AAP’S ARROGANCE IS JUST INFURIATING

By Swapan Dasgupta

Maybe I am over-reading the boisterousness, but the Aam Aadmi Party’s coming-second party at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar last week left me a trifle disturbed. The enthusiasm of the modest but jubilant crowd, most flaunting their by-now familiar headgear, was only to be expected. After all, it is not every day that a determined bunch of activists can alter the electoral calculus of a state, especially one that happens to be India’s Capital city, and come within smelling distance of an outright victory after polling nearly 30 per cent of the popular vote. No, the triumphalism was both understandable and expected.

Yet, I expected a measured show of humility by those who had emerged out of a popular movement against both corruption and political high-handedness. Instead, TV viewers were subjected to an astonishing show of cockiness by individuals, heady from their rapid elevation from relative anonymity to stardom. The Master of Ceremonies was particularly exultant and never missed an opportunity to direct his snide asides both on those who had lost and those who had performed better than the fledgling AAP. Although Arvind Kejriwal did make a show of inviting “good people” from the Congress and BJP to join his party, the overall tone was one of dismissive sneer: the AAP was the stage army of the good and all the other mainstream parties epitomised the rot of India.

It was this infuriating arrogance that also led to a AAP celebrity heckling former army chief General V.K. Singh at Anna Hazare’s fast in a village in Maharashtra. So much so that Anna had to personally intervene and ask the loudmouth activist to leave.

To attribute this unseemly display of triumphalism to the personal shortcomings of a few individuals may well be correct. But if success has gone to the heads of those who promised a new brand of “alternative”, much of the responsibility can be pinned on the editorial classes who have cast AAP in the mould of a La Passionara—the legendary figure from the Spanish Civil War who uttered the famous words “they shall not pass” directed at the advancing forces of General Franco.

There was always an extra gush in the coverage of the AAP campaign but if this impressionable folly of junior reporters has been transmitted up the hierarchy after counting day, it is due to two factors. First, there appears to be generalised consensus that the bottom has fallen off the Congress’ support base. This was most in evidence in Delhi and Rajasthan, but even the Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh results reinforced the conviction that no great depth left in the Congress batting any longer. Secondly, there is an emerging groupthink that suggests the AAP is the only viable force that stands between Narendra Modi and victory. If the AAP, or so the argument goes, can replicate its Delhi performance in urban India, Modi will have to be content with his existing job as Chief Minister of Gujarat.  

The AAP euphoria is proving infectious among those who are exasperated by the sudden death of the Congress and are desperately in search of a force that can derail Modi’s journey to Delhi. An Indian-American academic who was earlier singing praises of Rahul Gandhi has, for example, detected that the dynasty is well past its sell-by date. He is now detecting an AAP surge in places such as Bangalore and Pune. Whether such individuals have actually detected something that is not visible to the naked eye or are merely clutching at straws will be known in a few months. Whatever the reality, the AAP is certainly celebrating its moment in the sun, its rise being equated to a tsunami and the Arab Spring that toppled various decrepit West Asian regimes and left the region in a state of confused turbulence.

Yet, while the AAP rise has many obvious lessons for a smug and complacent leadership of the national parties, its rise suggests various possibilities for the future. The most important—and by far the most reassuring message—is that traditional electoral calculations go out of the window if a big idea grips the popular imagination.

Contrary to media reports, this is not a new AAP contribution to Indian politics. The elections of 1971, 1977, 1980 and 1984 were decided on the strength of a big idea. In those elections, voters weren’t bothered about candidates: their preference was for the big picture. In an equal way, the BJP’s triumph in Uttar Pradesh in 1991 was brought about by a similar attraction to another lofty ideal that proved more appealing than local organisation and candidates.

Equally, the large network of volunteers that AAP was able to organise isn’t exactly new. Every worthwhile party has its network of kayakartas. What makes a crucial difference in the election season is a party’s ability to attract incremental support. In 1977, the Janata Party—born barely a month before the election—was completely dependent on unpaid enthusiasts. For that matter so is the NAMO campaign dependent on volunteers who have shelved other activities to campaign for what they see is a noble mission. Yet, the enthusiasm of these volunteers can only make a difference if they are integrated into the main campaign. The AAP succeeded in effecting that synergy and for that it should be credited. Now it is up to the others to do what is necessary to energise a campaign.

