Ministers flying cattle class

The sudden hullabaloo over the so-called austerity drive launched recently by the Congress (and immediately imitated by lesser parties, like the CPIM organizing a khadi fashion show) first made me merely laugh sardonically – déjà vu absurdity, what else? Then I fell to reflecting, and it occurred to me that it was not a matter to be laughed at and ignored; there was food for thought here.

It is well-known that our politicians by and large like to live the high life; indeed, a great many people get into politics (have always done, at least ever since the British started letting in a trickle of Indians into government, way back in the 1890s) because they have decided it is the only way they can get a taste of the high life. It is not merely about dining at five-star watering holes and flying first class and staying at vast and grand bungalows at public expense, it is equally about being surrounded by armed guards and riding about in trademark white cars with sirens hooting and making swarms of secretaries and peons scurry about and keeping visitors waiting for ages just to tell the world how important one is, every waking moment. That is very much a characteristic of our political culture.

The interesting thing is that there has also been what I may call a counterculture, for want of a better word, of demanding that our rulers be self-effacing, simple in lifestyle, endowed with a philosophical bent of mind, dedicated to the ideal of service to the common weal, sage enough to know that to be honest in this world requires conquest of greed and brave enough to try conquering greed, regardless of the world’s opinion. That voice has never been completely drowned, and it grows strident every now and then – as now. This requires some understanding.

First thing to be noted: much of this strident criticism of the opulent living of our netas reeks of hypocrisy and double standards. Those who level such criticism – and those who focus and express it publicly, to wit journalists – are by and large middle class people who are themselves horribly greedy for the high life, and indulge in every kind of unethical dealing happily for its sake as long as they feel sure they can get away with it: I have been closely associated with the mass media myself, I have seen it all from the inside. I know how cheaply a reporter’s malleability can be bought – sometimes for as little as a suit length or an expensive saree or a bottle of good whisky or at best free tickets to Dubai or Singapore for self and the missus – and I despise them heartily when they write about politicians’ peccadilos, or sermonize about the importance of honesty and probity in public life. They deserve every bit of contempt I have heard politicians pouring on them. Their censure stems solely from impotent greed: they don’t hate the high life, they only hate the politicians who seem to be enjoying more of it than they can ever hope to. The fewer such people we have, the better for all of us. A straightforward crook is far more respectable than a pious fraud.

It is also a fact that our society (and that means not only the middle class, which has always been rather small till very recently, but the vast unwashed masses) has always expected the rulers to distinguish themselves from the ruled by grandiose and unabashed displays of pomp, pelf and power. Our folklore is replete with stories recounting, half-grudgingly, half-admiringly, the incredibly expensive and often unspeakably cruel ceremony and magnificence with which the sultans and badshahs, the maharajas and nawabs surrounded themselves. Single weddings, single monuments cost the taxpayer so much that great hordes had to be slaughtered to persuade other hordes to pay through their noses, and famine stalked the land afterwards and took off vast numbers again. It was not only accepted as part of the normal order of things, but even celebrated; after all, what were great sovereigns for, if they did not provide the masses with the spectacle and grandeur that they so craved, and could not hope to have in their own lives? Regardless of their avowed respect for their austere mentor Gandhi, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Md. Ali Jinnah carried this tradition of high-living into the palaces and courts of the new nations that were born under their stewardship in 1947 (Nehru was not dubbed 'The Last Moghul' for nothing!) Given that history, our current breed of rulers are doing nothing new or overly shameless and reprehensible; they don’t really need to apologise for anything.

Besides, the rulers of today – I wonder why they don’t have the guts to do it! – can very well point to the way the burgeoning middle and upper classes (by various estimates between 70 and 300 million strong) are living it up under the new dispensation, worshipping money and shopping and conspicuous consumption as the only things worth living for, all questions of ethics in making money be damned. Every other maidservant gets some jewellery made for herself whenever she can afford it, and tries to put her kids into an English-medium school; higher up the income ladder, every middle-class housewife splurges on puja shopping as though there will be no tomorrow, though her wardrobe may be bursting with luxury clothes already; look at how everyone spends on lavish weddings these days, and how nobody objects to the way the pujas themselves are becoming more ostentatious and expensive with every passing year, and fashion-show extravaganzas gain all-round approval, while money for poverty-alleviation programs is always scarce. And in case they dare to raise the inane objection that ‘it is our money we are spending’, they need only to be reminded that no money is their money by divine right: it is only a certain kind of social arrangement, a certain system of laws, that allows them to make and keep and spend that money the way they wish – and in allowing them to do so, politicians play a very decisive part (as in periodically hiking the salaries of government and PSU employees through one Pay Commission recommendation or the other, or in deciding how stiff taxes on businessmen should be). So why should the politicians themselves be left out of the party? Why on earth should the people expect them to be upright and moral and frugal guardians of a nation that is neither upright nor moral nor frugal when it comes to enjoying the material goodies of life?

Well, that brings us back to the insistent voice of the counterculture I mentioned earlier, the voice that is often almost drowned but never goes away, and that keeps making a lot of us feel guilty about our chosen lifestyles again and again. About that, in the next post…