Anticipating India

By Shekhar Gupta

How many, in a Mumbai room full of Hermes ties and finance whizkids, are Dalit? What if Mahesh Bhatt's son, David Headley's friend, had been a Muslim? Why is Delhi getting better as a city and Mumbai going downhill?

When did the Congress first start shrinking its prime minister? When did it become clear that Narendra Modi would take over his party? Who are the HMTs? And what does an angry Arvind Kejriwal say about us?

Raising such questions is the hallmark of Shekhar Gupta's National Interest, the most eagerly awaited news and current affairs column in Indian journalism. Informed by three decades and more of formidable reporting and a credibility that gives Gupta unrivalled access to decision makers in government, politics and business, the best of these columns in Anticipating India explain and interpret, provoke and predict change for more than a billion people.

A riveting first draft of modern Indian history, Anticipating India interprets everything from the successes and failings of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh to the ascent of Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal, from the forces that have deepened Indian federalism and constitutionalism to the public mood that keeps a check on excesses in the use of political power. 

Each chapter in Anticipating India, in its questioning of power, its use and abuse, carries within it ideas of India that challenge conventional wisdom, shatter stereotypes and, in the end, question our long-held assumptions of who we are as a nation and a people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351362562

Shekhar Gupta

Shekhar Gupta built his name, byline and reputation over three decades of seminal reporting from the political and social frontlines of a changing India. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan in 2009, he is founder chairman and editor-in-chief of The Print, India's newest media start-up. He also writes a widely acknowledged weekly column, ‘National Interest'.  Before turning entrepreneur and launching his media venture, The Print, Gupta worked for The Indian Express in two spells of six and nineteen years respectively, with a twelve-year stint at India Today magazine in between. A familiar face at significant public discussions and events and a sought-after public speaker, Gupta is the author of Assam: A Valley Divided (1984), India Redefines its Role (1995) and Anticipating India: The Best of National Interest (2014). 

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NDA DAYS

WISE MEN TALKING

26 November 1997

My dear Kesriji,*

I write this to you with a sense of anguish. You’d recall how reluctant I had been to take up this job earlier this summer. I knew it wasn’t going to work. But you counselled me to think positively, that with your instinct and my intellect we would survive at least until Independence Day in 1998.** You would also recall that you were good enough to make that solemn commitment in public.

Mercifully, however, I trusted my instinct and not yours and never gave my Maharani Bagh house away on rent despite such great demand in the diplomatic circuit. I trust that you also took care to retain the DDA flat you had declared among your modest assets. There will be a problem if you have a difficult tenant. Earlier I would have recommended that you use Comrade Surjeet to mediate. But as you and I well know, even that old man seems to be losing his touch now.

Never mind. In this difficult and traumatic hour I do not wish to shame you. I know exactly how you feel. Because I feel about the same way myself—irrelevant, ineffectual, bitter and betrayed. That is why this letter is more a reflection on the politics of our times and also on our brief tryst with real power. I write to you also with a special empathy, knowing that in 1990, when the Mandal fire was burning our cities, you were the only Congress MP supporting V.P. Singh on the principle of social justice. It must by now be a familiar situation for you. Because you again seem to be the only one in your party to be supporting me. My friend Jaipal Reddy is so right in describing you as the only social justice-wala in the Congress, as someone who has married one person but is carrying on with somebody else. Why it had to be me in this case is what I am complaining about.

Kesriji, newspaper columnists and IIC types can go on arguing why you and I are like chalk and cheese. But the fact remains that politically we share more than our belief in social justice. We also come from a similar sort of background. Except that I was the wise counsel within Indiraji’s cabinet, while you were an equally trusted bagman. I also entirely understand your predicament now, because I too had to go when I couldn’t handle her younger son. Now you have problems with her senior bahu. I know some people will remark uncharitably that it is the inevitable fate of family retainers but I had expected the times would have changed. At least from the way Narasimha Rao handled her for five years, all of us could see some hope. But either we didn’t have his skills or you were a bit complacent.

