The Hindu Business Line : Historic declarations

CERTAIN statements made by famous persons in certain historical contexts are indelibly etched in memory. The exclamation by King Louis IV, "L'etat c'est moi!" (The State! I am the State!) is the earliest that comes to mind. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" by you-know-who, "I shall return!" by General Douglas MacArthur, following his hair-raising escape from Corregidor during the Second World War, and "I have a dream" of Martin Luther King, are a few other examples from abroad. The most recent one is "Are you guys ready? Let's roll!" by a passenger in "United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists in 9/11, lunging forward at them along with other passengers, foiling their attempt to crash it, probably on the White House or the Capitol, and giving up their lives in the process.

Our own country does not suffer from any paucity of such gems. Here are some to savour: "Himalayan blunder" — a phrase made memorable by Mahatma Gandhi, the dismissive "Fantastic nonsense" of Jawaharlal Nehru, "Aagattum, parkkalaam" (OK, let's see) of Kamaraj, and the constant refrain "The law will take its course" of Mr P. V. Narasimha Rao when, during his days as Prime Minister, several political personages were charged with and arrested for various offences.

There are, however, two examples of statements made in two different continents on two different occasions which are astonishingly identical. One is "I am not a crook" of President Richard Nixon at the height of a the Watergate crisis, repeated word for word by Rajiv Gandhi in Parliament in exculpating himself from the Bofors pay-off.

The other is "I am in charge". On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot and wounded by a gunman and was rushed to the hospital. When reporters approached General Alexander Haig, Secretary of State, standing in the Oval Room of the White House sweating profusely in nervousness, and asked who would be making decisions, he came out with those immortal words.

The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, too reportedly shot back those words at his maiden media meet on September 4. One can be sure that if only he had known the parentage of those words and the pathetic circumstance and the plaintive manner in which they burst forth from the mouth of a hapless, haggard and high-strung but high-placed panjandrum, he would have thought many times over before uttering them!

B. S. RAGHAVAN