OEDIPUS WRECKS

OEDIPUS WRECKS

A cry of agony came from the King. At last he understood. "All true!
Now shall my light be changed to darkness. I am the accursed." He had
murdered his father, he had married his father's wife, his own mother.
There was no help for him, for her, for their children. All were
accursed. - Oedipus Rex, Sophocles (~409 BC).

On June 23, 1980, late morning, in the clear blue skies of New Delphi,
Bactria, a small red Sukhoi SU-26M aerobatic plane crashed near the old
military aerodrome at Safdarjang, a suburb of New Delphi. Only minutes
before it had performed a series of loops, slow rolls, Cuban eights,
inverted flights, horizontal inside snap rolls, vertical rolls,
hesitation rolls, rolling circles and while performing gyroscopic
maneuvers it seemed to stall and failed to get out. A large crowd on
the fields and on the rooftops nearby was enthralled by the maneuvers.
Then came the agonizing minutes of slow deathly spiral as the plane
headed nose down to earth. The people on the ground were transfixed in
horror and in a state of suspended trance as they watched the plane hit
the ground. It crashed into a huge orange fireball - a lifeless mangled
body of a handsome young man was thrown off of the plane. Oedipus
Seleucus the golden boy of Bactria was dead.

Oedipus was the most powerful man in Bactria. He was never elected, he
was not the King, he commanded no conquering armies, he held no great
office of the state - he was only his mother's son and the Supreme
Servitor. He commandeered the Bactrian congress and the senate to adopt
unanimously the Edict of New Delphi. It controlled all aspects of
Bactrian Citizenship under the definition of Kindred Blood. Then came
the draconian laws Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practice (MRTP)
Act, Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), and the Urban Land Ceiling
(ULC) Act, were all socialistic, supposedly aimed against the rich,
businessmen and industrialists. In reality these were the instruments
to extract money from the rich and powerful.

The Permit-License-Quota-Trinity was founded on these three laws. All
the three gave a lot of discretion to the Chief Executive and the
handpicked Ministers for exceptions and it is the exercise of these
discretionary and exemption powers that facilitated the collection of
huge sums of money. What was worse, previously, there was direct
dealing between the Grand Syndicate of the Party Elders and businessmen
for the accumulation of Party funds. The Grand Syndicate of Party
Elders in turn selected the candidate Congressmen and Senators. These
Congressmen and Senators became the servitors of the Dynasty.

Now, the state bureaucracy, because of the three laws, was for the
first time in its history co-opted into the moneymaking business. That
was the beginning of the unholy corruptive and criminal nexus between
state bureaucrats and the Dynasty's servitors. Oedipus was the Grand
Servitor to whom the congressmen and senators were beholden. Civil
servants, politicians, and the criminals came to form the Exalted
Trinity of Bactria. Oedipus reportedly had accumulated $ 126 million in
Pictet et Cie., the famed Swiss Private Bank on the beautiful shores of
Lake Geneva. The secret account was engraved as the Riddle of Sphinx
inside the ring. Only Oedipus's mother knew the correct answer - and
the secret Swiss bank account number - 423.

Finally there was the Law of Forced Sterilization. The stated goal was
Population Control, but it extended, like the Nazi Laws of Nuremberg,
to feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, St. Vitus's dance,
blindness, deafness or any inheritable malformation. Over a period of 2
years countless Bactrians underwent forced sterilization without
consent. A chartered bus carrying college professors to a seminar was
diverted to a hospital to undergo vasectomy despite their protest.
Trainloads of people were transported on buses to sterilization
centers, which worked overtime. Many women from villages ran to the
hills or hid in the forests. There was a sense of terror throughout the
country.

Under the guise of Urban Beautification Program, hundreds of thousands
of beggars were rounded up in trucks and dumped in distant rural areas.
In the War Against Poverty the poor became the victims of the war. His
deeds and misdeeds were a legion. He drove his armored sports car at
very high speed; he never stopped at red lights. He was married to
Medea, daughter of a general, but he had a bevy of girl friends, chief
among them was glamorous Ruxana. His favorite song in Bactrian was,
"Ruxana yun na ghabrana, tere mere pyar ko kya karega zamana" (Ruxana
don't worry, love between you and me is eternal). He presided over
demolition of huts and shops, forcible transportation of the destitute
and the poor and arbitrary decisions on land allotment in New
Delphi.

