Just a 90-minute interaction between the prime minister and the captains of electronic media in the country turned our entire upper crust into TV reviewers. And of course, in their near-unanimous judgment, the prime minister came off poorly. That is the clamour wherever Indian elites are to be found, from the party circuit to airline lounges: He sounded too defensive, he was getting too much into minutiae, he did not sound assertive enough. How does it measure up to a quick reality check?
It won’t, if you remember that the key to understanding Dr Manmohan Singh, and that is particularly so in terms of his public persona, is the man you see, is the man you get. He is never one to sound assertive, or aggressive, never one to make broad-brush statements. His style is like that of a professor caught in the complex detail of a problem rather than that of an expansive Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
And his method and moods? I have often said that even at the best of times Dr Singh seems to come across as Rahul Dravid batting at 39 for 3. He is not given to flourishes of any kind whatsoever. Go back to his public statements after the first flush of reform in 1991. He had the same lonely, almost melancholy, countenance when his first crisis, the (Harshad Mehta) stock market scam, hit him, and when he spoke a line as honest and politically naive, you might say as his depends on what is your starting point explanation for how to calculate presumptive loss on account of Raja’s 2G spectrum allocation.
He said then, famously or infamously, on the stock market crash in Parliament, that he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. Of course it got the rich, old and new, by far the greatest immediate beneficiaries of his policies then, furious: we are losing money, and he is so nonchalant? Nobody remembered that it was that one budget from him that had multiplied their wealth many times in the first place.
Lack of gratitude is the hallmark of the upper crust the world over. But in our country, lately, it has also got wrapped in a fascinating elite contempt for the political class. For the well-heeled Indian now, our politician (neta is the preferred expression, used as a pejorative) represents all that is wrong with our society. Some of it, probably, is driven by some evangelical don’t confuse me with facts sections of news TV where anchors with clenched teeth and bared fangs hold forth, calling every scam massive, unprecedented, bigger than ever before and then, safely, blame it on the political class.
Safely because, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, ultimately it is only our politicians who end up facing accountability, and they are also least likely to go after you. Take the telecom scam. A cabinet minister of the ruling coalition, who also happens to be the leading Dalit face of a key ally in a state going to the polls this year, has been locked up in jail. If he and his alleged co-conspirators were bribed, it was done by some corporates.
Have any of these intrepid TV anchors dared to call one of them, or even his spokesman or CEO, to his studio for a debate, or called for their arrest if not hanging? Would any of them, in fact, ever dare to call one of these corporates a congenital scamster? You have to ask that question, because that is exactly how one of these anchors has been routinely describing Suresh Kalmadi. Now, for sure, Suresh Kalmadi has more than a few serious questions to answer for CWG. But how do you know his forefathers were scamsters? Would you ever dare talk like that about anybody but a politician?
Also read: The 2G scam verdict is uncommon nonsense
The more interesting thing, however, is that it is the rich who are applauding this lynch mob. Exactly the classes who wanted to hire private commandos in Mumbai after 26/11, to stop paying taxes, and keep routinely calling for election boycotts. You ask them who they would prefer as their rulers if not our netas and they waffle: the Congress has nobody worthwhile, the BJP has imploded, the third front is dead, and Mayawati, arre baap re baap… There was a time when the same class was fascinated with Musharraf: so smart, so with it, so confident, what swagger, so articulate, so much like us. More important, so unlike our smelly, pot-bellied, crotch-scratching politicians who mostly do not know how to dress or speak English. You know where he ended up as millions of brave Pakistanis took to the streets to protect their democratic rights and their judiciary.
And while the charmed circle mourns the end of the idea of India because of political corruption, incompetence, and cynicism, it is exactly our politics that is transforming India in a most remarkable manner now. The politics we curse has given us a truly federal polity where over half of the states are governed by non-UPA parties and where, while power to make big money (from land, minerals and liquor licensing) has shifted to the states, we have at least ten chief ministers with impeccable reputations.
When was the last time you saw that in India? Maybe in Nehru’s first decade? What is even more important, the most efficient and effective among our chief ministers Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Narendra Modi, Raman Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan have all defied anti-incumbency. So it is evident that their voters not only acknowledge and reward these qualities, they also celebrate and value their democracy and politicians that make it possible, rather than curse them for all of their problems.
That is the happy, overwhelming reality behind this sullen, big-city drawing room mood. India is democratising and the political class and the voters are warming up to each other in a manner that is unprecedented, yet logical in its happy evolution. Voting percentages are going up, good leaders are being re-elected with larger majorities and others are mending their ways.
Even the Congress has been forced to send to Maharashtra, its traditional milch cow, a chief minister in Prithviraj Chavan whom his worst enemies would never accuse of taking a paisa in bribes or cuts. Likewise, can you deny that Dr Manmohan Singh is honest, capable, well-intentioned, wise and, most importantly, re-electable? So what if you do not exactly find him to be a rock star in front of the camera. That was never promised to you in the first place.
But one thing you can be sure of. Whatever his countenance and style, like the dour but indispensable cricketer we compared him with, he is at his best at 39 for 3, which is how the scoreline looks for UPA 2 right now. You can trust him when he says he isn’t going anywhere midway through this innings, and you can also be sure his party will now cut all the clutter and confusion and work with him rather than at cross-purposes. Even in the gossip-filled opium den that is Lutyens Delhi, you can see the smoke of confusion lifting. So forget all talk of a change midway, likely successors and so on through this Lok Sabha. And expect a fresh push for reforms, administrative and political changes and, hopefully, a changing of the headlines.
Also read: What if coronavirus crisis had hit India under Manmohan Singh, not Modi