1. Gold is your God: Time to lay down the Bauble
Warning for India’s Political Class -I
Barun Kumar Basu
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an
independent will” spoke Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre. Jawaharlal Nehru echoed similar
sentiments in his “tryst with destiny” speech. Yet, the more we strive to realize our ideals of
independence, the more we find ourselves echoing Jane Eyre’s “I do not think, sir, you have
any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen
more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made
of your time and experience.” The events of the last few weeks only prove the incapacity of
India’s political class’s inability to claim “superiority” on the basis of their time and
experience. Slavery of gullible citizens, Eyre’s “free human being with an independent will”
have been repeatedly mocked by our political class, irrespective of their ideology. Indeed, at
no point in time has India’s political class stood so miserably exposed and naked as they do
today. Yet they do not flinch from their world view of “us” (rulers) and “them” (the ruled) in
an UPA vs. NDA context alone.
To start with, I refer to a series of events that commenced with the Augusta
Westland chopper episode. A former Indian Air Force Chief was indicted without a trial even
though he had no solitary role to play in this sordid episode. Promptly, Angelic Anthony,
India’s Defense Minister ordered a CBI probe, based entirely on unverified and unproven
media reports, even decided to seek reparation from the chopper manufacturer and
stopped further supplies of the choppers. The CBI, for its part, acted equally predictably.
Julie and Tosca Tyagi……Abhishek Verma and his pretty Romanian wife and sundry other
wheeler dealers on Delhi’s cocktail circuit, promptly came in handy as blame goats. An FIR
was registered and the tail was sought to be pinned on Tyagi’s donkey. No one ever
questioned the evidential basis for the CBI’s action. No one ever asked a fundamental
question: If our leaders were riding their crest of popularity, why could they not travel by
train or by commercial flights like Gandhi and Morarji Desai had done? If they indeed had to
scale the heights of the Siachen, a la Churchill on the beach heads in 1940, could they not
have been transshipped from Jammu/Pathankot in Spartan Cheetah choppers that were
already doing duty in Siachen, even though these needed urgent replacement? If frugality
marked UPA from NDA, then why did UPA not scrap the proposal altogether? If every
second or third defense equipment supplier were unlawfully blacklisted, this would invite
disaster, in the fifth decade after the Sino-Indian debacle of 1962. Nor will India’s private
sector ever be allowed unrestricted entry into the holy cathedral of defense purchases.
Our political class only proved its ineptitude as everything was sought to be fitted
into a worldview akin to the classical Bengali-non-Bengali worldview, now replaced by UPA
and NDA. Did the political class care for the defense preparedness of the nation, the
integrity and loyalty of our soldiers, their self-respect, and their key role in future conflicts in
an increasingly hostile neighborhood? After all what happened in 1962 when politicians led
the war effort and failed to use the same Air Force to cover our ground troops who were
sitting ducks for the Chinese may recur. The whole drama played out as it had for Bofors
decades ago. The CBI had its blame goats, Angelic Anthony’s personal integrity remained
intact and loyal courtiers remained paragons of virtue while UPA and NDA argued endlessly.
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2. The media fanned the insensate debate no differently. Whistle-stopping commercially
saleable sensationalism crept in as armchair-bound panelists, many long superannuated and
self-proclaimed defense analysts, appeared out of nowhere to proclaim the demise of the
Indian state, even though they had not the foggiest idea of what was wrong with the
system. Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels never visualized the withering of the bourgeois
state to a proletarian takeover in the manner events unfolded in the last few weeks. Indeed
it was not the proletariat that took over, it was the lumpen amongst them that prevailed.
Who cared for India’s “tryst with destiny”? After all, the lumpen viewed themselves as a
“free human being with an independent will.” Who cared if a future service chief refused to
sign a file for purchase of defense equipment and deploy soldiers beyond our borders, lest
he become a pawn in a sordid political game, a decade after his superannuation from
service?
In a similar vein, another sordid saga played out in the courts in Kerala and Delhi.
Two Italian marines escorting an Italian cargo ship shot two Tamil fishermen, evidently
mistaking them for Somali pirates, by the color of their sunburnt skin. The case has dragged
on for over a year, unmindful of the international ramifications and the fact that the
European Union is India’s single largest trade partner. Indeed the entire case stands on a
sandy foundation that involves the location of the cargo ship with a recording device that
seems to have been corrupted or is missing. Neither has India conclusively disproved that
the Italian freighter was not in Indian territorial waters, nor has Italy conclusively proved
that the ship was in international waters. Should we have taken the matter to the UN, like
Kashmir in 1948? Or was Kashmir disincentive for us to rely on our courts and legal system,
even when fundamental questions remained unanswered? Even if a former Italian
government committed itself to the authority of the Indian higher judiciary, and
subsequently unashamedly, indeed brazenly, reneged on its assurances, should the Govt. of
India not have foreseen the import of the Kerala Police’s submission not to let the marines
go home to vote? It was only a matter of time before UPA-II found itself in a Catch-22
situation with its ineptitude.
