The continuing success of this multifaceted personality is not a reflection upon the wits of the electorate. What it reveals is the immaturity of our political culture, which mistakes boorishness for candour and a frightening lack of ethics for contrarian individualism. It is a caricature of rusticity that amounts to a cult of the noble savage. Like Laloo Prasad Yadav and like hisfather Devi Lal Chautala is lovable because he keeps to the skill set thought appropriate to the rustic caricature. He is admirable because he uses these skills to Get Things Done, which is a bit of a shibboleth in a polity where little ever gets done. The manner in which he Gets these Things Done does occasion bouts of soul-searching, but eventually the means are less important than the ends. Eventually, Chautala inspires sneaky admiration.

Chautala came to national attention by the easiest route through national notoriety. On the night of May 16, 1990, his former henchman and current opponent Amir Singh met Chautala's son Ajay Singh Chautala at the Canal Rest House in Rohtak. About midnight, Amir Singh told his security guard to go home; he would be travelling with Ajay Singh Chautala. The next morning, his body was found on the border of Bhiwani district. The Meham bypoll was countermanded. In the weeks preceding the killing, Chautala's lathels had been softening up the people of Meham.

What Chautalahad not factored for was the presence of the media, especially photographers. The images from Meham resulted in a national outcry. The shadow of Meham was to dog him right up to 1996, when the Justice K.N. Saikia Commission indicted him as an accessory after the fact in the killing of Amir Singh. Chautala deemed the good Justice to be as powerless as the press. Neither he nor his son presented themselves for the hearings. He preferred to lead a tractor yatra across the state, apparently to awaken the people to the excesses of the Bhajan Lal government. He miscalculated again. The people gave him a hearing, remembering the long sticks of Meham, then shrugged him off and went back to their lives.

Bhajan Lal, on the other hand, made significant political capital out of Justice Saikia's findings. But all told, it is an indicator of his political acumen (the technical term for animal cunning) that Chautala never let Meham catch up with him. In fact, it fed into his image as the leading organiser and motivatorand, for a spell, even made him kingmaker in Delhi.

For a man of such political prowess, Chautala's beginnings were utterly mediocre. He dropped out of school to look after the family fields while Devi Lal pursued his political career. The peasant become a politician only in the late 1960s after a fashion. He was associated with the Arya Samaj and became a Green Revolutionary. He came into his own only when Devi Lal followed his career graph to the capital. Quite used to tending the family's fields, Chautala, the favourite son, took over its political estate.

In Delhi, Devi Lal was cashing in on the same rustic candour and the duplicity it conceals that was serving his son so well at the state level. Before an open-mouthed Chandra Shekhar, who expected to be prime minister of the Janata Dal government, he proposed the name of Vishanath Pratap Singh for the post. And then it was his turn to be sworn in. "I," intoned the President, "as Minister of the government..." Came the echo: "I, Devi Lal, as DeputyPrime Minister of the government..." And so the government learned of his designation, after the fact.

Thereafter, while Devi Lal limited himself to starting village chaupals in five-star hotels and forcing Hindi upon an unwilling scientific community (the action earned him a new sobriquet: the Tau of Physics), his son got on with Meham. The Prime Minister was a friend. The Deputy Prime Minister was family. Haryana was his oyster.

The next reshuffle at the Centre saw Chautala emerge as kingmaker. When V.P. Singh's fall was imminent, it was he who organised the patch-up between his father and Chandra Shekhar. In fact, for a brief period, the immediate future of the future prime minister of India depended on this one man.It was an improbable achievement for a man who first made newspaper headlines for an offence so silly that his father should have disowned him. Flying in from a Buddhist convention in Southeast Asia, he was apprehended at Customs with a bag containing 48 wristwatches. A lesser politicianwould have been felled instantly by the shameful triviality of the offence. But not Chautala.

He emerged smiling even after he was caught with his hand in the till of the Kisan Sammelan in Yamunanagar. He was unfazed by a land scam involving prime real estate in the environs of Delhi. He wore a violation of the Arms Act like a badge of honour. He even turned the suspicious death of his daughter-in-law to advantage. She apparently shot herself while packing a gun in her husband's bag. To show what a regular, socially conscious family Devi Lal's clan is, the bereaved husband married his sister-in-law.

Today, Chautala is a more mature man. The days of Meham and Disneyland are long past. The years have conferred upon him a strange dignity, and an unexpected sophistication. Few, today, see anything amiss in his bid for power. He is, after all, a consensus candidate. But given his history sheet sorry, his past record a closer look is warranted. Unasked, Chautala gave his support to the BJP at the Centre,though it was supporting his rival Bansi Lal in Haryana. He withdrew it in response to a urea price hike. Then, paradoxically, he voted for the government in the no-confidence motion. And then the Bansi Lal ministry came tumbling down in Haryana. And now Chautala is a consensus candidate. Perhaps it's just a conspiracy theory, but it's so very well organised. A level of efficiency befitting the best organiser in north Indian politics.

Of course, there is no telling whether Chautala will eventually get to keep the gaddi. With respect to power, he has shown the tenacity of the legendary giant squid that embrace spermaceti whales in the deep. Equally, his career has been marked by sudden reverses. But, win or lose, he will survive.

Improbably, as always.

--PRATIK KANJILAL