Aatish Taseer reflects on the impact of permit-raj on the very entity that invented it – the Indian National Congress. This internal permit-raj regulated the injection of new political talent that would be required to keep the organizational wheels churning and the boilers firing. There was only one problem with the hot-housing effort: it was intentionally set-up to create bonsais not banyans. 

Every Congress leader,
as with certain bonsai, comes with, or will cultivate, a self-dwarfing
mechanism. He can grow, he knows, but never too big. He must be careful
not to put the heir in shadow; and, when the heir is something of a
bonsai himself, this is not always easy. 

The last desperate call for reform was in 1999, when the Amar, Akbar, and Anthony trio of Sharad Pawar, Tariq Anwar and Purno Sangma raised the banner of revolt. Sonia they said was not fit for purpose. That was a good time as any to cut off the family with a (well deserved) pension. Too bad that it did not come to pass.

Today, fifteen years later, Pawar is left bloodied but unbowed in face of the Modi storm. His party won four seats in Maharashtra (including his daughter Supriya Sule from home-town Baramati) as compared to the two for Congress. Anwar won handsomely from Katihar, Bihar and Purno Sangma is aligned with the BJP. If you only permit bonsais be prepared for harakiri.
…………
It was a hot desolate morning. The countryside was very poor and
arid, and past a sloping expanse of fields, solid gold with ripened
wheat, an ancient and arresting vision: the white sands and distant glitter of the Ganges. 

The road rose and
we came upon the Congress campaign. There was something almost quaint
about the sight of the Congress tricolour in the little village of
Kamarian. It was like one of those flags, which when ubiquitous and
powerful had offended the eye, but now, absent long enough to be robbed
of its associations, brought up—as with the hammer-and-sickle— a feeling
almost akin to nostalgia. The candidate was a political heir and the
son of a family friend.  

A handsome man, he sat on the floor among a
smallish crowd of people with a Congress cloth, lined saffron and green,
tied like a turban round his head. He was soft spoken and listened
attentively to all that was said. Later, in the car, on the way to
another meeting, he said, in reply to a question about why he wanted to
be in politics: “A while ago, I had an accident and broke my femur. I
was in bed for three months and began to think about what I would really
like to do. And I realised that I wanted to do something for the people
here. I know I can’t change India, but I would like, on a personal
level, at least, to do politics in a different way.”


A general observation: this is the kind of man—sincere, hardworking,
with a certain fineness of sensibility—that the Congress, much more than
the BJP, is able to attract. The tragedy is that it is never able to do
anything with this talent. Dynasty is to blame. 

Every Congress leader,
as with certain bonsai, comes with, or will cultivate, a self-dwarfing
mechanism. He can grow, he knows, but never too big. He must be careful
not to put the heir in shadow; and, when the heir is something of a
bonsai himself, this is not always easy. It takes a real invertebrate
like Manmohan Singh to meet the party’s idea of what the stature of the
extra-familial leader should be. In such an atmosphere, where illusions
must be kept alive, and where great lies have routinely to be told,
there are always men to tell them.
……
Link: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/mogambo-in-the-sacred-city
……

regards

He is not so much the aam
aadmi as he is the caricature of an aam aadmi. He is like the Punjab
Power employee Shah Rukh Khan plays in Rab ne Bana di Jodi, who, out of a kind of shame at his ordinariness, adopts a Bergerac-esque proxy to win the love of his wife.
…………..
There is one charge, above all others, that has not left Arvind
Kejriwal’s side this election. It is that, when faced with the hard
practical reality of running an administration in Delhi, he fled the
field, returning once more to the only thing he knows: the life of
protest. 

To this, Kejriwal has responded in an understandable way. He
has tried to turn a weakness into a strength. Like the writer who, made
aware of a flaw in his book, pretends it is not a flaw at all but part
of the book’s strength, Kejriwal has, on numerous occasions, spoken of
the courage needed to leave the Chief Minister’s chair in Delhi. He has
invoked the life of renunciation. Doston, inko kya pata tyaag kya hota hai!
He has compared his leaving Delhi to Ram leaving Ayodhya. It has been a
valiant effort, but, in my view, unconvincing. The charge is too
serious.


It is serious not just because it is on everyone’s lips; not just
because it has harmed him politically, earning him one of this
election’s most damning epithets: bhagoda; no, it is serious
because it goes to the heart of our fears about the Aam Aadmi Party.
 

These include fears of anarchy, intolerance, an inability to work with
others. But, of all these, one stands out in my mind. It is the fear
that Arvind Kejriwal is that most dangerous of all political animals:
the messiah. The man for whom any existing reality is too impure to be
corrected, and who strives for some necessarily vague Utopia, which he,
alone, by what feels like an act of faith, will bring into being. 