I cannot remember if Ghalib had said something to explain this situation. I am sure he did, the genius that he was in the ways of cruel Dilli. But it is a pity I cannot check with his official biographer Pavan Varma who, as you know, is also the spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs and is currently preoccupied with explaining away all the cancelled visits (mine as well as our foreign guests’) in view of this political uncertainty. I am not complaining that I wasn’t able to go to Malaysia or Bangladesh, but please do understand our national embarrassment when even friend Yasser hit the headlines once again, talking about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. I must say, however, that the Americans persisted with their new-found maturity. Ms Albright made it clear at the very outset she had no intention of raising the Jain Commission issue at the talks.

But why am I digressing? Time and again at all the steering committee and core committee (you know, some of us even call it the shor committee) meetings, my United Front colleagues have pointed out to me that our agenda should be domestic rather than international. That is how I intend to keep it in this brief letter and do a stocktaking of what we, two wise old men, had set out to achieve in this joint venture of ours.

Strengthening the secular forces was the centrepiece of our agenda. I know you were furious that I lost you control over the rump that remained of your party in Uttar Pradesh. But see what I gave you in return. I gave you Mulayam. Possibly even the BSP. You remember how keen the BJP was to go for mid-term elections when you brought down Gowda in your Third Miracle. Now they are running scared at the very prospect of a poll.

Unfortunately, we do not have much else to write home about. It is time, therefore, that we began to think about what we will do once all this is over. Of course, I have my IIC and you your Lodi Garden. But maybe I can still go to Jalandhar and give it a shot at the mid-term polls. The Akalis have been friendly and the ‘first Punjabi prime minister’ sentiment might just work there. I do, therefore, feel sorry for you. I wonder whether there will ever be any place for you in the Congress under the new dispensation.

Can I, therefore, make a suggestion entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times when we joined the freedom movement prabhat pheris in our youth? Remember, you’ve been the treasurer of the Congress party for decades, the guardian of its family silver (no pun intended) and keeper of its darkest secrets. If the humiliation and betrayals of the past weeks can prod you into telling after decades of kissing, all I would say is, go ahead. With your memory and instinct, and my intellect and contacts in the media, we should certainly be able to teach these shifty bu —– rs in your party a thing or two.

Yours sincerely,

Old man not in such a hurry

From Kesri (as told to Pranab Mukherjee):

My dear Gujralji,

I just received your letter and must say I do not appreciate its tone, which is impolite, if not downright impertinent. All I would reiterate at this moment is that I am a loyal soldier of the Congress party which is back on the trail of glory with Soniaji having accepted my long-standing insistence that she take it over. Thanks for the gift of Mulayam. I am still talking to Kanshi Ramji. With so much to do before the polls, can’t say very much more right now. But hopefully we will meet soon again, possibly when I come campaigning for my party in Jalandhar.

Until then,

I remain,

Still the old man in a hurry

WHAT INGRATITUDE, MY GOD*

22 January 1998

I spent the whole day waiting for the call from Sitaram Kesri. No, not for the Berhampur ticket. I understand his impotence as he understands mine. But since I believe he spends all his time playing cards these days, I thought he would probably send me an invite as well. Who can understand better the agony of a president of the mighty Congress sidelined by the dynasty?

Kesri’s predicament I understand. But what have I done so wrong that the partymen whom I kept in power for a full five years now avoid me like a rabid dog with mange? I trudge to dingy courtrooms all by myself, lonely and abandoned. What I would like to ask these ungrateful opportunists is, what is the charge against me? That I collected and gave bribes so they could stay in power? Or that I helped run that dirty little intrigue in St Kitts for the sake of Rajiv Gandhi? So unfair, but having been in this party for over half a century, I shouldn’t be surprised.

