Above 262 Seats, There is No Morality (31 May 2009)

If you wrapped your head in a piece of cloth to ward off the baking heat, and you closed your eyes and shut your ears to the news as it broke, you could feel yourself spinning around in a time machine last week.

There they were, the cavalcades of satraps and tributaries, bearing incense and myrrh and marigolds and shopping lists, descending on the Congress’s “war room” and 7 Race Course Road – how appropriate an address for horse-trading! – to wheedle and whinge and while away the long hours while the royals decided who would be seated in their durbar. Was this any different from the Prince of Wales’s visit just over a century ago when India’s princelings flocked to Delhi to pay tribute to their future emperor? How deliciously feudal we are, how supremely inured to the trappings of royalty or dynasty. Whether it is the house of Bolangir, or the scion of Gwalior, or the royal house of Srinagar’s Gupkar Road – papa and son Abdullah and son-in-law Sachin Pilot, himself from the Gurjjars’ post-Emergency ruling clan, all huggle-muggle in a “Kodak moment” – today’s Congress Party, which bills itself as the world’s largest democratic party, is a long, long way from getting there. You don’t need to stand for any election to make it to a top party post. And you know the long roll-call of famous progeny who will grace the Treasury benches. There are quite a few in the Opposition ranks, too, but don’t for a moment assume that this means we have a young Lok Sabha. Although there are 79 MPs under the age of 40, the average age of this Lower House is 53.03 years – this is older than the 14th Lok Sabha and much older than our very first parliament in 1952 where the average age was 46.5 years.

But what about the Aam Admi, the bemused hero of Laxman’s cartoons, the speck in the ocean of 417 million Indians who actually voted this time? First of all, the media, who (again) got it wrong in their opinion and exit polls and exhibited their immaturity and illiteracy, actually have not managed to analyse why voters behaved the way they did. At a very broad level, the average voter in large swathes of our nation still reacts in a visceral manner to what she hears. That message may be wrapped in a wad of currency, or address basic fears about a livelihood, food to eat, clean water, or decent roads. Why, most of the newly-minted MPs would have been hard put to even spell the names of their constituencies before this election. Ajay Maken boasted that he had visited his New Delhi constituency – where he lives – 200 times since 2007. Most of us ordinary citizens visit our constituencies, where we live, at least twice every day.

Second, the Common Man is tired of blatant and primitive appeals to caste and religion. That is why the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and yes, even the Bharatiya Janata Party have been administered a very big punch in the solar plexus. Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi prove that just trying to run a half-good government that is not nakedly corrupt can reap big rewards.

And finally, contrary to early euphoria about the return of the national parties and the decimation of regional fiefdoms, the numbers tell a different story. The combined vote share of the Congress and the BJP actually fell from the 2004 election, and the vote share of the regional parties stayed nearly the same at about 30 percent. Yes, the BSP, the RJD, and others of their ilk have been forced to offer “unconditional outside support” (see satrap above) but for the UPA, it is like going to sleep every night with your head resting on a basket of cobras.

A hung parliament it was not, but creating a new government took quite a while. It is fascinating, even for us politics-obsessed Indians, to watch the process. After all, Manmohan Singh’s cabinet has 78 ministers, ministers of state with independent charge, and junior ministers of state, which means every third member of the UPA in the Lok Sabha is a minister. Not very long odds. The portfolios were also largely unsurprising. None of the top posts went to newcomers. There were a few stabs at imagination: Kamal Nath got road transport and highways, Veerappa Moily got law, and the irrepressible Farooq Abdullah got new and renewable energy. But did it set off a frisson up the nation’s spine? You tell me.

And down south, while Andhra Pradesh sulked at not getting more ministerial posts despite giving the Congress its single largest chunk of 33 MPs from any one state, dynasty-building was going in apace in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. One day after his older son Azhagiri was named a minister in Delhi, Tamil Nadu chief minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi named his second son his deputy and heir apparent. You’ve got to expect some drama in a state that has politicians with names like Stalin, Napoleon and Tagore.

Way off in the Sunderbans, Cyclone Aila caused death, destruction and destitution. People had no water or food for days. But it was point-scoring time again, and Mamata Banerjee and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wanted to be sure we knew it was a national calamity.

In 1996, as a few Indian climbers lay dying on the upper reaches of Everest, they were ignored by a group of Japanese summiteers. There was a huge uproar about why the stricken men had not been offered oxygen and a lifeline. In India’s politics, getting to exercise power is getting to the top of the world, and it takes everything you have. “Above 8,000 metres there is no morality,” one Everest climber said. So brutal, and yet so true.
(This piece appeared in Khaleej Times on June 3, 2009)