AAP has indicated that the mould of conventional politics can be broken. Mercifully, it is not the only force that can benefit from creative destruction. 

Sunday Pioneer, December 15, 2013

An empire that was built on the counterfeit

By Swapan Dasgupta

Maybe there will come a day when the National Capital of India chooses to have its very own coat of arms and a matching motto. The college of heraldry is best suited to design a crest appropriate to a city that a former Viceroy (who opposed the transfer of the Capital in 1911) described as the “graveyard of empires”. However, when it comes to the motto, nothing would please me better than the commonly-understood phrase: Jaante nahin mein kaun hoon?

If there is a single phrase that defines the ethos of a city built to flaunt the grandeur of political power, it is the imperious assertion by the few to the many: “Don’t you know who I am?”

In most cases we don’t and so we have to be educated. How does a harassed parking attendant at one of Delhi’s celebrated hotels on a Saturday evening know that the rude 20-something who has blocked the flow of traffic is the favourite younger son of the minister who controls a formidable caste vote bank? How does Mr Ordinary Middle Class who protests against the queue jumping at airport security know that preferential treatment must be accorded to Mr Self-Important, IAS?

And how is a spirited young women brought up to repudiate patriarchy and the ‘commodification’ of women, believe in feminism, women’s empowerment and so on to know that when the high priest of progressive thought makes a crude sexual advance at her in a hotel lift, the answer has to be yes? After all, Jaante nahin mein kaun hoon?

To view the ongoing saga of an individual who forgot where influence and self-importance ended and where ordinary decencies took over as an unfortunate aberration caused by an excess of drink is to misread the social context of the incident. Goa may well be a place where inhibitions are supposedly abandoned and where it all hangs loose, but this was no ordinary misreading of a situation. What took place was an act of brazenness brought about by the belief that power, influence and grandstanding generate exceptional entitlements.

It may have begun with fighting the good fight against the dark forces that were hell bent of taking India down the slippery slope of bigotry and hate. Even though the means may have been contested, that was a democratic right, guaranteed by the Constitution. However, from battling for so-called liberal values to embracing sharp financial practices and taking full advantage of political cronyism was a leap into another league, into the world of the Jaante nahin. It didn’t matter that this was not accompanied by the seedy and very vernacular social ambience of hard drinking and disreputable assignations in hotels with hourly rates. In essence, the assembly of beautiful people in festivals celebrating the cerebral but underwritten by dodgy liquor barons and victims of extortion also turned out to be a cover for an empire built on the counterfeit. Once values had been mortgaged to self-fulfilment, the descent to moral corruption was near-inevitable.

In a libertine world where anything goes, consent is somehow taken as implicit. But whether groping-gone-wrong was consensual or forced begs a larger and more disturbing question. What is the mentality of an individual who thinks nothing about making a lunge at a junior colleague who also the friend of his daughter? Did it stem from the licentious groupthink of people who flaunted their rejection of conservatism and moral orthodoxies? Or was the process also aided by a belief that in kaliyug the law is an ass, at least for those who, like the character in T.S. Eliot’s Cocktail Party can say:  “You know, I have connections—even in California.”

The ‘crime’ was despicable enough; even more sordid was the attempted management of its inevitable fallout. For some, the veneer of religiosity was a cover for preying on female devotees; for others, a damaging charge of rape can be debunked as a political frame-up. Rape, radical feminists used to say is always political. Now we are told it is an anti-secular conspiracy.

The hallucination doesn’t stem from the fogging of individual minds. It happens because some people have internalised Delhi’s overriding philosophy: Jaante nahin main kaun hoon? 

Sunday Times of India, November 1, 2013

Tejpal: Reaction is to culture of ‘entitlement’

By Swapan Dasgupta

There are times when a ‘scandal’ becomes more than a gripping tale of individual misdemeanours: it becomes a commentary on society and social mores. The miscarriage of justice in the case involving Alfred Dreyfus brought into the open the fissures in late-19^th century French society, particularly its pernicious anti-Semitism. The salacious tale of what came to be known as the Profumo scandal involving Christine Keeler went a long way in exposing the hypocrisy of the post-War British Establishment and contributed greatly in breaking down the culture of deference that once defined the United Kingdom.

