Sachin and rekha to become rajyasabha MPs. Are they so great? Yes, they are great. So do they deserve to be Rajyasabha MPs? No, because MP seat is not a honorary thing like Padmasri or Bharata ratna. Already govt agreed to include sports as a category to get India's highest civilian award, when sachin is struggling to make the 100th century. Let him have two Bharatha Ratnas, but why a seat in parliament?
Many think that Rajyasabha is powerless and it's for the able ministers who can't woo voters but have wisdom in a particular area like Manmohan Singh or arun jaitly. Of course, it should be powerless, or else it would be called rule of the elite class, not democracy. Then what is the purpose of such a house in democracy?
From the very first time the idea of democracy was born, political thinkers are bugged with one flaw of people in general, i.e. humans are emotional . There is a fat chance ( not normal fat, sumo-fat ) that, the voters will fall for the magic of speaker and elect him like in the case of lalu prasad. let's say voters are at their right mind when they elected the policy makers, but even policy makers are humans. They could commit errors in policy making in an emotional state, which will be fatal for the nation. To prevent such things, political thinkers came up with the idea of senate, which in Latin roughly means house of old or wisdom.
The job of these old guys is to create check point when the elected house, made an error in making a decision due to various reasons. That's it, only check points or warning or suggestion or to make the actual house to rethink it's decision. But if the elected house is stubborn, it's word should be the last word, to make sure that, our loksabha is twice as large as Rajyasabha, so if both houses are at loggerheads, Loksabha prevails, after all its elected by the people !!
Now, to the actual question, can sachin or rekha can take up such a job? His batting performance dropped when captaincy was given to him, he requested govt of India to exempt import tax on his Ferrari because he played well many times and gave success to India. He never really expressed his opinions on match fixing or IPL scams. I am not against sachin, my point is, runs made on the cricket field does not make a person to sit in the house and scrutinize govt policies. If govt wants to honor him for his service to the nation, give him more awards, or create an award on his name and give it to crickets, like Dadasaheb phalke award, or offer him free petrol for his family for rest of the life.
And Rekha? Who's idea it is to send her to Rajyasabha? I would choose vivek oberai, he at least went to tsunami hit villages and served there for few days.
My point is, sending a person to the Rajyasabha is not like giving him a bank job where he gets the salary but never really works, or like giving him an honorary captain position in armed forces where he only ware the uniform to have photographs but never enters the war field.
