The Hindu : The death of innocence

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 07, 2002

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The death of innocence

By Harish Khare

The BJP has come to grief because it could collectively never summon that inspiring nobility of purpose that must underline any national endeavour.

WE NOW know in sordid detail what we suspected all these last four years: that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its leaders' pretence to be different, more honest or more patriotic than others is bogus. Though the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee's bold decision to cancel the petrol allotments ought to be applauded, the party cannot deny the symptoms of a basic malaise. It may be a matter of satisfaction for some partisan minds that the BJP crowd has turned out to be as vulnerable as the Congressmen were, but this vicarious satisfaction does not help find a way out of what this scandal has revealed, a crisis of political purpose.

It would be no use pretending that the petrol pump scandal is a solitary case of malfeasance in the age of the party with a difference. Indeed, there is no difference; the spirit of the Satish Sharma brand of crony capitalism survives. An association or relationship with a Minister is the safest short cut to riches. The evidence is all around in the nation's capital. The only difference is the pretence of the BJP Ministers that they continue to believe in their innocence and honesty while those around them exhibit all the signs of ill-gotten affluence.

The problem, however, is larger than the vulnerability of this or that Cabinet Minister in the Vajpayee Government; nor is the issue confined to the BJP. The problem has to do with the very nature of the motivation that the so-called "political activists" bring with them when they come to the public arena to "serve" the people. For those at the very top, there can be and often is a blinding desire to change the way things are arranged. But for the majority it is a motivation of a different kind. Those who serve the public — Union Ministers, Parliamentarians, State Ministers, legislators, municipal councillors, panchayat presidents, etc., — are paid only a decent salary (to be sure, neither slave wages nor a maharaja's privy purse), they feel themselves less than adequately compensated for their "sacrifices"; and, hence the temptation to find other ways of supplementing their legal income. This temptation runs contrary to the public expectation. Since the Mahatma's days the tradition has been that leaders gave up their careers and family wealth to join the freedom struggle. As the myth-making goes, Motilal Nehru is cited as the finest example of this tradition of sacrifice (tyaag); a man who reportedly got his laundry done in Paris took to wearing home-spun khadi, gave up the palatial Anand Bhavan. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose and others gave up lucrative careers to end up in jail in the cause of the nation's freedom. The leaders' sacrifice added nobility to their endeavour, inspired the masses, garnered legitimacy for the nationalist movement. They set high ethical standards of behaviour for themselves, and by which the public continues to judge the later generation of leaders.

It is a different matter that soon after Independence the "freedom movement generation" had no qualms in adopting the ways and lifestyles of the former colonial masters; someone had to move into the Viceroy's Mansion just as someone had to occupy the Teen Murti House. The leaders were no longer setting examples in austerity or sacrifices for the next generation of new "rulers". For every Lal Bahadur Shastri, there were a dozen Congressmen who felt they were entitled to be compensated for the "sacrifices" they made during the freedom struggle. Eventually, the socialist state was invented, and ways were perfected to make the political leaders/activists/workers live a life of comfort and a little more. The more entrepreneurial among the political "workers" branched out into regular criminal activity, and then used their criminal muscle to corner governmental contracts. An expanding state, with an over-working public sector, provided enough opportunities — contracts in railways, irrigation projects, PWDs, etc. — to add to the prosperity and affluence of a vast army of "political activists". A new culture of parasitism came into vogue.

Politics became a lucrative business. Congressmen became role models for political activists of all hues; and, later combined with the rhetoric of democratic egalitarianism, the hitherto deprived communities threw up "leaders" who demanded a share in the loot. And these new "leaders" combined in "new social coalitions" to oust the Congress from governmental perches in State after State; but once they came to occupy the governmental bungalows, the Mayawatis, the Kalyan Singhs, the Laloo Yadavs, the Mulayam Singh Yadavs and their "activists" imitated with a vengeance the ways of the same Congressmen they denounced so vehemently on their march to power.

The BJP's tragedy has been that its leadership has never come to terms with this deeply entrenched mindset that politics is the short cut to affluence.

The BJP leaders have deluded themselves into believing that an association with the RSS would inoculate them against sins of the Congress variety. They are entitled to believe in the myth of the RSS as a wellspring of wholesome nationalism; but the RSS functionaries themselves are not above petty vices. To this, the BJP leaders have added another layer of deluding myth: that their evocation of "Hindu cultural nationalism" somehow immunised them and their associates against the temptations that have corrupted other parties and politicians. On their way to power, they detected many aberrations among their flock but chose to overlook them in the interest of the final goal of seeing a Hindutva regime in place in Delhi.

All these pretences are gradually giving way to commonplace greed. An army of "self-sacrificing, nationalist, deshbhakt" Hindutva drum-beaters and spear-carriers have been parked in Parliament, legislatures, committees, or otherwise provided access to the joys and benefits of access to power.

It is now conceded that even the RSS and the VHP "saints" need to be compensated for their "sacrifices" with the pomp and luxury of Raj Bhavans. This is all in a day's work; the real trouble is the requirement of the party activist in Barabanki or Maduri or Rajkot. Ingenious devices have to be invented to compensate the "activist" who has put his eggs in the Hindutva basket. Neither Pokhran-II nor Kargil Vijay brings any material compensation to the Rambhakt. In fact, it has already been hinted that the current petrol pump scandal grew directly out of a "direction" from the BJP leadership to the Petroleum Ministry to ensure that the BJP "workers" were not left out of the loot.

Yet, there can be little satisfaction from the BJP's current loss of innocence.

After all, all political parties need to attract a large number of "activists" to man offices and to contest elections at various levels of competitive politics. What is in it for these "activists"? For every Kapil Sibal or Arun Jaitley or P. Chidambram who can always go back to a lucrative legal practice, there are thousands of "workers" who either do not have or cannot get gainful employment in the market place; these "workers" have to be lured into sparing time, energy and efforts into "party work" on the promise or hope of a commensurate compensation. This dilemma manifests itself most acutely at the district level in every political party; the BJP is no exception. The problem is going to get acute as the state withdraws more and more from areas of economic activity. It is easy for an Arun Shourie to preach that "idealism" can make good politics, but the BJP has come to grief because it could collectively never summon that inspiring nobility of purpose that must underline any national endeavour.

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