India’s other red light district

What do Sonia Gandhi, Singapo-re’s Lee Kuan Yew and Ashok Mitra, the economist who was West Bengal’s finance minister for a whole decade (1977 to 1987) have in common? For not very dissimilar reasons, all three are averse to flashing red lights on cars. The difference is that what Mrs Gandhi and Mr Lee advise on grounds of astute policy, Mr Mitra, ever the Communist who refuses to be called a gentleman, advocates for reasons of lost idealism.

Someone was facile enough to suggest that Mrs Gandhi recently refused to allow members of Parliament the status symbol they craved for because of her political antipathy to the colour red. That may have been so when Prakash Karat and the Left Front were up in arms over the nuclear agreement with the US. Now, with those same CPI(M) revolutionaries promising to support Pranab Mukherjee for Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mrs Gandhi should have every reason to welcome anything that suggests UPA-Left alliance. Or does she? Is she really grateful for Mr Karat’s promise of support? No one really knows what she feels about the man who tried to do her husband out of his birthright.
Such is the mystery that it was a Calcutta joke that far from being Mr Mukherjee’s sworn enemy, Mamata Banerjee is really his ardent supporter. According to this version, Ms Banerjee proposed Dr Manmohan Singh for President because that would mean Mr Mukherjee automatically becoming Prime Minister, which wouldn’t have been at all acceptable to 10 Janpath. Then she appeared to set her face implacably against Mr Mukherjee, apparently knowing that nothing would more surely force Mrs Gandhi to propose him.
But however enigmatic the Congress Party president might be, her objection to flamboyant red lights is all too soundly rooted in the political logic for which she admires Mr Lee so much that she sent her son to Singapore to sit at his feet for a week and learn the dos and don’ts of being a successful Prime Minister. Red lights, she argued, would draw further attention to the privileged position of those who are supposed to be the people’s representatives. What else do they earn, people might ask. What do they make on the side would inevitably follow. Politicians being a discredited species in these scam-ridden days, it would be wiser if they don’t draw attention to themselves. Of course, it’s unfair to forbid MPs a privilege that mere MLAs enjoy. But supremo though she might be, Mrs Gandhi can’t exercise authority in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu. She could, of course, forbid Congress MLAs in both states to flaunt the totems of power; in fact, it would be a clever move in the austerity one-upmanship stakes. I am surprised no one has put the idea in her head.
Mr Lee, of course, needs no advisers’ inputs. He is his own best strategist. He is also a simple man who abhors ostentation. So when he was first elected Prime Minister, he drove his own Mercedes Benz to the gubernatorial palace to be sworn in. Visiting Mumbai in 2007, he explained to an elite gathering of legislators, administrators and tycoons that Singapore had done away with emblems of rank for cars. He felt that ruling parties whose leaders are recognisable from special number plates, bonnet pennants and red lights tend to lose elections in the capital, and Singapore is its own capital. He told them that “familiarity breeds contempt. So, in Singapore no minister goes with the flag, and our cars are not specially numbered. We share the trials and tribulations of the populace.”
He might have added that carrying egalitarianism a stage further, Singapore long ago abolished colonial privileges like government flats, cars, chauffeurs and peons for its civil servants.
Instead, they are paid well enough to be able to afford their own comforts. Our various pay commissions have pushed up bureaucratic salaries to high levels but also retained all those perks that were meant to compensate for poor pay.
According to newspaper reports, Mr Lee’s high-powered audience “listened with rapt attention” to the homily and applauded fervently and frequently. Then they drove away in their chauffeur-driven official cars with distinctive number plates, flags fluttering bravely in Mumbai’s sea breeze, red lights flashing above, and, in many cases, with sirens also screaming. India is “incredible” and “shining”, as the official advertisements proclaim, but also in many respects, unchanging.
Mr Mitra would angrily reject such calculated reasons for opposing ostentation. As he says over and over again in the trenchant language of his delightful memoirs A Prattler’s Tale, he was in politics to give, not take. I am not sure if he blames globalisation for the airs and graces of politicians who demand special car number plates, swivelling lights and bonnet pennants, but he does blame capitalism as he bemoans the lost idealism of mythic times. He is pained to see a young Marxist legislator roll up in style and explain that everyone else did the same. If Congress MLAs can boast the appurtenances of rank, why not others?
It’s like the old story from the capitalist glory of the faltering days of the Soviet Union when Leonid Brezhnev’s aged mother visited him. He took the old lady round his sumptuous apartment in the Kremlin, his town houses in Moscow and Leningrad (as it then was), his farms, his dacha on the Black Sea and all his other properties. “You’ve done well, Leonid!” the old lady croaked at last. “But what if the Communists come back?
If they do come, everyone will know in advance, for they will do so with lights flashing, pennants fluttering and sirens wailing. Communists move in style.