Oedipus was the crown prince without the crown. His word was the law.
His goons were the Ultimate Enforcers. Chief Executives, Senior
Ministers, Congressmen, Senators and Ambassadors went to his home for a
morning darshan (homage). Now Oedipus was dead, his handsome face and
body was mangled.

But this story began in ancient times. Alexander the Great defeated
Indian King Porus at the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC. Ancient Bactria
was a Greco-Indian kingdom. The new colonists, chiefly Greek
mercenaries, old and wounded men, introduced Macedonian methods of
farming and agriculture to the mountain tribes. Many Greeks married
Oriental women; thus began the fusing of the nations according to the
plan which had been simmering in Alexander's vision for the
future.

Bactria was a democracy and a republic, however the office of the
Supreme Head of Government, Supremo, was hereditary - handed down from
generation to generation to the Seleucus Dynasty. Seleucus, the founder
of the Seleucid Empire, was the general who retained his Indo-Oriental
wife gifted to him by Alexander the Great. By the intermarriage of
Europeans and Orientals the age-long distinction of Greek and
"barbarian" was broken down. But there were divisions in the Bactrian
society due to religions, castes, languages and wealth.

The Seleucids could trace their family lineage to ancient gods Zeus and
Io. Oedipus's grandfather Menoceus I was the Supreme Head of Government
- he was deified after the State Funeral. Menoceus I had only one child
- Jocasta. She had a lonely childhood supervised by her two beautiful
aunts Phaedra and Elektra. Phaedra was Bactrian Ambassador to UN and
Parthia, and Elektra was the Bactrian Ambassador to Babylonia and
Macedon. Jocasta married Laius in 1942, after an intense love affair,
in Europe. They had two boys from their marriage - Menoceus II and
Oedipus. Soon thereafter Jocasta abandoned Laius, and her marriage and
went to live with her father. Father and daughter had a very loving
relationship. Official biographers of Jacosta mentioned very little of
Laius. Jocasta's father made Laius a non-person and Laius simply
disappeared from the scene. In later years Laius's images were
airbrushed from the family photographs - Laius died quietly in 1960 as
a non-person.

The office of Supreme Head of Government was in the gift of the Grand
Syndicate of Party Elders. After the death of Menoceus I, the Grand
Syndicate of the Party Elders made the fatal mistake of calling
Jocasta, a gungi gudiya (a dumb doll). There was a fear that Morpheus,
the wily satrap of a western state, or Jason, a state minister and a
member of the untouchable class who served her dead father, might usurp
the hereditary office of Supremo. Jocasta took no chances and
immediately launched a political coup against the Grand Syndicate of
the Party Elders. Jocasta and her loyal sycophants created her own
Party named after herself. She offered money and high positions to the
members of the congress and the senate; she rewarded the moneyed
classes with trading monopolies; and she tempted state bureaucrats with
rapid advancements. The Grand Syndicate of the Party Elders watched
helplessly this coup de theatre in pained silence. The coup was over in
48 hours - State of Siege was proclaimed. After the death of her father
Menoceus I, the object of her love was Oedipus. Jocasta only loved
three men in her life -- first her husband, then her father and, at the
end, her son.

On June 25,1975, by fiat Oedipus's mother Jocasta was acclaimed as the
Supremo. Tanks and APCs patrolled the streets. Dawn to dusk curfew was
imposed. The Phalanx Troops were ready to shoot protesters on sight.
The Sacred Constitution and the Bill of Rights were suspended until
further notice. Jocasta had subverted the Supreme Court and installed a
rubber-stamp Chief Justice, the puppet President, a poet, did what he
was told, Parliament was declared sine die and the levers of power in
the civil service was brought under the direct control of her Office of
Supreme Guidance. Oedipus and his goons had dynamited transformers
feeding power to the newspapers and firebombed the courts. The state
controlled TV Delphic Vision and Radio Sky Messenger played martial
music. Over 200,000 were arrested and incarcerated without being
charged. Jocasta packed the judiciary, law enforcement agencies and the
secret police with her sycophants.

Son Oedipus, a dropout from high school, became the De Facto Supremo
and Ministers and Chief Ministers from all over Bactria were taking
orders from him. Oedipus recruited 100,000 goons in the Youth Wing of
the Party. They roughed up anyone not yielding to their Great Cause.
She spoke of socialism and Gareebi Hatao (War against Poverty); state
ownership of the banks and general insurance. As a sop to nationalists
she offered Angrezi Hatao (Eradicate English) campaign.

