Are you honest, boy?
Then be not spendthrift of your honesty,
But keep it to yourself; in Padua
Men think that honesty is ostentatious, so
It is not of the fashion.
– The Duchess of Padua, Oscar Wilde.
Sedated by the ease with which power and effortless money is available for the asking behind the seemingly impregnable walls of state-provided security, this is now the culture of India’s political elites – both the old discredited power elite with secular-socialist pretensions, and the nouveau upstart elite with holier-than-thou pretensions. Nothing else can explain the Vajpayee government’s benumbed conclusion that it can disregard public opinion and concerns about the conduct of over-powerful officials and extra-constitutional personalities in the top echelons of power.
Nevertheless, it defies logic that the government should believe that it can get away with this attitude. For while politicians may hallucinate that citizens accept (sic) corruption as a way of life, the people actually yearn for good, efficient governance with dharma as a way of life. In fact, the BJP itself tapped this rich vein of public disgust with undisguised, unrepentant corruption when it rode to power at the head of a coalition government.
It is sad that barely a year down the road, the people find themselves squeezed between an effete government and an inane opposition, with nowhere to turn for succour from the maddening spiral of dishonesty, corruption, and sheer knavery in the country’s political and economic life. A number of things have happened in recent weeks, which deserve careful attention.
First, the titillation provided by Tehelka’s entrapment journalism quickly, almost imperceptibly, merged with a deep-seated uneasiness over the government’s functioning; these concerns will not easily fade away. It is therefore amazing that even as the BJP cancels public rallies in the realization that its allies will not automatically rush to help shore up its sagging image, it betrays complete lack of awareness of what has gone wrong. This is why the party cuts a sorry image blaming conspiracy theories one day and denying them the next day.
The new BJP president has evaded the issue by proposing a code of ethics for party MPs and MLAs, when the problem, if truth be told, is the conduct of members in Government. I refer specifically to what is called the ‘page three culture.’ As anyone who reads newspapers would know, the capital has a rich, abrasive, closely connected business and social class that almost daily hosts a party that could cost anything from twenty to forty-five lakhs (going by figures quoted in the gossip columns).
It is, of course, extremely gross to ask how such parties are paid for even in our liberalizing economy. As a lot of ‘business connectivity’ takes place at these gatherings, they are sought to be legitimized by artificially creating a genre of ‘society journalism’ within mainstream journalism, so as to afford a measure of protection to those who attend them. As is only to be expected, the presence of politicians, bureaucrats and/or their family members adds significantly to the business-worthiness of any event, and this fact is well understood by those who attend such functions.
Hitherto, the best-known faces on this circuit were respectively a female member of an illustrious political family who is said to be waiting-in-the-wings for her big moment, and an audacious socialite who ran an illegal bar with female hostesses, one of whom was publicly murdered in highly dramatic circumstances. The lady, of course, continues to be a big ‘draw’ at all society do’s as the business-social-political elite does not believe in moral stigmas.
The BJP has found it impossible to resist the allure of the page three culture, if at all it has tried. Beginning with members of the Prime Minister’s own household, almost every Minister of stature and personal ambition can be found gracing one or other do in the capital, on some pretext or other. While some mitigation of the RSS’ arid puritanism is perhaps desirable, what has happened, at least in the short run, is a loss of moral perspective as ministers and party leaders clamber up the ‘secular bandwagon’ with an ill-disguised inferiority complex.
Dismayed party and RSS cadres have noticed that the parvenu elite is extremely impatient with those who remind it of its origins in the movement to restore the nation’s civilizational ethos to its rightful place in the public realm. Notwithstanding the limited understanding that the BJP-RSS may have about the actual significance of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, it was about much more than re-claiming the Lord’s birthplace. That is why, while the BJP could legitimately shelve the reconstruction of the temple, abrogation of Article 370, and the common civil code when it came to power, it can hardly plead that its lacks the mandate for su-raaj (good governance) because it heads a disparate coalition!
This utter incomprehension about the deeper meaning of its albeit limited mandate is what has made the BJP so unresponsive to public anxieties, a failing it shares with the RSS, its ideological fountainhead. That is why, even as former President Bill Clinton’s visit to the quake-affected Gujarat villages highlights the Keshubhai government’s shameful inability to provide succour to thousands of victims after so many months and so much available aid, neither the BJP nor the RSS leadership considers it necessary to tell the inefficient Chief Minister to call it a day. The failure to even take note of the resignation of Mr. Suresh Mehta (Minister in charge for Kutch quake relief), who was repeatedly obstructed in his work by the Chief Minister’s henchmen, is a telling commentary on both.
This insensitivity is echoed in the Prime Minister’s refusal to sack aides who are unacceptable to both the coalition partners as well as the general public. Mr. Vajpayee should realize that retaining discredited officers promotes disrespect and distrust of the leadership, a fact that even Congress president Sonia Gandhi has conceded by sending secretary Vincent George on long leave and forcing the resignation of Karnataka PCC chief V.S. Koujalagi, who was filmed accepting a bribe. Even worse, in Mr. Vajpayee’s case, are the rumours that the impugned officers are refusing to be transferred and are challenging the government to sack them if it dares. Clearly, the government will lose face if the officers are accommodated elsewhere, rather than shown the door.
Finally, citizens are still waiting for the government to show some concern about the stock exchange scandal in which millions of small investors have lost hard-earned savings to manipulations by racketeers, and some have felt desperate enough to commit suicide. A young relative of mine died of brain haemorrhage caused by the shock of the stock exchange massacre, and besides his debts, the family is saddled with a hospital bill of two-and-a-half lakhs incurred in the vain but necessary attempt to save his life.
The stock exchange crisis is thus not a newspaper headline for affected families. Citizens want to know how the Government plans to punish banks that hand over the savings of millions to market raiders to manipulate the bourses without collateral; why interests on savings were reduced to railroad citizens to invest in the share market where there is no fairplay; why bank mutual funds are a dead investment; and why the government slept through the knowledge of insider trading on the stock exchanges and the company-bank-broker nexus.
The Pioneer, 10 April 2001