Lost in Siren City

This past week’s Robert Vadra controversy laid bare the incestuous and unedifying relationships between the capital’s political and business (and occasionally media) elites. Somehow more than those who made the loud accusations those who remained silent or responded in muted voices deserved greater attention. In many cases, their motivation was not sobriety but anxiety and fear.
Could India Against Corruption — or whatever its maverick political avatar is called — target them next? Could a desperate Congress resort to scorched-earth tactics and hit back by “exposing” similar secrets of political rivals? It stands to reason it would, and so create an atmosphere of immoral equivalence. Should that happen, India is headed for a messy, dirty political year. Inevitably, it will lead to a narrative of alienation of suffering citizens in the rest of the country from self-serving elites in New Delhi.
This narrative has been heard before, during the Anna Hazare fasts of 2011 for instance. Such narratives are not unique to India. They arise in other democracies at a time of disgust with prevailing political choices and a yearning for change. In 2008, Barack Obama famously presented himself as an outsider to the Beltway, the inner geography of power in Washington, DC. If Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination and the presidency, it was pointed out, two families — the Bushes and the Clintons — would have cornered the White House for at least 24 years (presuming Ms Clinton got only one term). This was
a powerful symbolic message.
That aside, the gloom in the economy and the policy paralysis following the setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan gave Mr Obama a chance to argue that the political elites and their Wall Street friends had hijacked the capital. It almost didn’t matter who was in office, and which party had won the previous election. It needed an outsider to fix Washington, DC, clean up the system and resist the allurements and compromises on offer.
Admittedly, this was not the only reason for Mr Obama’s victory, but it did contribute. Of course, how successful he has been as President and in driving a viable alternative agenda is open to question. Nevertheless that does not take away from the traction his platform got four years ago.
Is India looking at something similar in 2014 or whenever the next general election is held? The question is not as simple as it seems and requires close, multi-layered interrogation. For a start, it needs to be spelt out that the attack on Mr Vadra — the first time the Gandhi family and its immediate members have been charged with financial misdemeanour since the Bofors scandal — has rattled the Congress.
Whatever the legal sustainability about the specific accusations made by Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan, the fact is they will do damage. In another time and context, they would have been easier to “manage”. Coming in an environment already polluted by perceptions of “crony capitalism” — so much so that the Planning Commission used that expression in an early draft of the 12th Five-Year Plan document — they will be a problem. Further, the media and social media universe today is free-floating to the point of being anarchic.
As such, even if similar allegations of “Bob’s your uncle” sweetheart deals are levelled against senior members of the BJP and other Opposition parties, and their extended families and associates, the Congress cannot escape unscathed. As the ruling party for two successive terms, it will bear the brunt of any negative mood.
There comes the wider question of how the rest of India sees New Delhi and its opaque alliances. The liberalisation of the economy has been good to the city. From a sleepy bureaucratic town, admittedly with enormous discretionary authority, it has grown into a mammoth leverage machine, one at the centre of a much bigger economy. When business corporations set up liaison offices or corporate headquarters in the national capital region, they essentially concede lobbying the government and influencing key public agencies is unavoidable.
The whole process of deregulation of individual business sectors, of navigating environmental and other clearances and the miasma of resource allocation, for instance, has made the Union government not less important for businessmen but actually more important. As such, the fixer-lobbyist industry in New Delhi has evolved into a much more sophisticated entity since 1991. This has happened even though one of the avowed goals of liberalisation was to weaken patronage powers of public servants. As the economy has expanded, the sort of silly money flying around in the capital has acquired extraordinary proportions. It has led almost everyone into temptation.
To the uninitiated, this makes New Delhi both the metropolis of opportunity as well as the metropolis of depravation. It is not an inspiring Shining City but a Siren City, tantalising and repelling at the same time. It becomes then an allegory for all that is wrong with
contemporary India, a starting point for a modern rendition of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
This assessment is partially correct and partially too correct by half. It ignores similar nexuses are now apparent in a series of smaller cities and provincial capitals, which have similarly collusive, “milli bhagat” political economies. Second, it overstates the situation in the capital and does not distinguish between social and policy elites, between the Beautiful People in the glossy supplements — who may be arms agents and deal makers by day and generous hosts by night — and the city’s intellectual and policy establishment, which has a far different existence and persona. To be sure, the two do intersect but it is not as if one entirely overwhelms the other.
As such, when positing the New Delhi consensus as adversarial to the larger public good and the broader reality of India, it is necessary to ask which aspects of the consensus are being considered adversarial. Business inheritors who seek out politically connected social climbers for private treaties need to be resisted. This should not be confused with automatic resistance to the entire policy and intellectual infrastructure of New Delhi. The latter would seek to mould a new government or Prime Minister of course, and do so in its own image, but that does not necessarily make it entirely dispensable.
What does all this mean for 2014? Ideally India needs a leader who is untarnished by the capital’s prevailing political culture, is resolute enough to resist the seductions of the social elite and can give the policy establishment reassurance without surrendering all thought to it. Who is that last man standing?

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com [2]