The
messiah is dangerous because he is at bottom a nihilist. I have written
before, in a different context: ‘Every man who ever dreamt up a
Utopia was animated far more by the wish to purge than to build. I would
say, too, that the great flaw in any Utopia is the intellectually lazy
notion—and one capable of unspeakable violence—that if only the society
were cleansed or purged of some particular undesirable element, the
Utopia would automatically— come into being. That nothing more would
need to be done.’


In the case of Arvind Kejriwal, that undesirable element—the
fire by which all aims will magically be realised, all evils
cleansed—is Corruption. It came up again and again in a speech I heard
him give in Harsos, a small village on the rural edge of this
constituency. It was the first time I was hearing him speak, and I was
at once alarmed and fascinated.


Let me say first that it is difficult to exaggerate the extent to
which this man is physically unimpressive. He has thin long arms; a
small frame and, one suspects, a flaccid body; he wears baggy clothes in
dull colours, and carries a blue Reynolds pen in his pocket. There is
the trace of a whine in his voice. He is not so much the aam aadmi as he is the caricature of an aam aadmi. He is like the Punjab Power employee Shah Rukh Khan plays in Rab ne Bana di Jodi, who, out of a kind of shame at his ordinariness, adopts a Bergerac-esque proxy to win the love of his wife.


Yet—and this is what makes his physicality so fascinating— under this
drab diminutive appearance, this Gogolian picture of the government
servant, there lies an iron-willed monster of perseverance and
doggedness. When his party men say, “Modi will never find a fiercer,
more relentless opponent than Kejriwal,” I believe them. And when
Kejriwal himself says: “I have not run away. Antim saans taq tumhari chhati pe moong daalunga,”
I believe him too. It is, in fact, in this combination of physical
puniness and inward strength that the resemblance to Gandhi becomes
striking in more ways than one. For, like Gandhi, Kejriwal’s vision of
what he seeks to dismantle is all too real and tangible, but what he
wishes to put in its place—that kingdom of heaven he wishes to lead us
into—is pure chimera.




One never hears him utter a harsh word against what must be the
fountainhead of corruption in this country, the Indian state. In fact,
if one were to close one’s eyes and imagine Kejriwal’s India, it would
be a giant expanse, reaching as far as the eye could see, of two- and
three-storey government flats, in Sovietised shades of blue, beige and
grey, packed full of pious government servants, leading a dreary
existence on subsidised gas, housing, water and electricity.


But haven’t we—you might well ask—already rejected this vision of
India? Isn’t that what this election is about? Hasn’t India, having
already sampled the genius of the Indian state, come out in significant
numbers to say: no, we do not want that India. And not simply because it
doesn’t work or is corrupt, but because it is shabby and lifeless and
stifles the spirit. Have we not already opted for the other India?
Which, crude as it may still be, is the India of roads and malls and
IPLs—Sheila and Munni’s India! 

Do we not agree that, at this stage in
our development, we have more to fear from big government than big
business? Is it not generally acknowledged that the source of corruption
in this country is a State that preys on private enterprise, rather
than private enterprise preying on the State? And is it not true that
India’s daily encounter with corruption occurs, not in the Reliance or
Vodafone shop, but in the government office?


Kejriwal—that scourge of Corruption—does not reflect this in his
politics at all. He is far more willing to demonise business than the
State.


In fact, one of the things that has intrigued me this election is the
kind of anger I sense for Kejriwal’s brand of austerity. The AAP will
tell you that the violence against its volunteers is all
BJP-sponsored—and, no doubt, some of it is. But some of it is also
spontaneous. They seem to arouse a kind of contempt. I have witnessed it
in all quarters, now in a driver at the Harsos rally, who, on seeing
Kejriwal in his Scorpio, might say: “Yeh simplicity kuchh zyaada toh nahi ho gayi?” Now, in some BHU students, jeering at AAP workers taking a boat ride on the Ganga: “Lagta hai ke pehli baar boat mein jaa rahein hain.” Or, here, in a man who took me aside in Chitvan gym, to say: “Kejriwal se zyaada diwaaliya insaan maine kabhi nahi dekha hai. Voh maansik rogi hai.” And, even at the little protest outside my house, a BHU student muttered: “Isko toh main bhi thhapadh maar sakta hun.” 

India, it seems, knows what to do with simplicity when it comes in the
form of a holy man— Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Anna Hazare. It is far less
sure of what to do with it when it comes in the form of Arvind Kejriwal.



