The moralistic inferno

“Virtue the field;
Temptation the seed;
Evil the growth;
Damnation/Joy the harvest —
Er… depending on your point of view”
From Bachchoonama Book VI

Consider, my dear friends, the resignation from Parliament of Christopher Huhne MP, sometime contender for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party, which is now a junior member of the British coalition.
He is awaiting sentence by a British court for a criminal offence to which he has, at the last minute, pleaded guilty. It was a hopeless case. His former wife, herself in danger of being accused of collusion in the crime, was openly saying to the press and to anyone who would listen that she was, as we Brits say, going to “blow the gaffe”, or, simply, tell the truth and expose the guilty and sexually duplicitous Huhne, who had left her and the family home for his bisexual parliamentary assistant, to his deserved fate.
Hell hath no fury... but in this case fury had the evidence, the trump card. So what was Huhne guilty of? Murder? Had he and his wife conspired to kill the king when he visited their castle and was she going to show her bloody hands to the police instead of letting a little water clear them of the deed? No!
Was he guilty of rape, kidnap, terrorist plots, land grabs, mafia activity, connection to the violent underworld, taking bribes from capitalist companies to deprive peasants of their rights, eliminating rivals by intimidating their families or by murdering them, selling the assets with which his ministry was entrusted; did he acquire lands and loans by virtue of being the son-in-law of some power in the land; did he sell licences for coveted transmission wavelengths under his control; cheat farmers of debt relief measures promised by a Central government? No! He did none of these things.
What he did do was nevertheless against the law. Allow me, dear friends to explain the law he transgressed.
In Britain, as everywhere else, you have to have a licence to drive a car. There are laws that govern your behaviour while you drive. You can’t go through red lights at crossings, you can’t drive down “one-way” streets, you can’t drive in bus lanes, can’t drive when drunk or drugged, can’t drive down the wrong side of the road or exceed speed limits. If you break these and other such laws and are caught you are punished by law with a fine and your driving licence is stamped with “points”, the number depending on the severity of your offence. If you accumulate 12 of these “points”, your driving licence is cancelled for five years.
The principle way that motorists are caught for speeding is through the technology of cameras, which gauge the speed of the cars whose number plates they record. What the cameras can’t always tell is who is driving the car at that prohibited speed.
Chris Huhne was. The cameras recorded the fact and sent him, as registered owner of the car bowling down the motorway at excessive speed, a notice of the offence and asked him to say who was driving the vehicle at the time. Chris either had too many points on his licence already and was fearful that he would be subject to a driving ban, or he thought that the news that he had broken the traffic laws by speeding would be detrimental to his political career. Either way, he convinced his wife to take the rap. She testified by signing a form that she was the driver who had exceeded the speed limit and consequently was allocated the “points” on her driving licence.
More than a decade later Huhne, having challenged the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party and been defeated by Nick Clegg, is yet a senior member of his party, which is a partner in the coalition government in the UK. He gets the post of minister for environment. His personal life has been in turmoil as he has left his wife to form a partnership with another lady.
His abandoned wife, a professional of high standing in her own right, bitterly and with no regard for the fact that she herself conspired in the deceit, exposes the story of Huhne’s cheating on traffic laws. Huhne hangs in there for a while and then pleads guilty in court and resigns. His political career is over and he may yet be sent to jail.
Be assured, dear friends, that I am no supporter of Huhne or his party. Neither am I appalled or surprised that he resigned. These are the workings of a mature democracy. He resigned because he and his party know that lying and cheating even in a petty matter of the law should exclude a man or woman from being the democratic representative of the people. I am wrong! Very wrong. If he and his party thought they could get away with it, they would bluff it out because that’s the way of politics in the world. Except that in British democracy that bluff doesn’t work. Personal integrity has become, over centuries of the evolving democratic process, a necessity.
Not so yet in the evolving democracies of the world. Let’s get specific, dear friends: How many Indian MPs or members of the state Legislative Assemblies are under indictment, suspicion or investigation for crimes which are, by any measure, more serious than passing off to your consenting wife licence points for speeding?
Will they resign? Will the parties they represent in any way question, sanction or suspend them?
Of course not. Indian democracy is not a moral enterprise or even an ideological one. It is, alas, a confrontational confederation of votebanks. In such a democracy the accusation, “He is a crook” is answered with “Yes, but he’s our crook”.
The rumour that Huhne is moving to India is baseless.