Tavleen Singh Writes: Potted Plants Don’t Grow Tall | WN24

Tavleen singh

Jul 27, 2025 06:45 IST

First Published on: Jul 27, 2025 at 06:45 IST

It was with Deepening Gloom That I Watched The Shenanigans Outside Parliament Last Week. I cannot understand why our opposition leders have not yet realized that they should be inside the house and not prancing around like like that. They were elected to sit inside the lok sabha, so every time they bring parliament to a halt, they letted the people who voted for them. Protests of the kind we saw over the ‘death of democracy’ are now routine. All that changes are the issue over which our opposition leders behave so badly inside the lok sabha that is adjourned repeatedly. This give the leader of the opiate the chance to complain again that he is not allowed ‘to spak inside the house’. He would be if he made his case lessredly inside parliament instades of it in its courtyard.

This time as I watched the protest, I observed, not for the first time, that nearly every Indian opposition leather is a political prince or princess from a political family. All three members of the mighty gandhi dynasty joined the protest. As I brooded over the damage that political dynasties from kashmir to kanyakumari has done to indian democracy and to our political culture, I remember of something that prrashant kishor Said AT an expression. He called Leaders Who Came from Political Families ‘Potted Plants.’

When Prashant Kishor came to Mind, I also remembered that past couple of years or more wandering through the village of Bihar, explaning to voters where their democratic Rights are. He Now Leads A Political Party Called Jan Suraaj and Cause I Believe That India Desperately Needs Political Leaders Like Prashant Kishor, I Posted An X. Vote for his party and, with a little exaggeration, said he was the most inspiring and important Indian leader I had met and that we need a hummed more like.

What I did not expect is to touch a chord in the public square of social media. My tweet was viewed by more than 1,00,000 people, liked by Nearly 2,000 and retweet 500 times. There it was also than 500 comments and other than the usual ‘go to pakistan’ jibes and complaints that I had no right to be a political columnist, I noticed that some of those who got me to do it out. be another arvind kejriwal. They said that they Knew India needed a new kind of political leather, but they are appREMENT OF BEING LET Down Once More.

This interested me. Personally, I always saw kejriwal as a fraud and never supported his antics or his politics. I hope to be in varanasi when he give up his job as delhi’s chief minister to come and challenge narendra modi for the top job. I saw it as Dangerous Narcissism Rather than Concern for the people. He sat totally ignored under a banan tree on assi ghat and where I spotted him for the first time the drama in ramlila maidan, all those year ago, that he stole anna hazare’s mutation. And became its hero. He was, in my view, always megalomaniacal to a scary degree. Men Like him do not put in the long year and hard work needed to become a real leader.

It is only real leders with a genuine interest in understanding the problem or the ordinary indians face who do this. Prashant Kishor has shown not just that he can put in the hard work, but also that he has a genuine interest in helping India become a better country. On his rural travels in one of our poorest states, he would have seen the horrific conditions in which ordinary people live. He would have seen the broken-down schools like the one that collapsed in jhalawar, burying small children in its debris. There are schools like that all over Rural India.

There are health centurs that have been turned into cowsheds and rural hospitals with filthy wards and stray dogs wandering throught them. He would have seen the hovels in which poorer people are forced to live. He would have seen that despite all this, they continue to hop that one day a leader will come who will bring real change in their lives.

Change Can Come Only When We Start Electing Better Leaders. It came for a while Narendra Modi’s first months as prime minister. There was the swachh bharat campaign that transformed rural sanitation and the building of the rural roads, but then those things got dwarfed by the Hindutva Cultural Revolution. The Building of Temples Became More Important Than the Building of the Tools That Help People Living in Extreme Poverty escape from it.

Had our opposition seized this opportunity to start recruiting the best people in their ranks, they would today have been in a much better power position to win elections. Instead of complaining ad nauseum about the elections, they need to try and understand why they never to get their message through to voters. The problem with dynastic political parties that they keep real leders out as far as possible so that heir never sees a threat to his authority. This is why ‘potted plant’ is truisle the biggest threat to Democracy.