Still, it is something of a miracle that he exists at all. Wrong-
headed as his politics may be, there is no greater tribute to the
democracy we live in than its ability, less than two years after
Kejriwal was fasting in the streets of Delhi, to have absorbed him
electorally. I will say, too, that the people who comprise his
party—many of whom have left their jobs to serve the cause— are among
the most decent people to ever enter politics. And, whether they win or
lose, they will have forever altered the political culture of this
country. Already, due largely to their advent, there is a growing
conviction that politics need not be the province of the cynical
professional, but that ordinary people, tired of what they see around
them, can and must step forward.


This is not AAP’s election. Many of them know as much. They would
like to be, they say, Modi’s main opposition. They are hoping for
100-150 seats. They are dreaming. It would have been much better had
they stayed in Delhi and proved that their politics was more than a
politics of protest. And yet, that morning when I left them in their
small silent circle on the edge of the Ganga, and found myself swept up
in Modi’s jansailaabh, an angry flood of youth, testosterone,
hope and pride, which was, by turns, exciting and scary, I could not
help but feel what a good thing it would be for Indian democracy if, in
Modi’s hour of triumph, the man tasked with whispering ‘memento mori’ in his ear was none other than this most formidable of former taxmen.
…..
Link: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-runaway-messiah
……..

regards

‘Then, referring to Rahul Gandhi’s comment the other day—and he only ever refers to him as ‘shahzada’—that
poverty is “a state of mind”, he said: “Now what I want to know is: Is
this poverty that the Prime Minister is asking Obama to alleviate real?
Is it the poverty of our streets and neighbourboods? Is it real poverty?
Or is this also that state-of-mind poverty?”

……..
This election began for me with a Modi rally in Delhi last September.
I was struck at the time by a number of things. These are my
impressions from that day: …..And then, just as P— and I were getting pretty restless, the
strangest thing happened. The sky darkened. A cool wind began to blow,
and the temperature seemed to drop by several degrees.  

A long narrow
poster of Modi tied to the metal frame of the tent came free and began
to blow in the wind. But in such a way that it seemed—because of the
little ripple that [ran] through the poster—that Modi was waving at us. 
In fact, many people from the press corps—you know how India loves a bit
of magic!—got up and began to photograph this strange phenomenon. Not
just because on this day of ‘chamchamati dhoop’ it was suddenly
cooler, and the glare from the sky was gone, but because this
apparition of the leader seeming to wave at the press enclosure
coincided exactly with Modi’s arrival on stage!  

And when I stood up on
my chair to see the reaction of the crowd, it was not so small. Not
small at all, in fact. 
.
‘He began in humour. And this is [rare]. This is not a funny country:
there are very few political leaders who can really make people laugh.
“The Prime Minister is in America at the moment,” he said, embarking on a
cruel impression of the PM. “He is grovelling before Obama. He is
telling him that we are a poor country, and that America should help us.
“‘We are,’” he went on, in a weak plaintive voice, “‘a nation of 125
crore, but we are poor. Please help us!’”


.
‘Then, referring to Rahul Gandhi’s comment the other day—and he only ever refers to him as ‘shahzada’—that
poverty is “a state of mind”, he said: “Now what I want to know is: Is
this poverty that the Prime Minister is asking Obama to alleviate real?
Is it the poverty of our streets and neighbourboods? Is it real poverty?
Or is this also that state-of-mind poverty?”


.
And for many minutes, this was all that he did. He just made us
laugh, at the expense of the discredited PM, and The Madonna with Child.


.

‘But then—and one could almost not tell when it happened— all the
humour fell away. And he was angry. Full of this emotion that I now
think of as distinctly his: this mixture of pain and sadness edged with
great anger.


..
‘… His victory will decimate the opposition. Not just in terms of
numbers, but philosophically too. It will be a long time before the
Congress finds its way again. The [pundits in Delhi] will say I’m wrong.
How will he find the numbers? they ask. But the numbers will come. This is going to be one of those elections when all the old calculations cease to apply.’

And, if I have sympathy for Modi, if I wish to see him
succeed, it is because of my sympathy for the people who support him.


…
It is this India—clear-headed, restless, hungry—that has energised
this election. It is the India that some of us have been waiting to see
come into being.


…
It is also my concern for this India that has prejudiced my view of
this election. The reason is that I grew up among a class of
Indians—privileged, exclusively English-speaking, intimately connected
to power and politics—who loathed this other India. They turned their
nose up at their bad English; they complained of their body odour; they
described them, while doing an impression before a hooting drawing room
of people (I’m thinking now of a large mondaine of Delhi society) as
‘ball-scratchers.’ They hated their beliefs and practices; they held
their religion in contempt; they lived in open terror of their rise.