It is still early days to be entirely sure if the grim saga of Tarun Tejpal’s conduct at a purportedly intellectual festival in Goa earlier this month will be treated by social historians of the future as an isolated act of criminality or will be regarded as a vivid illustration of the social mores of contemporary India. It is possible that the so-called “private moment” in a hotel lift points to one dirty, middle-aged man and can hardly constitute a generalisation for either the media or even those who combine artistic sensibilities with the good life. At the same time, there is an equally compelling case for the suggestion that the great champion of the underdog behaved as he did out of a sense of arrogance and entitlement—and that he isn’t the only one.

To view the Tejpal controversy as a media event—which may explain the interest it has aroused in the Fourth Estate—is only partially correct. The attempt by the boss (and, in this case, the perceived owner) of an organisation to extract sexual favours from a subordinate isn’t novel. There have been enough highly-publicised instances of ‘modern’ Indians in publishing and information technology misusing their positions to secure sexual favours for the Tejpal case to acquire any novelty. The only possible difference is that the element of consent in this case appears to be exclusively one-sided. What really marked the Tejpal case was the attempted ‘management’ of the crime by the journalist and the Tehelka management. And that is where media, politics and the social mileau of the ‘arty’ world intersected.

The failure of the Tehelka management to report the incident to the police, when it was under a statutory obligation to do so and, instead, settle matters through a private deal, has attracted many adverse comments. Equally, a lot of incredulity and disgust has surrounded the attempt by Tehelka’s Managing Editor to elevate ordinary criminality into a test of high feminist principles. At the heart of both approaches was the astonishing presumption that normal rules—whether of law or society—don’t apply to those engaged in the noble business of exposing the wrongdoing of others.

It is this insistence of exceptional standards to judge Tejpal that has both angered and mystified many. First there was the attempt to minimise the gravity of the charges against Tejpal and settle the issue through what has been described as a “private treaty”. Secondly, there was the bid by Tejpal to unilaterally award himself a punishment: a sabbatical from active journalism for six months. Thirdly, when these measures were greeted with a renewed sense of outrage, there was the attempt by the Tehelka management to establish a private dispute redressal mechanism—a committee headed by a friend of Tejpal who also happened to be a leading feminist. Thirdly, there was an attempt to put pressure on the family of the victim and persuade her to withdraw her complaint, perhaps in return for some compensation.

And, finally, there was the astonishing demand that Tejpal should have a say in deciding which authority was best placed to assess the charges brought against him. The Goa police, it was claimed, was not an appropriate authority because the government there was controlled by the BJP which apparently wanted to settle scores with Tehelka for its role in disgracing former BJP president Bangaru Laxman in a sting operation more than a decade ago.

In any ordinary case, the defendants may well have claimed that the sexual liaison was consensual but they would not have tried to establish a parallel system of justice or claimed political victimisation. That Tejpal did so was revealing and suggested that the man tried to take refuge behind his lofty status in society and his formidable political links.

Tejpal, it has emerged, was more than just an editor who also organised literary events by way of brand extension. He positioned himself as a great crusader for liberal values and secular causes. Cabinet ministers had invested in his ventures, MPs were among those who had large stakes in Tehelka and he had been appointed as a non-executive director of Prasar Bharti. In addition, he was on first name terms with the great and good of the international literary world. He could flaunt his ‘enlightened’ values on sexuality and get away with a style that was reckless. Corporate bigwigs vied for his attention and showered him with generous sponsorships for his Thinkfest in Goa. No, Tejpal wasn’t any old hack. He was among Delhi’s beautiful people, a pillar of the Establishment.

The assault on Tejpal’s pretensions has, willy-nilly, come to express the popular antipathy to the culture of licentiousness and entitlement that defines India’s governing elite. The coming days will determine if the Tejpal affair is another nail in the coffin of a rotten dispensation. 

Asian Age, November 29, 2013

                                                                                                   

Why young MPs avoid insolent India

By Swapan Dasgupta

The protests that gripped Delhi over the past 10 days may have begun as a spontaneous expression of outrage against a particularly brutal gang-rape. But somewhere along the way, they escalated into something more far-reaching and yet ill-defined.