On the one hand a foreign nation had willingly submitted to the authority of the
Indian judiciary, on the other hand, the withering Indian state, was busy “making friends” as
its Foreign Minister recently stated on national media. In the meaningless UPA-NDA
brouhaha that followed, predictably the political class did not ask obvious fundamental
questions. Why was a case of our national honor pending in an Indian court for over a year?
Did police investigation prove the Italian contention that the ship was outside our territorial
waters? Why did our mandarins in South and North Blocks not foresee domestic
compulsions in a chronically unstable Italian polity when the same compulsions plagued us
concurrently? The coincidental timing of the Augusta Westland chopper ‘scam’ and the
Italian marines faux pas, could only be interpreted as a ploy, yet again, to safeguard the
tattered myth of the Gulliverian UPA, indeed a quid pro quo to stymie investigations into
the chopper deal. In sum, Augusta Westland and the Italian marine issues were debated in a
caviler manner that threw to the winds “your claim to superiority depends on the use you
have made of your time and experience.”
Neither time nor experience mattered, they were not even relevant. Instead, what
was relevant was a Minister’s obsession for his personal integrity even if it meant sacrificing
the nation’s collective defense integrity and the reputation of an ancient regime that was
desperately clinging to a heart-lung machine in its last gasps for life. For the opposition, it
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3. was good Disneyland fun, a roller coaster that provided gladiatorial thrills for the Opposition
as UPA squirmed, gasped and passed out, indeed reacted in extraterrestrial behavior that
Spielberg would never have approved for ET.
The author is a former Ambassador of India
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4. Gold is your God: Time to lay down the Bauble
Warning for India’s Political Class -II
Barun Kumar Basu
As if this were not enough, came the drama over Sri Lanka. This time, instead of the
Italians, it was a UPA component that hallucinated itself as Protectors of the Tamil faith,
even beyond our borders. ‘Har Har Mahadev’ was replaced by cries of ‘war crimes’,
‘genocide’ et al. Unmindful of the recent licking by puny Maldives, a smarting Bangladesh
(over the Teesta issue) and a Pakistani Premier who sought the Ajmer Dargah Sharif’s
blessings before sponsoring the next Mujahedeen attack on a CRPF camp in Srinagar, the
DMK marched into battle against the Lankans, all over a photo of a slain child of a former
LTTE commander. Neither was there any direct evidence that Lankan troops had shot this
innocent child, nor was there any clinching evidence that some other lunatic fringe had
perpetrated this act or publicized it to discredit the Lankan government or that it was yet
another collateral damage of war. The DMK conveniently omitted to include thousands of
non-Tamils who lost their lives as those Tamils that were caught in the crossfire between an
integrity-preserving Lankan army and integrity-blowing LTTE. Evidently, Tamil deaths were
‘genocidal’, all others suicidal!
Again, the predictable drama played out even as the UN draft Resolution was
approved by UN Security Council members. As for Augusta Westland and the Italian marine
issues, this time too, the debate centered on the manner in which the UPA-led coalition
could be sustained till May, 2014. Three or four senior Cabinet ministers were flown to
Chennai to administer spa treatment to the DMK mandarin who realized the thin ice UPA
was skating upon. In the same manner as Italy’s interim government reneged on its stated
undertaking to the Supreme Court, the DMK patriarch withdrew his Ministers from the
Union Cabinet and support from the UPA alliance and government, notwithstanding the
severe damage it could do to our international credibility when it was at its lowest ebb in
the Indian Ocean region, much the same manner in which EU and the Italians are now trying
to cover up their faux pas in submitting the affidavit to India’s Supreme Court.
When India has legitimate pretensions of being the superpower of the 21 st century,
should UPA have continued with the DMK instead called for premature general elections
and called the DMK’s bluff? In any case, in an era of rising prices, unemployment and rising
prices, would the electorate honestly be swayed by the plight of some distant cousins in a
foreign land? Or was it a last minute ploy to avoid any further jail terms for prominent
members of the DMK in the unending 2G saga? If so, then where is the fundamental
difference between the linked pairs of Augusta Westland and the Italian marines’ issues and
the DMK’s withdrawal and the 2G scam?