…
Only the Poor were beautiful. The people I grew up among had great
reserves of feeling for the rural poor. And through their many schemes
and yojanas, their fraudulent plans for empowerment, their concern for
tribal art and religion, this crowd of ethnistas and Oxbridge Lefties
worked hard to make sure that the Poor never lost the thing that gave
them their great charm, namely their poverty. Now while it would be
unfair to say that the members of this class supplied leaders
exclusively to the Congress party—many of them went on to join other
parties, some even to lead large states—it would not be an exaggeration
to say that if one party were to be singled out as sharing the beliefs
and prejudices of this class, it would be the Congress Party under the
leadership of the Gandhi family.


…
And the decline that was to
be observed between Jawaharlal Nehru’s generation and Rajiv Gandhi’s was
visible everywhere. No one perhaps expected that it would have brought
us so soon to Rahul Gandhi; one might be forgiven for thinking an
intervening stage was needed; but decline itself was inescapable. It is
not possible for a class to remain vital if it cannot draw cultural
nourishment from the place it inhabits. That class then will produce
people without the means to deal with India; it will produce
Coomaraswamy’s intellectual pariah, ‘the nondescript superficial being’
who is neither of the East nor the West. 

Because the sense I had at that rally in Rohini—then subsequently, in
Kanpur, and then again, here, in Benares— was of a country unbound. A
country coming free of its historical obeisance to the class the Gandhi
family represented. The change was happening not because the new middle
classes sensed the danger the elite posed to their own growth. No: it
was much more basic than that. It was that the cultural gap had finally
grown too wide. And if they turned away from Rahul Gandhi, it was not
because they saw him as a threat to their own interests, it was because
they couldn’t understand a word he was saying. In the past, this might
have produced a feeling of apology in them; it now produced an equal and
corresponding feeling of contempt.


….
It was there in the voice of a young priest who came to see me the
other day. He was of a grand line of priests belonging to the Kashi
Vishwanath Mandir. He wore jeans and a kurta, pink-stemmed rimless
glasses; his ringtone was: ‘Yada yada hi dharmasya…’ There were
broad streaks of yellow on his forehead, pierced red at the centre, and
he wore a ring of Hessonite, for his Rahu was bad. We had not met to
discuss politics. 

But the young priest, after making apologies for being
apolitical, as men of God frequently do, could talk of nothing else. Of
Modi, he said: “Rahul Gandhi se toh zyaada sincere hain. Kam se kam unko bataana toh nahi padhha ke yeh Vishwanath hain. Rahul Gandhi ko bataana padhha ke yeh Vishwanath hain.”
Then, as if coming to the heart of the difference between the two men,
he said Modi knew how to perform all the rites at the temple. “Rahul
Gandhi,” the priest added cruelly, “toh sona-chaandi dekh rahe thhe. Unko toh Vishwanath se koi matlab hi nahi thha.”


…
This was what was new this election. In another time, Rahul Gandhi
would not only have been forgiven his deracination; he would have been
admired for it.


…
But cultural rootedness came with problems of its own; in fact, it
came with the problems of that culture. And, likeable as the priest was,
he was an effortless bigot. He lamented the fact that all of India’s
Muslims had not been sent to Pakistan in 1947; he spoke of the need,
when Modi came to power, for one decisive riot that would show Muslims
their place. To hear him speak was to be reminded of how dangerous it
was to romanticise one India over another. It was also to be reminded of
the man the priest supported this election, the man from whom such a
wide range of things were expected.


….
Modi, that day in Rohini, when I first heard him speak, had said a
few things that worried me very much. He said that at that same
breakfast in New York where our Prime Minister had been insulted, some
Indian journalists had been present. Would they, he thundered,
those journalists, be answerable to the people of India for why they
had been eating Nawaz Sharif’s breakfast while their Prime Minister was
being insulted?….No press freedoms would need to be reeled in; the change of air
was often threat enough. But, more than all this, what really worried me
about what Modi said that day was that it suggested a certain kind of
man. Whose principal crime, in my eyes, is not so much that he is a
bigot, but a provincial.


The provincial is a problem not because you can’t have a glass of
wine with him, though that would be nice too. Nor is it simply that he
is not a man of the intellect—not a reader, not someone of subtle mind.
The provincial is a problem because his plan for Development, on which
his entire fame rests, often ends up being too shallow a plan. Too
limited in its scope. 

Modi, if he is to bring profound change, must not go the Erdogan or
Rajapaksa route. Because the conditions for the emergence of that kind
of leader do exist in India. There is the malaise left behind by the
previous government; there is a loud majoritarian feeling; there is
disgust with the elite; and there are people baying for a strong leader.
It is very easy to imagine an India in which Modi, if he delivers on
Development, will be forgiven everything else. And anyone with a harsh
word to say about him will be driven out of town. It would be terrible
if that atmosphere were allowed to grow in India. 
………
Link: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/the-light-of-benares
…..

regards