Power as object of ridicule

"WILL the anchors please not look so cheer-ful," read the note slipped across the table. It was a special programme. Powerful people paying tribute to a dear departed member of the Power Pack that rules the nation. The anchors handling the tributes pouring in from various political parties, were mere conduits to the television studios, through which the grief of the Powerful was to flow and flood the Nation. The anchors' alleged cheerfulness was perhaps seen as an escape hatch which might somehow dissipate the flow, and allow some viewers' minds to wander into gentler, more relaxing areas of thought; to forget for a moment that we are all surrounded by mortality, by barbed wire fences, sniffer dogs and black cats commandoes, or to remember, that no matter how many parties you change, The Great Leveller will get you, when it wants. Power means austerity and seriousness in India. Any deviation from the script, a smile or a mistimed repartee from anchors is not considered innovative, but tactless. Levity demonstrates a lack of respect for Power and the controlling authority.

As girls, we were similarly taught not to stare too long at the alpha-male who heads the pack. We heard countless stories about insolent daughters-in-law or serfs who stared back at their masters in defiance, and how nothing good came to them. As the non-powerful, Indian wisdom goes, you must keep your sense of humour on a tight leash and your eyes cast permanently down as you face or serve sound bytes from the Power Pack. Being a writer's daughter spoilt me early on in life. I could never tear my eyes away from this quintessentially Indian spectacle of hypocrisy dressed as honour and custom. I watched fascinated how faced with power, daughters and daughters-in-law can wilt into lumpy subhumans; and similarly journalists, babus and contractors will react into simpering sycophants.

All those who have graduated from India's school of governmental power system go on in time to form one of the three groups. The first is formed by the iconoclasts. They are the Radical ones, the Young and Old Turks: forever wrapped in rhetoric, stressed out and dishevelled, easily driven to a state of theatrical fury, like the late Ram Manohar Lohia and most of his present day Samajwadi followers. They realise deep within, that they can change nothing in the reality surrounding them, that they can improve nothing without in some basic ways first changing themselves (which they won't since they love themselves too much as they are). So they just rage. History shows they will be felled by a sudden scandal, or suffer a heart attack or a stroke just as suddenly. They leave legions of myths behind; none of them any use for constructively deconstructing the system that they lambasted all the time, but which strangely also protected them.

The second group is comprised of those who want to succeed and observe the successful closely. They imitate their ways in behaviour and speech, and are resigned to the existing reality. Many of them even derive a strange sense of satisfaction from the status-quo. They are willfully ignorant and treat the sphere of questions as the monopoly of formal interrogating agencies. Themselves, they are reluctant to accept or possess knowledge of any kind. For knowledge brings a sense of irony, a certain restlessness. Regardless of religion, culture and gender, they are content to pass their lives in a state of mental numbness, not really doing anything. Because the price of success in India's power corridors means living with neither intense desires, nor specific goals. They seldom smile, hate excitement and agitation of any kind, and dash off testy little slips from their grim watchtowers, to anchors and correspondents sharing a bit of irreverence and levity in the face of grim death and disorder: "Will the anchors please not look so cheerful?"

This is the group that houses most of our Powerful babus and netas, the movers and shakers, in whose obstinate view, the nation's security is permanently under threat from a sly network of nosy fact-finders, irreverent wits and askers of questions. They must be controlled firmly at all times. The temples of the sacred Official Secrets Act must never be sullied by their shadows falling across its sacred steps.

This is the group that today has been hard hit by the Tehelka tapes, as it was once by the Shah Commission hearings. It still hopes it will survive the former as it did the latter. It probably will.

The third, and the smallest group comprises of the ones to whom the democracy is always full of a million stories: interesting, improbable and full of unplumbed depths and mysteries waiting to be traced. They are understandably wary of the first group, and the second group, just as understandably, fears and mistrusts them like contagious bacteria. It was the Emergency that begat this group, and it has now begotten the Tehelka tapes. Whatever their ultimate fate, the T tapes, by driving people first to anger and then laughter, have unleashed two processes which shall deeply affect the history of India: a mass detoxification from fear of Power; and a collective journey of Indians into the bowels of democracy, facilitated by the new information technology.

One man must feel increasingly alone in all this din, Atal Behari Vajpayee. Once upon a time, he used to have a sense of humour, and is still popular among the BJP rank and file. But the centre of power is moving away from him. He must feel the emptiness all round him growing as he is forced to speak to the nation through the same screen that has undone his government, bereft of his redeeming wit and sense of irony.

One could be sorry for him, if one was not so preoccupied with feeling sorry for the nation.

MRINAL PANDE

The author writes in Hindi and English and is a freelance journalist. E-mail the writer at: apande@vsnl.com

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