What makes citizens of India’s showcase Capital take to the streets periodically— remember the similar response to Anna Hazare’s movement last year—to vent their dissatisfaction against the ‘system’ is prone to divergent interpretations. Can the unrest be attributed to the arrogance of the rulers and the wide gulf that separates them from the ruled? Is it a problem linked to breakneck urbanisation that nurtures aspiration but leads to the simultaneous breakdown of established values? Alternatively, is ‘civil society’ a made-in-media tamasha? 

Whatever the trigger, one thing is absolutely clear: India’s political class has been left bewildered by the street protests involving large numbers of  mostly apolitical and leaderless individuals. President Pranab Mukherjee’s son has quite rightly been pilloried for his “denting and painting” remark but it is easy to understand the incomprehension of a middle-aged inheritor whose own experiences of student movements didn’t involve rubbing shoulders with “pretty women” in western apparel.

In pre-liberalisation India, the angry young men and women who burnt buses and threw crude bombs in Calcutta were invariably scruffy and fitted a jholawala stereotype. Certainly, what was derisively called the ‘South Calcutta’ (or, for that matter, ‘South Delhi’ and ‘South Mumbai’) types would never be seen chanting slogans on the streets. Until the anti-Mandal protests of 1990, the creamy layer of the middle class was politically invisible.

Yet, appearances can be remarkably deceptive. One of the features of the media interviews of the protestors at India Gate was the glaring mismatch between outward appearance and social status. A few of those interviewed were extremely articulate in English, suggesting a privileged schooling, but most of the women in jeans and fleece jackets were naturally at ease in Hindi. There was little in their outward appearance to distinguish one social set from another. Casual wear has become the great leveller.  

For these lower middle class individuals, many of whom come from India’s dynamic small towns, life in the metros is both liberating and deeply oppressive. Their fierce desire for self-improvement in a city that offers opportunities is coupled with an aspirational lifestyle which, in the context of economic globalisation, also involves adopting the trappings of westernisation. They have consciously broken away from the ‘behenji’ mould that defined their mothers’ generation. At the same time, they are confronted by the regressive patriarchal assumptions of neighbourhoods and workplaces where women in trousers are typecast as ‘fast’ and ‘loose’, not least by a police force that has internalised the khap panchayat ethos.

An earlier discourse suggested that this social transformation would be met by Gen Next politicians who didn’t share the fuddy-duddy assumptions of earlier leaders. However, as the Delhi protests vividly revealed, labelling someone as the “youth icon” or proclaiming a young MP’s familiarity with the social media didn’t qualify them to respond to the anger with purposeful politics.   

Why, it was often asked, didn’t Rahul Gandhi arrive at India Gate to meet the aggrieved?

The answer is curiously simple. An overwhelming majority of India’s young MPs are inheritors who have long been accustomed to the aam aadmi looking up to the netas with forlorn eyes and the leaders in turn responding with a show of noblesse oblige. For them, good politics always meant doling out favours to a supplicant India.

The protestors who gathered to demand better policing and exemplary punishment of molesters and rapists weren’t pleading before dynastic icons with folded hands. They were self-confident, angry and exasperated. They represented a new, assertive and even insolent India. Their expectations couldn’t be met by discretionary hand-outs and even cash transfers. Their demands are a key element of modern politics: the expectation that the state will be responsive and efficient. The chalta hai fatalism of an earlier age has been replaced by a voluble rejection of a meek theek hai.

The people are changing and the political class isn’t. This mismatch will not be unending. Sooner, rather than later, the yearnings of an assertive India will find political expression. 

Sunday Times of India, December 30, 2012

Maharani's durbar and a blinkered view of history

By Swapan Dasgupta

Apart from newspapers that commemorated the event and an agreeable party on the lawns of Ambassador Hotel where the cultural elite drank to the occasion, the centenary of the transfer of the Capital and the foundation of New Delhi was largely unobserved. ‘Official’ India which otherwise loves to organise tacky commemorations by producing unappealing postage stamps gave this event a wide berth. And, while no one was forthcoming about the reason, the rationale was inescapable: the 1911 Durbar was a ‘colonial’ event and, therefore, only worthy of sneer.

