Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, March 10: The table has turned on both Bhagwant Mann and Navjot Singh Sidhu 16 years after they were on the same stage but at different ends.
In 2006, Mann was a contestant in the Great Indian Laughter Challenge and Sidhu was sitting on the other end as one of the judges to decide on the performances of the competitors.
Co-incidentally, Mann was cracking a joke on politics. “I asked a politician what rajneeti (politics) means. He told me it is the act of deciding how to govern. Then I asked what gormint (government) means. He said it means those who gaur (look closely) at each issue only to forget it a mint (minute) later,” Mann chuckled.
The joke apparently got a whole new layer on Thursday but as one of the judges, Sidhu may not have appreciated it much though he then had burst out in laughter as the cricketer-turned-politician usually does at a crack of joke in every such occasion. Mann was not among the winners then.
Both the contestant and the judge later happened to join the same “rajneeti.” Sidhu began from the BJP and then switched over to the Congress and Mann flourished in the Aam Aadmi Party. In the current election, Mann was named the chief ministerial candidate by the APP while Sidhu despite his best efforts could not get the nod in his favour from his party.
As the election results show, Mann is all set to become the new chief minister of Punjab having won his seat by an impressive margin of over 58,000 votes and the AAP close to bagging a record 92 seats in the 117-member Assembly and Sidhu losing his seat Amritsar East. For the next five years, or so it seems, Mann will be in charge of the Punjab government on which he cracked jokes as an embodiment of forgetfulness, and Sidhu will be competing with others to prove his mettle before the people or be lost in the oblivion.
