What’s the link between aides and aedes?

While the nation awaits the next round of spellbinding exchanges between our Urdu couplet-loving prime minister Manmohan Singh and opposition leader Sushma Swaraj, we must not forget the pivotal character in the drama - the political aide. Without this modern-day action hero, there would be no spectacle, no TV-worthy scam nor thunder accompanying the WikiLeaks storm in India.

In Delhi’s corridors of power, such aides are feted when their bosses are in favour, and run the risk of being named and shamed the moment the bosses fall from grace. Sadly, in their hour of crisis, few aides get the chance to recite from Allama Iqbal or Mirza Ghalib.

But political aides are a hardy species. Men of mettle like Nachiketa Kapur and Sanjeev Saxena don’t just wine and dine, preen and pose, and bask in the reflected glory of their masters. It is they who allegedly do the hard work of transporting wads of cash from point to point. Nor are they easily daunted. In the life of the aide, what counts is staying power and the ability to adapt to the stint in the doghouse.

Eradicating such aides from Delhi’s political landscape is as hard as eradicating aedes, the infamous mosquito, which causes dengue. Like the city’s political aides, Delhi’s aedes mosquitoes are fond of stinging in high places, and grab headlines every other year by strategically heralding their arrival at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), the country’s premier public sector hospital.

Last week, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi confirmed this season’s first case of dengue in the city after a post-graduate student at AIIMS who was living in the campus, tested positive.

The incident spurred VK Monga, chairman of the corporation’s public health committee, to acerbically observe that almost every year, the first and the last positive case of dengue fever are reported from the AIIMS campus. Once again, he called for cleanliness in and around the hostels where junior doctors and medical students live.

This is not the first time that AIIMS finds itself in the list of favourite breeding grounds of dengue-causing aedes mosquitoes. In 2010, the 25-year-old son of an AIIMS staffer died of dengue. In 2006, the AIIMS campus reeled from it. Many students left their hostels after one of them died of the disease. Each time, following such incidents, there is a flurry of activity. But typically, it is a short-lived phase. The following year, the institute again hits the headlines with a dengue story.

Dengue mosquitoes bite during the daylight hours. They like clean, stagnant water. Their favoured breeding places are barrels, drums, jars, pots, buckets, flower vases, overhead tanks, discarded bottles, tins, tyres, water coolers, and every other place where water can collect. All this is drummed into every school child and adult every time there is a dengue outbreak in the city.

Why then is an institution with world-class doctors and where, incidentally, prime minister Singh had his coronary bypass surgery in 2009, unable to heed this simple message? Is it so difficult to keep water coolers and residential quarters of doctors on the campus clean?

By now, AIIMS and dengue have become twinned in the public imagination. But it is not fair to pick on one institution. Diseases like dengue stalk Delhi’s affluent colonies and glitzy Gurgaon as well. Inside marble-tiled homes, there is much sweeping and swabbing. But clean water stagnates in overhead tanks and flower vases and in trays kept below air conditioners.  The dengue-causing aedes mosquito could not have asked for more.
What’s the connection between aides and aedes? Neither feels threatened by lofty statements about clean surroundings. Neither is deterred by committees and contingency plans or the personal cleanliness of a few people. The aide knows that as long as the political environment remains muddy, his or her career prospects are bright - there will always be a need for dirty tricks.

Delhi’s clever aedes mosquitoes have drawn the same lessons as their political cousins. AIIMS may have the most capable doctors but if the support staff of the institute is not able to do the simple things that need to be done to maintain hygiene in the campus hostels, its residents are not safe. There is a moral lurking somewhere in this connection. We need a new Urdu couplet for it.