Mamata's minions making millions: how amazing?

Mamata Banerjee’s electoral advisor Prashant Kishor (already notorious statewide as ‘PK’) is apparently dismayed to find out that while Didi deliberately lives an austere lifestyle, her footsoldiers, even far down the line (including municipal councillors) are living it up and flaunting it. He fears that this could boomerang on the party at the hustings next time round, because the opposition – read everyone from the BJP to the CPI(M) – could make a noisy issue out of it.

Who in this country pretends to be surprised at this late date? Read my three-part essay on corruption. Personally, I would lay much of the blame for the persistence of the disease on the mass media: they hold the spotlight steadily and harshly on those at the very top, to wit prime ministers and chief ministers, so that they have to keep forever to the straight and narrow or go the way of Lalu Prasad and Jayalalitha (in fact, when I am in a cynical mood, I often say that I would much rather leave the top jobs to others: too much trouble, too little scope of wholesale loot!), and pay scant attention to how the minions are feathering their own nests with impunity. The saying in political circles, indeed, is that if you can become and stay a councillor for two successive terms, your children can live in gravy all their lives without doing a day’s honest work.

In fact, it has been at least three generations since most young people who have known they cannot make a good enough living in any ‘respectable’ profession and don’t have the stomach for a life of wholesale and large-scale crime, take to politics as a duck takes to water. They have no ideology and no ideals and no goals beyond enriching themselves quickly and effortlessly through the bribes, cutbacks and speed money that come with assumption of office. They always know which side of the bread is buttered, they quit fading parties like rats deserting a sinking ship,  they always salute the rising sun, and they keep changing badges over and over again. The real tragedy of our political life is that this type has become too numerous to satisfy all of them, and too impatient and fickle, so the top leaders, who have to utilize their money and muscle and loyalty to grab power and hold on to it are always living on a powder keg with a slow fuse attached; the ancient saying ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ has acquired a much more sinister immediacy in these ‘democratic’ days than in the days when real kings ruled! I remember India’s political history clearly since the early 70s, I pity the leaders of Congress, CPI(M), Trinamool, BJP and the rest equally, and I marvel at the composure and (short-lived? suicidal?-) self-confidence of top leaders who have to rely on this kind of human material to govern this land or even parts of it.

I have said and not once before that the roots of the malaise lie in four social factors:

1.      Far too many people have become convinced that a flashy and expensive lifestyle alone gets you widespread social approval, despite all our high-falutin’ talk about the nobility of 'plain living and high thinking',

2.      Far too many people, who started off poor or hard up, can see politics as they have understood it as their only passport to quick money and ‘fame’ (notoriety, to their minds, does almost quite as well: no harm in occasionally spending a few months in jail if that ensures the five-star lifestyle for the rest of the year),

3.      There is too little systemic surveillance, condemnation and punishment of that kind of living.

4.      Every opposition party goes all out to hoist the one in power on this ‘corruption’ petard, knowing full well all the time that those whom they are luring into their own camps from the ruling dispensation are being drawn only by the tacit promise of carrying on making the ill-gotten gains they have got habituated to making for a few more years. 

So those who pretend to beat their breasts over the rottenness of the system are either naïve and ignorant, or very cynical but want to look good in their own circles (just the same as claiming loudly that only others, ‘bad people’, watch porn!), or just have too many idle hours to kill every day in useless chatter. The comfortably salaried, holier than thou, middle-aged  middle class is the most culpable.

There: I have just ensured that like John Stuart Mill, I am never going to win an election myself!

[Oh, and it would be remiss of me if I didn't mention that I am very pleased that the post titled 'Addendum to the population bomb post' has stayed so long on the most-read list, and the post on Father Wavreil has come back, and the one titled 'Missing you, my heart' too: though the memory of the girl - besides my own daughter - who caused me to write it only makes me want to puke these days: how could I have been stupid enough, at fifty, to be besotted with someone so completely ordinary, common and nondescript? I often think that most women can live with a modicum of safety and decency only because the average man is so docile and tolerant and gullible.]