As Karnataka marks sixty years of the founding of its legislative assembly, one is reminded of another country, another time, another place. Scouring the centuries-old cobble-stoned marketplace in Baghdad, City of Caliphs in what seems like another lifetime, where I was looking for a keepsake, one was always struck by the strength of feeling that the politics of the region generated... where even as the bombs fell and war loomed, the book sellers would sit unfazed alongside backgammon players sipping shots of qahwa, locked in heated debate along the banks of the Tigris.

This was a city, where the power of the sword and fealty to the tribe almost always decided the fate of rulers and nations, artificial constructs conjured out of the sands by their colonial masters. Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia. How different are we? Here, at home? On our sub-continent…

Always partial to sepia prints of the past, I homed in on a black and white picture of turn of the century Baghdad where the street on which I stood I was told, had seen a king, decapitated, his body dragged through the streets, as the rivers turned to blood. The triumphalism of one coup, followed by counter-coups and much bloodshed, and quiet disappearances since.

But surely, we’re different from the Middle Easterners, I tell myself. The Arab nations have never tasted or understood real democracy or nationhood or the healthy power of debate in quite the way we have these sixty odd years. I mean, look at the opportunity missed by the Arab Spring, the brutality visited on one nation after another once the jackboot was removed, the vicious rag-tag liberation armies settling scores rather than bringing stability and freedom to their oppressed peoples.

Here, in an India, it must be said, we were a motley collection of kingdoms and principalities, collectively known as Hind. This was a continent of self-styled potentates and petty chieftains who warred with one another.

With the advent of the Mughals, and then the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British, they vied with the other to prove who was more loyal to the firang kings and queens in distant Europe. Survival tactic? Perhaps.

But where did this palpable pride, this sense of nationhood, this identity of being an Indian first rather than the linguistic, casteist individuality, suddenly spring from? How did the idea of India overlay the rest of our multiple identities?

The battle for independence, and the Mahatma no doubt must have pushed the Indian in us to the fore, and that empire builders through the ages saw us as one unified India, all the way from the Hindukush to the Irrawady.

Does it still hold true? Or have we regressed? As Karnataka dusts off its path to democracy on Monday, and legislators, old and new, beat a path to the doors of the most impressive building in the city, — no, that should be the state — there’s a huge stirring of pride amongst us all.

Poring through the black and white pictures — and there are so many — one can see the Vidhana Soudha as it rises from the rubble. There’s Jawaharlal Nehru! There’s President Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and B.D.Jatti, who went on to become Vice President, the former king of Mysore and Karnataka’s first chief minister Kengal Hanumanthaiah.

And the apocryphal tale of how even back then, the political class, bent on pulling the other down, found ways to beat the system. Mr Hanumanthaiah managing to beat the rap of a chief justice bent on disqualifying him by declaring a holiday on the day, the judgement was to be delivered!

It’s of a piece with how the endearingly Machiavellian Pranabda managed to put one over the Bengal tigress Mamata Banerjee on the fateful Wednesday, whom he may have defanged through fair means and foul!

Politics. Politicking. As it should be.

But the antics in the last one week here in this state demonstrate once and for all, that in these august chambers, it is certainly not politics as usual. The legislators whom we elect to supreme office are no longer the erudite intellectuals with the clever turn of phrase and ringing speeches who could bring us to our feet and out of our homes to fight for a cause that was greater and bigger than our petty, individual grouses against each other.

Karnataka’s legislatures have seen the great and the good. Hanumanthaiah was followed by the illustrious S.Nijalingappa, B.D. Jatti, Veerendra Patil, Devaraj Urs and Ramakrishna Hegde. But with each new man in the hot seat came the slush of corruption that sullied the politician. The pressure from a liquor lobby was the first one heard of the sleaze, followed by the rise to prominence of the real estate mafia who impacted the development – or not – of our once sylvan city to the sad, sorry mess it is today, to the pre-eminence in our current times of the mega-rich educationists and the billionaire mine barons of Bellary.

Does the ability to make cash, granted, mountains of it, make these legislator-businessmen fit to call the shots in our parliament and assemblies? Well, the cash-rich legislators who now people our assembly certainly seem to think so.

Which is why the BJP’s B.S. Yeddyurappa, accused of every ill, has the moxy to say to his successor that the 12 men who cross-voted during the elections to the legislative council should be thrown out of the party. He is choosing to forget of course, that it was his Operation Kamala, which brought many of these dubious characters into the Vidhana Soudha in the first place. Sugar barons, lottery kings, louts. Politicians? Nahhh!

And the Congress, unable to shake off years of infighting, is facing the embarrassment of one of its candidates walking away with far more than the votes that were allotted to him even as rumours of one and a half crores — how many zeroes is that exactly — and a car thrown in, is said to have been the going rate for a single vote.

Which is why the black and white pictures of Karnataka that I have date back to 1952! Much before the Jarkiholis and the Lads became part of our political lexicon.