The Hindu sense of history has at the best of times been rather feeble. However, when it comes to the 190 years of British rule, the disdain for a recorded past is coupled with a spurious political correctness and hypocrisy. Even after six decades of Independence and flamboyant assertions of national sovereignty, India has yet to develop the necessary self-confidence to view history as history. Instead, the past has been sought to be tailor-made to view the prevailing political fashions of the present.

It is not that the ignominy of being ruled by a ‘foreigner’ has weighed heavily on the national consciousness. In the past thousand years or so, predators from the west have repeatedly overwhelmed indigenous kingdoms, particularly in northern and eastern India, and combined ruthless vandalism with innovations. Turks, Mongols, Persians and Afghans made India their happy hunting ground, and ruled with a mixture of raw coercion and cultural co-option. The conquerors always took care to maintain a discreet distance from the conquered peoples without creating a closed system based on ethnicity and religion. Of course, post-Akbar many of these barriers broke down but never sufficiently for the hapless Dara Shukoh to become a trendsetter. Not enough of the conquerors went ‘native’ although enough of the conquered peoples appropriated facets of the Persian and Turkish ways of life.

Many of these changes stemming from conquest and subordination were also dutifully played out in the two centuries of colonial rule. The British steadfastly maintained their social distance from the ‘natives’, particularly after the uprising of 1857 and the influx of the memsahibs into the Civil Lines and cantonments. The Indians were socially wary of the British but there were enough ‘collaborators’ (as in Moghul times) who sought to bridge the cultural and emotional gulf between the West and the East.

More to the point, there were enough Indians that genuinely believed (particularly after the demise of the East India Company in 1858) that British rule constituted a significant advance on anything the country had hitherto experienced. At one level the 1911 Durbar was a spectacular show of imperial might—as evident from the grovelling genuflection of the Indian princes (barring Baroda and Udaipur) to the King-Emperor. But it would be imprudent to forget that until Mahatma Gandhi captivated the nation with his simple message of swaraj, the common Indian was genuinely enamoured of the “Queen’s peace”. The choreography of the 1911 Durbar was thrown out of gear when the Indian crowds broke the cordon to kiss the ground on which the King and Queen had walked. Were they victims of ‘false consciousness’?

“Maharani” Victoria wasn’t Indian and nor did she ever visit India. Yet, this diminutive frump became as much a part of India as any distant Moghul. In 1911, when the New Delhi project was inaugurated by George V on December 15, the British Empire was the most world’s most decisive power; by 1931, when New Delhi was finally ready to function as the seat of government, the imperial sunset was approaching.  

This is not revisionist history. It is the history that was itself cynically revised as part of the nation-building project of India’s post-imperial rulers. But history isn’t rewritten by removing the George V statue from its canopied pedestal opposite India Gate or by renaming Connaught Place as Rajiv Chowk. Unless India is overcome by perversity, there will be a Lutyens’ Delhi distinct from a DDA Delhi, a Kingsway called Rajpath, the North and South Blocks and a Parliament House built for an India where democracy was conceived of as the future.

The British Raj wasn’t quite the dark ages the sloganeers make it out to be.


Sunday Times of India, December 18, 2011 

History is ignored

By Swapan Dasgupta

The British Empire was above all a celebration of protocol and pageantry-what the historian David Cannadine has called “ornamentalism”. This would explain the somewhat perfunctory treatment meted out by King George V and Queen Mary to the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, when he stepped on board the Medina in Bombay to welcome the only visit of a reigning King-Emperor to India on December 2, 1911. According to convention, the Viceroy of India was the direct representative of the Crown in India: he governed in the name of the King-Emperor. With the monarch now physically present in the Empire’s prize possession, the Viceroy was automatically relegated to the status of a mere Governor-General.

Bruised vanity wasn’t the only hiccup governing the visit. The British Cabinet, in the throes of a vicious encounter between the House of Commons and House of Lords over a high-tax Budget, was most reluctant to have the monarch away from Britain for such a long time — there was just no precedent. The King overruled the elected government peremptorily. “It was”, he said, “entirely my own idea”.

Queen Victoria, the original maharani, would have loved her grandson for the defiance. To her, India was the Jewel in the Crown. The government wasn’t pleased and flatly refused to pay for the costs of a new, bejewelled crown that would symbolise the King’s symbolic anointment as King-Emperor on Indian soil. There was a scheme to make the Indian princes pay but ultimately the bill for the £60,000 crown from Garrard, the Crown Jeweller on Regent Street, was footed by an ever-obliging government of India.

