Here are the two questions you are most likely to be asked these days: One, when was the last time India looked so rudderless and angry? And two, do people of India bother about corruption? Hasn’t it just been a way of life for ever?
The answer to both lies in 1989-90, in what should be one of the most important years in our political history. Rajiv Gandhi lost power to V.P. Singh, mainly because of the Bofors stink which raised an almighty popular outrage that devastated the Congress in the north. And then, soon enough, V.P. Singh, the victor himself, was running for cover, with his rude implementation of the Mandal Commission report unleashing an even angrier storm. In each case, India looked even more anarchic and furious than it does now. So that should answer the first question.
The second question was asked a little differently in 1989. It was more like, would Indian voters understand Bofors? Would they care? Surely, V.P. Singh was himself asked this question all the time. And to those of us who followed him, on motorcycles in 48-degree heat in the 1988 by-election in Allahabad, what followed was a fascinating tutorial in political communication.
In village after village, V.P. Singh would get down from his motorcycle, and speak to small groups of people. Your homes have been burgled, he would say. In fact, he would use the more colloquial sendh lag gayi hai – sendh is the hole a burglar makes in your wall to break into your home. Then he would pull out a matchbox from his kurta pocket, and hold it up: when you buy a matchbox for 25 paise, five paise go to the government. It is your money, with which the government builds schools and hospitals for you, buys guns for your army. If somebody has stolen a part of this, isn’t that the same as your house having been burgled? The voter understood. And you have not seen him angrier since, except, perhaps, now.
Also read: It’s a puzzle why VP Singh was never accepted by OBCs even after Mandal Commission
The difference is that this new surge has not even needed a V.P. Singh to explain it in such simplistic terms. It is mostly a result of how India has changed. If our people have moved so firmly away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration, they will also not accept day-to-day corruption as a normal, chalta hai part of life. Second, aspirational people have higher self-esteem, so they are also less willing to swallow the daily humiliations they face wherever there is an interface with the government, whether to get a driving licence, a passport, an income tax refund, admission in a Central school, a decent college for your children, a hospital bed for your old parents and so on. One of the more profound statements Rahul Gandhi made some time ago (at the Congress’s Burari plenary in December) was the way he defined the aam aadmi: one who is left out of the system, who has neither the contacts to manoeuvre his way through it, nor the cash to pay his way out of it. It is a different matter that his own party’s government, or its hallowed NAC, has done nothing to ease the pain of the same aam aadmi, squandering money, energy and political capital behind populist yojanas and laws instead. That aam aadmi is out on the street now, with the cry of enough. This aspirational, new Indian will not be resigned to her fate just because she is out of the system, and incapable of paying her way through it either.
There is an old Punjabi truism. That all those who beat their breasts at someone’s funeral are actually each crying for their own. That is true of this anti-corruption mood as well. Please do not miss a story in tomorrow’s edition of The Sunday Express (‘Unseen, unheard’) where our reporters (from The Indian Express) have spoken to a wide range of people attending the various protests, all at their own expense, sacrificing a day’s work or more. Each one has a story to tell.
A story of having been made to pay a bribe for a petty service, or a straightforward entitlement, like a hospital bed, a property registration, a passport and, worst of all for the urban middle class, a simple income tax refund, a school admission. Or having been denied it, just because he did not have the money or contacts. In today’s aspirational, competitive upsurge, he will not take this with that old stoicism. If your child does not make it to the IITs/ IIMs through a competitive exam, you are disappointed, but not livid with the system, because that exam is a fair, level playing field. But what happens when you cannot get your child into a Central school, but your neighbour can, just because his distant cousin is an MP with a quota slip, or has the money to buy it from an MP?
That is why this rising anger has not even needed a V.P. Singh to explain to people what corruption and scams mean for them. They actually neither understand nor bother about 2G, or CWG, nor is their anger going to be sated by the mere fact that those allegedly involved in these scandals are all getting locked up in jail. People of India are not looking for revenge. They are looking for justice, and an equal playing field for themselves, and their children. They want politics to respond to their aspirations. That is what widespread corruption, nepotism and connection-ocracy denies them.
The recent burst of scams, particularly 2G and CWG, are playing in 2011 the role V.P. Singh played in 1989, by confirming the aam aadmi‘s worst suspicions and fears. And if these scams are the new V.P. Singh, in a manner of speaking, the media is their new megaphone. Those coming out on the street in Delhi’s 44-degree heat are not doing so because they have done any fine reading of Team Anna’s Lokpal bill, or because they believe it will eradicate all corruption, or that Baba Ramdev’s campaign will bring 400 lakh crore rupees worth of black money from foreign banks. They are coming in, because they are angry, they are finding no redress, not even the hope or promise of a reform. So they just want to kick butt.
Also read: VP Singh — the poet-PM who took BJP support but later called the party a disease
The answer to all this is neither any apologies or promises from the government or the party, nor just locking up people in jail. It is not even the most draconian anti-corruption law and ombudsman ever in human history. You talk about hanging those involved in major scams? The Chinese execute hundreds for corruption every year, including governors of their provinces. Has that ended corruption? Transparency International ranks them higher than us on its scale of corruption: so even here the Chinese are ahead of us!
The answer is governance reform. India needs to launch a massive reform in every area where a citizen comes in contact with the sarkar, from getting ration cards to driving licences and passports, birth certificates, property registrations, municipal clearances, tax assessments and refunds and so on. Availability of quality schools and colleges, something the aspirational young Indian and her parents value most of all, hospital beds, has to be quadrupled in the next five years, and a credible programme needs to be launched now. Land records, registrations must be computerised, and a new system ensuring deadline-bound delivery of routine government services must be set up. It is more complex than reforming the economy in 1991, but the gains will be enormously greater. More important, this is the only way to bring back some of the constructive, if competitive, calm we were just getting used to in our society.
Also read: VP Singh — the poet-PM who took BJP support but later called the party a disease