Till the 88th minute, Bayern had seen itself within pinching distance of reaching the Champions League final to face their German arch-rivals Borussia Dortmund. But then, Big Wobble struck.
Once Big Wobbled, you saw Teutonic calmness – yes, that’s a Pitroda-esque ethnological cliche, so kill me – give way to decapitated chicken panic. And sure enough, with 10 minutes of added time, a double-espressoed Real Madrid tucked in the winning goal and called in the fat lady to sing. Final scoreline: Real 2 Tropicana Munich 1.
As it happens, earlier the same day, there was another Big Wobble. For anyone who cares to acknowledge strange messaging in BJP these days, at an election rally at Karimnagar in Telangana, the prime minister accused Congress of striking a deal with ‘Ambani-Adani’ to make ‘shehzada’ – that is, the prince formerly known as Rahul Gandhi – stop his usual tirade against the Thompson and Thomson of India Inc. Especially visual was the question that BJP’s guarantor presented to the crowd: ‘Were tempos filled with currency notes sent to Congress?’ Narendra Modi channelled his inner Gabbar, asking, ‘Ambani-Adani se kitna maal uthaya hai?’
To charge one’s principal opponent of getting paid by corporate fat cats so as to refrain from casting slurs against those very corporate fat cats is usually seen as a mild rhetorical device used for political virtue-signalling by everyone but Che t-shirt-wearers. That Modi was overturning the usual narrative of Gandhi — that BJP was in league with AA, making the central government a Deewar-flavoured ‘suited-booted sarkar’ – would have been chuckle-inducing…
…were it not for the fact that Modi had just conjured up the image of AA doing unto Congress what Congress usually accuses AA of doing unto BJP: filling tempos with dubious cash. (Interestingly, ‘tempo’ is the generic name given in India to open-back vans originally manufactured by the Hamburg-based Vidal & Sohn Tempo-Werke that shut shop in 1977.) Who needs electoral bonds when you have tempos? Effectively, Modi was accusing AA of bribing Congress to make Gandhi shut up. Or, let me rephrase: Was Modi accusing AA of bribing Congress to make Gandhi shut up? Congress response was, unsurprisingly, very Congress-like. Partymen trotted up instances since elections were announced – the duration that the PM said Gandhi had been mum about any AA-GoI nexus – of their boss bringing up the ‘government-industrialists complex’. They even made the by-now quite reasonable demand in ED-CBI season that Enforcement Directorate and CBI look into AA possibly laundering money on the back of open vans. Modi’s ‘sudden’ lurch towards national socialism – or critique of crony capitalist behaviour – may well be seen by his admirers as a clever countermove to hit two birds with one stone: one, get rid of any ‘suited-booted’ connotation during this poll season that his government may reek of for some non-attar-applied nostrils; two, come across as a more relatable Thomas Picketty of Indian politics than any entitled member of the opposition.
But what about AA? Even if you believe that the PM picked up the phone and called A and A, telling them, ‘Listen, I’ll have to badmouth you a bit for a bigger cause. Don’t mind,’ people are liable to wonder well after the hurly-burly’s done and the electoral battle’s lost and won, where AA stands in the scheme of things. And more importantly, where a BJP government stands in its dealings with India Inc in general, and AA in particular.
Whether BJP forms the next government or not, we may have just witnessed a Great Wobble. Every time AA interacts with a future government, we shall now see tempos.
