From soap opera to farce

Why not hold a referendum instead of banking on fixers for the nuclear deal?

One of the axioms of Indian life was the primacy of politics. The political might be dirty, but politics was vital. It connected all the great value frames of public life from nation, state, democracy and various ‘ism’. The politician was exemplary and other domains like business, Bollywood, and sport all played second fiddle to the business of politics. Today there is an inversion as business and sport provide the exemplars. Worse, politics appears like a scurrilous page three, with Amar Singh sounding the dominant notes. A man known more for his association with film stars suddenly seems to be determing the fate of a country. There is something unreal about the scripts all around. The Left, including Raja, Bardhan, Brinda and Prakash Karat sound like cassette tapes. They repeat a rhetoric that seems alien and defeated. The Right seems equally flummoxed. Standing in between, giving support to the Congress, are some of the seediest characters on stage.

Abraham Lincoln, the old innocent, once said you can fool some of the people some of time but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Lincoln missed the bus because all that politics needs is the wisdom of ‘you can buy some of the people all of the time’. There is a realism about the haggle that only politicians relish. There is also a hypocrisy that we need to understand. Stendahl said hyprocrisy is the recognition of value where there is none. Amar Singh has done precisely that. He has discovered a new found sanctity to nation, science and patriotism using Kalam as a patron saint. It is a bit like Paradise Lost where the devil gets the best lines. In Indian politics it is the middleman as fixer who does. He plays Mother Teresa, Fevicol and Red Cross with effortless ease, promising quietly to send the bill a week later. He sits immaculately correct, stating that if the CPM wanted to see IAEA drafts, they should have allowed one of the younger ones like Yechury to take the oath.

Something about the performance leaves one incredulous. What was opera now looks like a farce, but it is a farce which works. Manmohan Singh waxes idealistic, but the sudden presence of Amar Singh makes one wonder if two different scripts have got mixed up. What is even more perplexing is that those who were key actors have been suddenly displaced and transformed into impotent critics. The Left faces an impotence which it cannot grasp. It failed to understand that the business of business is business. The wisdom of Karat understands property as theft. It failed to grasp till too late that possession is nine points of the law.

Examine the way the debates take place. The Left in its didactic way recites its anachronisms and plays the nationalist card. It wishes to make Bush appear dangerous, but all he does is to look like a retired version of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E Newman. The gossip of power overwhelms the logic of nuclear energy. Electoral logic has the same power as a magic formula which makes the Manmohan detergent feel whiter. Nuclear power seems as serious as a VLCC advertisement. Amar Singh goes on TV to spout nothings which make defense experts seem redundant. The ordinariness of the risk of atomic power seems eerie. This is absurd drama at its best. One must give it to the Left that they at least tried to be serious.

Now the whole event is like a local egg and spoon race. The Congress’s egg is immaculately intact and the CPM has egg over its face. All that matters is who reached the finishing line, not what one fought about or the way one fought. I think the Left in its archaic way thought it was a five-day cricket match with immaculate umpiring. Amar and Malayam — the Singhs — created a quicker T20 version that ended the game. They were right; the spectators were tiring of the longer substantial version.

Should such an event leave us transfixed about the banality of Indian politics? There is no more to this than the idiocy of the Left. What we are facing is a moment of innovation in institutional politics. The nuclear deal is too important an issue to be left solely to scientists or politicians. Nuclear power demands time-lines and visions of a different order. Is it not time that NGOs, gender groups and human rights activists ask that the nuclear issue be part of a referendum because it not only determines the fate of a party but the future of a society? To reduce it to a bargain cut in some plush corner of Delhi or Lucknow is too sordid and too simplistic. No regime should hypothecate the future in this way. Nuclear power can’t remain the pretext where page one meets page three in Indian society, with a socialite spelling the end of one kind of Socialism, as an irony of Indian politics.

The writer is a social anthropologist.