London Eye: Stick to debate or debate with sticks

But all this appeared only hazily in shadowy distance. On campus conflicting views turned up as only another kind of otherness; and otherness India has always offered more plentifully than any other. It seemed strange that those we inferred on the Delhi University campus to be some lesser cousins of the RSS were going around winning student elections when they should have been making fun of their teachers, or at least studying. In a different kind of strange, JNU was a place where jhola-bearers spoke with suspect passion against The System while they secretly prepared for IAS exams; if they failed the secret stayed, if they passed they were going to change the system from within. Most didn’t take either left or right very seriously. The rest of us would hang around, or ‘spare’ as we’d say, over cheap coffee and stale bondas to flirt in a seeking and mostly not finding way. In the half century of progress since then, why does this feel now like the most progressive ideology of all.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn – he still is that just about – has announced a tickling reshuffle in his shadow cabinet after leading the party to one of its worst ever defeats in an election. He’ll soon be gone, and not too soon for the party and its MPs who’d been campaigning for years for him to go. Corbyn resisted them with his sole virtue of sticking on regardless. Back in June 2016 Conservative prime minister David Cameron said in parliament it was really in his party’s interest for Cameron to stay, but that Corbyn should listen to his own MPs -- “For Heaven’s sake, man, go.” Cameron spoke more truly than he could have known then. It did turn out to be in the interest of the Conservative Party that Corbyn stayed; Labour was sunk more by its own leader than by Boris Johnson in this election gone. But Corbyn appears to have not noticed the election result.

As a part of his reshuffle Corbyn has appointed the Sikh MP from Slough Tan Dhesi his parliamentary private secretary with timing as impeccable as the appointment of a new first officer by a captain who has just wrecked his own ship. So Dhesi will now, for the next couple of months become the “eyes and ears” for Corbyn among his MPs. What could Dhesi’s eyes see among MPs from the party, or his ears hear? They could only say now even louder that they were right all along in saying Corbyn was leading the party to ruin. So if Dhesi tells Corbyn now what they are saying they always said, perhaps Corbyn will listen. Too late for him, and worse, too late for his party.