It wasn’t the Asquith government alone that was not amused. The Archbishop of Canterbury threw a minor tantrum when it was suggested that the crown be placed on his head by three princes — one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh. As Kenneth Rose noted in his biography of George V, “he argued that coronation implied consecration, and that in a land of Moslems and Hindus, any such act of Christian worship would be misplaced. It was therefore agreed that the King should arrive at the Durbar with the crown already on his head.”

So it was that at noon on December 12, 1911, that the King-Emperor and the Queen-Empress rode in state to the grand domed tent, flanked by Sir Pertap Singh, the Diwan of Jodhpur, and by reputation the wisest guardian of princely India. His carriage was preceded by a contingent of the 10th Hussars that trotted in to the venue where the band played the robust notes of “See, the conquering hero comes.”

Actually, it was an unlikely “conquering hero”. Two days before, there was a spectacular state entry of the King into Delhi and the 25 square mile tented township complete with ornate princely pavilions, metalled roads, railway lines, electricity and post offices that had been put into place in record. Based on the diaries of the 23-year-old Lilah Wingfield, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who travelled to India to experience the Empire in all its glory, writer Jessica Douglas-Home has provided an unflattering description of the first impressions of the King: “Curzon’s (1903 durbar) had been a show fit for the representative of the greatest sovereign on earth. But now, the first time a reigning British monarch had arrived in person on Indian soil, the Emperor of Emperors appeared as an insignificant, virtually invisible, figure, seated uneasily on a small bay horse surrounded by taller, more imposing and better mounted military men.”

“As the lonely figure of the King rode anonymously down the processional route into the mile-long Chandni Chauk, the crowds looked at the Queen in all her glory and came to the conclusion that she must have left His Imperial Majesty behind in England.”

Unfortunately for Hardinge, possessed by a fanatical desire to demonstrate that Lord Curzon’s 1903 Durbar wasn’t the last word in awesome pageantry, there was another boo-boo in the offing. In the ceremonial genuflection of 475 Indian princes before their King-Emperor, Gaekwad of Baroda deviated from the script. Minutes before he was to appear, he took off his ceremonial jewels and dressed as a Maratha gentleman, walked up to throne, bowed and then — horror of horrors — instead of taking the mandatory seven steps backward, turned his back and walked away, “nonchalantly twirling a gold-topped walking stick”. There was, wrote Douglas-Home, “a murmur of dismay” from the crowd.

An equal gasp of surprise greeted the King’s announcement, kept a fiercely guarded secret, that the capital would be transferred to Delhi from Calcutta. “The Times correspondent visited 10 of the camps and informed his readers that the announcement of the new capital was being received without enthusiasm. Some blamed the Calcutta monsoon, others suggested that it was a reflection of a British intention to remain permanently in India. It was believed by some that Calcutta had been chosen as the seat of power because it would be easy to leave by sea in case of an uprising.”

An uprising, however, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The only show of people’s power occurred when, after the King had departed to his tent “rather tired after wearing the crown for three hours” and a 101-gun salute. A huge crowd of Indians broke the cordon, rushed to the durbar tent and were seen kissing the ground on which their raja and rani had walked. A Tibetan Lilah Wingfield encountered said he had travelled four months to be in Delhi to get a glimpse of the King!

The next day the foundation stone of New Delhi was lowered into a plinth by the King in front of a small audience of 500. “To loud applause the Maharaja of Gwalior offered to give the plinth a statue of the King Emperor.” From faraway London, Lord Curzon decried the move to shift the capital to Delhi — “the graveyard of empires”.

The Durbar was the most important event in India a century ago. It was a great moment for a Raj that would not endure for more than 36 years and which would never really settle down to a New Delhi that was formally inaugurated in 1931. But it was also a moment in India’s history that will live on despite the contrived derision of the “post-colonial” mind. The Raj’s Delhi is as much a show of India as is Shahjehanabad, the creation of rulers who came from Central Asia.

The latter is celebrated; the former isn’t even commemorated. That’s why India has no sense of history, only an overdose of hateful politics.

Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle, December 12, 2011