Rajbir Deswal

No, I am not complaining like Param Bir Singh, Mumbai’s former Police Commissioner, but just making a statement that we in the police know the politicians a little more than what’s hidden from the public eye. Readying for sleep, a Haryana CM had to pass a painful night having hurt his knee that hit the corner of a table. The next day saw the sharp corners of tables rounded off in all government rest houses, dak bungalows and tourism complexes. At some places, the sharp-cornered tables were replaced with oval or round-shaped ones.

Another very simple but popular politician of Haryana had double-beds of all VVIP suites of government rest houses increased in length. With his simple ways, he wouldn't wait to reach a rest house for going round the corner; instead, he had the entire convoy stopped en route while he eased himself. Yet another CM was allergic to flowers. Once, an enthusiastic DC offered him a bouquet of plastic flowers, whose hand he knocked sideways with a jerk, out of a natural reflex action.

A politician, who held a constitutional post in the state, would invariably stop on a businessman’s premises and eat jamuns by spitting out the seeds in the same plate he took them from. Another, as chief guest, had got the director, students' welfare of a university suspended, since the latter could not arrange for a matchbox to light the traditional lamp.

In one district, an NSG protectee was to be housed when a team arrived to inspect the arrangements. An officer who began sniffing a tad vigorously detected the smell of fresh paint. He told local officers that the smell needed to go before the VVIP checked in. At the suggestion of a junior engineer, all through the night, four farrataas — jumbo-sized fans — used to separate grain from the chaff, were pressed into service. By the next day, most of the smell had gone and the VVIP accommodated.

At one of the Surajkund melas, when a twig from a tree fell on the VVIP, it was considered to be a security lapse. Amusingly, a pigeon couple above him cooed, while intelligence sleuths around exchanged glances. A politician of Haryana, who had a self-conferred ‘doctorate’ in politics, however, was a jolly man, who would laugh away minor slips. To someone who had gone to complain about a revenue clerk asking for bribe, he wittily suggested that rather than spending the fare up to Chandigarh, he could have paid the amount to the patwari and got his work done.