Jagdeep Dhankhar's health bulletin: The unpalatable truth of the vice president's condition

Sometimes the truth hides before us in plain sight, but we let ourselves get distracted. Our Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar submits his resignation citing health issues, but everyone thinks it’s an excuse.

The real reason—say political pundits, politicians and paparazzi—is that Mr Dhankhar has crossed a red line. Which line? When did he cross it? About that, they are not sure. They try and read between the lines, even though the VP’s resignation letter is little more than a single line.

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Which brings us back to the heart of the matter: VP Dhankhar’s health. Here then, is his latest medical bulletin, and you can see for yourself what a sorry shape he is in.

To all appearances, the vice president was doing all he could to ingratiate himself to the people who needed ingratiating: bending, bowing, and scraping—but it was felt that he was not bending deep enough or scraping hard enough. Medical science experts say this is an early warning signal of the patient developing a backbone—a dangerous, potentially painful condition for a leader in his position.  

It’s also possible that the chairman of the Rajya Sabha suffers from a stiff neck. Indeed, it may have been observed that he has not been nodding vigorously and quickly enough to all the suggestions that came from the direction of the government. These are tell-tale symptoms of selective spondylitis. A clear case of being unfit to hold high office!  

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As if all this was not bad enough, Jagdeep Dhankhar also betrayed signs of finding his own voice—again an occupational hazard. He had begun expressing his views on Justice Verma and key judicial matters. We all know that such talk is an alarming sign of the patient losing it.

Normal, healthy adults only echo views already expressed and widely circulated by the Press Information Bureau (PIB). Okay, you can change a word here and there, but you certainly cannot say something that is not part of the script. This does not mean that you can’t have your own views—of course you can, but like bathroom singing, it’s not for public airing.

To compound matters, there also appears to be a problem with the Mr Dhankhar's vision. He often did not see eye-to-eye with authority. Whether it was his keenness to meet his American counterpart or go on foreign trips like his predecessors had done, Mr Dhankhar appeared to see things differently. Clearly, there was an urgent need for corrective surgery.

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Ill as he was, however, there’s one area in which the patient defied the doctor’s prescription. They had expected that he would pocket all the slights he was subjected to without a murmur of protest.

What the doctors didn’t realise was that the old war horse still had the stomach for a confrontation. So, he did what no vice president in the country has done before in similar conditions: he resigned, and all hell broke loose. As it turns out, the old man does have the balls for a fight. 

Society