Mother and son also fashioned new instruments, new laws which would be
populist as well as facilitative in the collection of unlimited sums of
money. A new financial instrument was introduced - the suitcase. These
vast quantities of money changed hands in suitcases. It was called
suitcase futures trading. The 'donor' took suitcases to the Supremo's
house, and the Party Member, who introduced him to the Supremo, desired
that the Supremo should ceremonially touch the suitcases as per the
sentiments of the donor.

Bactrians remembered that Government in those days did not make a
policy but they decided every request case by case; that is, suitcase
by suitcase.
Oedipus and Jocasta raised nepotism to the level of public policy and
promoted Dynastic rule as a laudable goal. The burgeoning cadres of
ministers and legislators who have been nursed to their positions by
their doting sires thanked Jocasta and Oedipus, their patron saints,
for validating the practice of unabashed nepotism. Secondly, by
involving a large number of her cronies in the process of fund
collection, Jocasta institutionalized corruption as a part of the
political culture. The wheeling-dealing of Jocasta's men became the
favorite parlor talk. Some of the Party Elders went to the extent of
saying that now even empty suitcases were not being returned by the
Supremos staff -they are kept the suitcases as souvenir of past
generosities of the donor. There was even an Honorable Office of the
Keeper of Suitcases adjoining Supremo's office.

The Party used the State Funds to distribute its grace and favor to
those who gave money and patronage to Jocasta and Oedipus. In New
Delphi there was as the New Class - Black Money Billionaires, with
palatial homes and conspicuous consumption marked by hideously
expensive family weddings in 5 star hotel dream palaces. The New
Industrialists from the dusty plains of Sogdiana and Gandhara had very
little capital of their own. State Funds were the biggest investor in
these undercapitalized companies. State Banks organized Loan Melas
(Loan Fairs) to distribute loans to the Party faithful, which were not
repaid by the "borrowers" - taxpayers lost money in State
Capitalism.

Oedipus wanted to design, develop, produce and sell a People's Car -
Zephyr. He got the necessary permits in 48 hours, by ignoring of the
requests of more qualified and more financially sound companies with
decades of experience. Car distributorships were handed out to favored
sycophants all over the country and, from each distributor and monies
were collected. Cronus, the then Defense Minister got him 1000 acres of
land near Arcadia at a throwaway price over the protest of the Bactrian
Air Force. The plant did not produce a single Zephyr car during the
lifetime of Oedipus.

Government officers, who protested against this crazy scheme were
quickly removed to sinecure posts and were shadowed and harassed by the
Revenue Police and the dreaded Criminal Bureau of Investigations. Those
who complained faced the harassment from Tax Audits, Criminal
Investigations, Summary Detention or the frightful midnight raids by
the Revenue Police. As a relief from the tension, Tainted Persons gave
Tax Raid Parties in basement private discos complete with fashionable
hostesses and Bactrian made Foreign Liquor cocktails.
The most shameful aspect of the State of Siege was not its harsh
imposition, but in the manner which the whole country succumbed to it
and accepted it meekly. "As I had expected not a dog barked," Jocasta
said later. Such was the condition in the World's Biggest Democracy
that hardly any newspapers denounced the action. No "middle class"
protests, and no member of the intelligentsia got up from their soft
sofas to complain. Performance of the Supreme Court as a guardian of
fundamental rights was deplorable. The Chief Justice and the highest
court in the land had failed the people in their hour of trial when the
entire country was turned into a vast prison yard. The Chief Justice
and the President meekly put their seal of approval of the gross
violations of the Sacred Constitution and the abrogation of the Bill of
Rights.
Jocasta and Oedipus were surprised by the ease with which they could
silence and subjugate democracy. It was feared that there might be
considerable resistance by Opposition parties backed by the
intelligentsia and sections of the politically conscious public. The
police all over the country were alerted to expect disturbances.
Instead, there was an explosion of sycophancy - the sycophants were
rewarded with jobs, favors and titles, medals and exalted awards.

Some newspaper editors went in a procession to the Supremo's house -
not to protest against the press censorship but to complain that the
censorship was not strict enough to prevent 'counter-revolutionaries'
from having their way.