Yet the UPA-NDA debate only exposed the hollowness of India’s claim to super
power status. Which wannabe super power allows its national debasement to the whims
and fancies of regional satraps, that too for a non-issue? Or do we seek to descend to the
historically uninspiring Italian bravura, peccadilloes of their leaders and genetic political
instability since the end of World War II? To muddy the waters, we now have the TMC
sympathizing with the Tamils but not willing to interfere in India’s foreign affairs. Like the
DMK, for the TMC, Bangladesh was a mere Indian vassal and thus Teesta waters were India’s
unshareable family heirloom but Lanka was a matter of foreign policy. In effect, DMK and
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5. TMC’s vassal state perspectives plumbed new depths of political crassness and
opportunism, even as Lanka and Bangladesh remained our immediate neighbors!
We also had war room precision-timed maneuvering by the Bihar Chief Minister to
gain ‘special status’ for his State in making good the shortfall of 20-odd DMK legislators and
preserving the myth of a majority government. Not only did this CM invite himself to Delhi,
he did not have any model of proven development, only grievances, and expected scraps
from UPA-II in return for his messianic support. TMC was not far different when it emerged
from the shadows to throw a lifeline to the keeling UPA-II ship over the Lankan issue. Yet
NDA constituents stated they would not bring any no-confidence motion in Parliament in
the hope that the UPA-II government would collapse under the weight of its Marxian-like
contradictions. This only places, on public exhibition, the brazen and crass desperation of
the entire political class to cling to power, even if it were for less than 365 more days.
Equally, it speaks of the reticence of the political class to face an angry electorate.
The crowning glory, indeed the most comic episode, came with the introduction of
the Anti-Rape Bill in Parliament. If a prominent Opposition MP said he too had ogled at girls,
many others felt that it fallen upon them to correct a historical wrong with yet another
wrong. That meaningful enforcement of existing laws was sufficient to safeguard our
women folk was not adequately politically appealing to the political class; hence yet another
unenforceable law, as if the new law was in atonement of the political class’s proven
impotence during the Delhi protests against Nirbhaya’s gang rape and subsequent death. In
doing so, the political class only ensured that the chasm between men and women widened
immeasurably. Would I, as an employer, risk chiding a female employee for any professional
misdemeanor or transfer her to a geographical location in NE India? Should my son and my
grandson ride a cab with an assertive tip-demanding lady at the wheel? If a young lady
school teacher were to make sexual overtures to my below-18 handsome grandson, how do
I prove the poor boy’s innocence and keep him from incarceration, lest she falsely accuse
him of stalking her? I wonder what would come of a nonagenarian like me if a female bank
clerk were to keep me waiting for a legitimate banking service and I expressed my protest
vocally, for only the first offence is bailable? Has our political class not already learnt its
lessons from the high incidence of legally proven false dowry cases? Law cannot supplant
justice as government ought not to substitute for governance. Sadly, both justice and
governance were the biggest casualties in the UPA-NDA’s ‘Big Fight’.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx described the lumpen
proletariat thus, “Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of
dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were
vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers,
mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel
keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in
short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French
call la bohème.” Criminal charges against hundreds of legislators testify to the integrity of
our political class. The Indian political class thrives, is indeed grouted among all these
elements and much more, irrespective of ideology, even admitted by senior Cabinet
ministers. In fact, vain, and most often, illusory ideological moorings only add strength to
the electors’ voice that Charlotte Bronte’s words so aptly summate, “I do not think, sir, you
have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have
seen more of the world than I have.” At the dawn of Independence, a tired but hopeful
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6. nation had supported Pater Familias in power. Sadly, their families have proliferated and
their vacuuming tentacles now extend to every sphere of public life, draining the life blood
of this noble nation, even as many denizens of such families forfeited their deposits in
recent State Assembly elections. Indeed they were like Oliver Goldsmith’s Village
Schoolmaster for “…..e'en though vanquish'd he could argue still” although “…past is all his
fame. The very spot where many a time he triumph'd is forgot.”
Patronage and arrogance of power make a heady mix for violent rejection and
Jacobean instability. Indeed, this nation desperately needs a Lord Protector of Realm of the
integrity of Oliver Cromwell, who put an end to the ancient regime on 20 th April, 1653, with
his dissolution of the Long Parliament thus, “It is high time for me to put an end to your
sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled
by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government;
ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of
pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue
now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more
religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for
bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the
Commonwealth? Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the
Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are
grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get
grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock
up the doors. In the name of God, go!” I hope our electors, particularly GenNext, will derive
inspiration from Cromwell’s words and restore the dignity and reputation of this noble land
in the comity of nations.
The author is a former Ambassador of India
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