Surely, I agreed with him, that politics did come with certain risks. But what would one gain by killing him once he was already elected an MLA. One could understand such elimination of a rival before election, not after.
What he told me was revealing. He said that he had defeated his rival by a narrow margin in the previous Vidhan Sabha elections. If he was killed now and if there was a fresh election, which there would be, the rival had every chance of winning it. I was simultaneously shocked and enlightened. Political killings suddenly unravelled as a game of marginal costing in game theory. I was also a bit frightened and asked him, “Are you saying that some gunmen will break into the compartment and shoot you down? So, there is every possibility of my becoming an unwitting victim, a collateral damage!” He replied, quite unemotionally, “Yes, it is likely that you may get shot too.”
I sat quietly for a few moments, nonplussed. Then I asked him wasn’t he to move around in his area all the time and that he was a sitting duck in any case. He looked at me with bemusement as if I was a child asking kindergarten level question. Then he said, “Arre nahin bhai, we are always surrounded by our own gunmen when we venture out.” A familiar picture flashed in my mind of a jeep with the Netaji sitting in the front, by the driver, and half a dozen stengun and double-barrel gun wielding goons, some sitting and some swinging on the footrest and window-sills.
I then asked him if he has been given some special security by the government. He laughed, with some sadness and also some pride, and said that they were his private security guards. I was curious to know more and enquired about the expenses he would be incurring on such elaborate private security. He said, again with sadness and pride, that each person cost him six to seven thousand rupees a month in salary, food and lodgings extra, totalling about twelve thousand per person. A quick calculation established that the politician sitting across me was spending some seventy thousand rupees per month on his security alone. I think it was double an MLA’s salary in those days!
So friends, think again before venturing. I can recommend some good Mutual Funds, where an SIP of seventy thousand per month can make you incalculably rich, within four Vidhan Sabha terms, sitting at home, while you twiddle your thumbs around the trigger of your rusting AK-47.