The usually fire-eating trade unions behaved as if they had suddenly
ceased to exist. There was, of course, fear bordering on panic. Under
the Edict of New Delphi there was a law called the Maintenance of
Internal Security Act, MISA, anyone could be detained indefinitely
without the right to appeal to courts.

The harsh truth was that the people had become utterly cynical about
freedom and democracy. In short, Jocasta had outlawed the Sacred
Constitution; it had become a meaningless document to most people. It
was just not worth defending. Jocasta and Oedipus did fear some
resistance to the State of Siege. But there were admirers around her,
chiefly her son Oedipus, who were certain that outside the opposition
parties defiance would be nominal and could be taken care of by his
bullies. And this is exactly what happened.

With one billion people, Bactria developed into the world's largest
democracy and had elections. Only one out of two males and one out of
three females could read and write their own language. It had a middle
class of 200 million, but only 20 million paid income taxes. In the
last election it had 13,000 Elected Officials for various offices, of
which some 2,500 were convicts and four states had chief executives who
were convicts. Many politicians were convicted but no politicians
served time in jail. Presently the Office of the Commissioner of
Vigilance had an Internet Website with over 3,000 names of Corrupt
Officials and Police Chiefs. Bactria ranked near the top of World
Corruption Table. The movie and music industry was funded by the
Bactrian mafiosi. Film stars accepted apartments and Rolex watches as
tax-free payments. The sports stars accepted large sums of bribes to
throw away matches. All government transactions involved a small
nazrana (payment) -from the doorkeeper to the Minister. The Grand Nexus
was the exclusive club of corrupt politicians, bribe-taking state
bureaucrats, shady businessmen and common criminals.

It appeared that crime and corruption were non-issues for the voters of
Bactria. All the underworld dons and convicts, who contested the polls
either from behind bars or from hiding, were elected with big margins.
Politicians accused of offences such as murder, kidnapping and
extortion, the victory came easily as they did not have to bother
personally about their campaign - they all won by a handsome margin.
The victory of underworld dons was a clear indication that the
expectations of the electorate have been changing with the collapse of
the government machinery in the State. "It appeared that the people
have begun to revere criminals," remarked a senior political leader.
Senior Party leaders defended their decision to field criminals on the
grounds of their "winnability".

At the smoldering plane wreck site, Jocasta was hysterical, she was
looking frantically for the wedding band on Oedipus's finger - it was
glinting in the mid-morning sun. She lunged and pulled it off his
lifeless finger. There it was - the riddle of Sphinx "What creature,
the Sphinx had asked, "goes on four feet in the morning, on two at
noonday, on three in the evening?" That was the secret account number
of the Swiss bank account in Geneva - 423. Thereafter, she could not
bear to see the dead body of her beloved Oedipus. She had loved only
three men in her life - first, her husband; second, her own father; and
last, her own son. Now all three were dead.

Jocasta and the chorus sang:

"Alas!

Here was a sorrow that redoubles sorrow.

Where it will end? What else Fate hold in store?

While yet I clasp my dead son in my arms

Before me lies another struck by death.

Alas cruel doom. The mother's and the son's."

Jocasta panicked and fled. The Greek Chorus shrilled:

"The Queen has fled my lord, as if before

Some driving storms of grief. I fear that from

Her silence may break forth some great disaster."

There was dark premonition of Oedipus's death. Sophocles wrote,

"He (Oedipus) made a journey to consult the god, he said - and never
came back
home again. All died, except one terror-stricken man,
and he could tell us nothing - next to nothing."

In Sophocles's play Oedipus sang,

"I had not then come and slain my father.

Nor then would men have called me

Husband of her that bore me.

Now am I God's enemy, child of the guilty,

And she bore me has borne too my children;

And if there is evil surpassing evil,
That has come to Oedipus."

Oedipus was doomed before he was born to kill his father and marry his
mother, and commits both crimes unwittingly. Sophocles shows the
absolute injustice of divine preordinance; others point to the
unattractive sides of Oedipus's character -- his temper, his paranoia,
the way he threatens his political enemies, and the citizens with
arbitrary punishment, and his supreme arrogant conviction that his lack
of intellect can surmount any obstacles in his or his mother's path.
This view rendered Oedipus somehow culpable after the catastrophic
event; and his fate is rendered justifiable by his abrasive personality
and sexual tensions. Jocasta was damned for her love and admiration for
Oedipus.

Jocasta then had a series of torrid love affairs. She told her
confidante Pupulina that she delighted in being admired, liked to be
surrounded by good looking, witty, intelligent men, but the sexual side
of her was overdeveloped. What had upset the censorious mob in Bactria
were those passages that showed the lonely Jocasta to be a woman of
deep passion who, as a teenager, fell in love with her future husband
Laius. Free from her family, she had an affair with him in Europe that
lasted several years before they married, against her family's wishes,
back in Bactria. She was further plagued by rumors and gossip about
other affairs when her marriage to the womanizing Laius fell apart,
including an alleged fling with her father's private secretary,
Orestes. The Greco-Punjabi farce "Chaddhi Javaani Buddhe Noo" (The old
bird is getting horny) was banned.

The soothsayers and sycophants did not give a definitive yes or no as
to whether these relationships actually took place, relying instead on
the statements of contemporaries in Bactria. But what came through
clearly was Jocasta's preference for thuggish, rude and forceful men -
an obvious contrast to her father. Her husband Laius, her father's
secretary Orestes and her yoga teacher Haemon, and personal god-man
Teiresias, all fitted this description. She doted on her younger son
Oedipus who was of the same mold. He was a selfish, untalented and
unprincipled man who rode roughshod over his mother. His death in a
1980 plane crash broke her, personally and politically.

In "Oedipus Rex" love, loyalty, hatred, revenge, fear, deprivation, and
political ambition drive the characters towards catastrophe. But this
story is not the cinematic adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's
atmospheric movie Edipo Re made in 1967. Appropriately, in a post
Freudian era, that movie concentrated on Oedipus's private
psychological and emotional self-discovery. In real life this was less
transparently the political story of India during the era of Indira
Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay-Oedipus wrecked his plane on
that clear June morning in 1980. Sanjay Gandhi's obituary by sycophants
and Indira Gandhi servitors in Indiatimes.com read, in part:

"One of the most controversial political figures of his times, Sanjay
Gandhi, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru and the son of Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
he made an unceasing impact on the country in his brief political
career. His war-like spirit and defiance were welcomed by many. He had
no angularities in his style of living; no flamboyance in appearance;
no exclusiveness in everyday living and no extraordinary habits even
though he belonged to an extraordinary family. Sanjay who refused to
accept inheritance of the family greatness had by the age of 33 become
the symbol of the rising generation with his courage and daring. Even
though his extremely promising career had been cruelly cut short by his
untimely death in an air crash in 1980, he created history and left a
legacy for generations to come."

Others took exception to these brave words of praise - and they did
with vengeance. The events that followed resembled the Greek tragedies
of ancient times.

Her bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984. Tamil
separatists assassinated Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1991. The plane crash
and the assassinations were not figments of imagination -- these were
facts. Like the Royal House of Thebes, the children of Nehru-Gandhi
Dynasty were accursed.

No one in India had made a critical assessment of the impact of Indira
Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi. Instead the sycophants and
soothsayers had deified Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi.
Airports, stadiums, hospitals, centers of learning, sports
competitions, awards, nature parks and numerous memorials had been
named after them.

It was an indication of the intellectual condition of Bactria that its
old horses, who were very hoarse and very old, were in a flutter about
the fact that Jocasta may actually have had an enjoyable sex life. The
instinct of a storyteller is to applaud, but this just will not do.
Even in an era accustomed to scurrility, sleaze and corruption, the
Bactrian Caesar's daughter should be seen to be chaste, Hindu Brahmin
and properly womanly. Whereas, if the stories told were true - and in
such matters every substantial accumulation of rumors substituted for
proof - Jocasta may even have been a bad case of epitomizing the
brilliant parodic one-liner against Hindu hypocrisy which says "caste
no bar lekin sex baar-baar" (Caste is not a barrier so long sex is
plentiful).

Jocasta had, it seems, nearly as much love for the pleasures of her
residential bed as of her Supremo chair.

The political crimes were dismissed as mere aberration and forgotten in
the mist of selective amnesia. Even the highly critical Report of the
Shah Commission of Inquiry was systemically destroyed - only one copy
survived. Such was the search for truth - it was rarely found.

The plane wreck foretold the catastrophe that followed.