Actually, I am just contemptuous. After all, I held power for longer than all non-dynasty prime ministers put together. I did a better job in my five years than Rajiv, whose widow’s pallu my partymen are grabbing so fondly now. What a mess Rajiv made of a majority of 413 in a House of 545! He became a lame duck in his last two years, complicated Punjab, Kashmir and Sri Lanka, and left his party and the family permanently blighted by Bofors, losing half his seats in 1989. It is a cruel thing to say and it would make Mani Shankar Aiyar angrier, but if Rajiv had not been assassinated midway through the 1991 campaign, the party’s final tally would not have been much better than what I bagged in 1996.

What is the point of now reminding my fellow Congressmen that I gave them a stable five years even though, unlike Rajiv, I inherited a minority government held together with treachery and intrigue. I started economic reforms, shielded Manmohan Singh from the securities scam and generally left the economy in much better health than Rajiv did. Yet, if none of my partymen wished to make reform an election issue, main kya karta?

I know the media and even my partymen have often claimed that my worst enemy is my silence. They made fun of my pout. How can I ever expect them to ponder if they did better under me, or that big-mouth Rajiv? The time, however, has come for me to dump modesty and assess my own years in power dispassionately.

Indira, in her first avatar, I can’t say. But could Rajiv ever have steered India with half as much skill through the end of the Cold War? All right, I bungled with the odd hasty statement like the one during the failed Soviet coup.* But by and large, I figured out the new Russia, contained Robin Raphel and that other upstart, Benazir Bhutto, settled Punjab and even controlled Kashmir. That Abdul Kalam is such a quiet, discreet fellow . . . I am not sure he will ever open his mouth on this. But somebody please ask him if all his achievements and now Bharat Ratna would have been possible if I had not manipulated both Moscow and Washington to buy him time.

God, emotion indeed is the mother of indiscretion. How can I, a wily old fox, be so careless as to talk of secrets that should remain in my belly forever? And don’t at least my senior cabinet colleagues know what I am talking about? Just why is it that they never give me the credit for anything? Or, can’t I also rightfully ask why is it that they never hold the dynasty responsible for bringing the party to such a pass today?

Nothing amuses me more than talk that the party suffered because I ran the dirtiest government in India’s history. First of all, such claims are unfair to people like my socialist friend from Ballia.* Second, who made money after all? Look at the more celebrated cases: Sheila Kaul is Rajiv’s aunt. Satish Sharma, his bosom pal, until not so long ago the guardian of the family silver. Jagdish Tytler, Ghani Khan Choudhury . . . whose loyalists were they? And Buta Singh, I did not even have him in my cabinet. Yes, I did not particularly bother about my cabinet colleagues who built fortunes but I also did not expect that they themselves would make corruption an election issue against me, their own leader. Look at my plight: Koi kehta hai murgi churai, koi kehta hai murgi ke ande (somebody says I stole the hen, somebody says I stole its eggs). Either way, I was called a thief. Now if even Sonia also fails, they will probably start blaming me for Bofors as well.

Allegations of thievery do not hurt me as much as the canard that I was a closet saffronite, the khaki-chaddi-under-the-dhoti campaign. Would the man who says this most loudly, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, now check under his own trousers? I did miscalculate in trusting the BJP on Ayodhya, but wasn’t it Rajiv who allowed the shilanyas and launched the 1989 campaign from there with a call for Ram Rajya? Who will give me credit for the way I isolated, and at least for two years marginalised, the BJP after Ayodhya?

My friends ask me why I am whining now on being sidelined by Sonia when I spent half a century happily serving the dynasty. There is some truth in that. But those days were different. Just as a party like the Congress needs its Chandraguptas, it also needs its Chanakyas. But today if Sonia will not see the value in my famed Kautilyan skills, it is because of the one crucial mistake I made. That was in presuming, in 1991, that the days of the dynasty were over and that I was rebuilding the party for the post-Gandhi era.

I did take my position as prime minister far too seriously. I saw through the Jain Commission tamasha and tried to block it. I thought it didn’t look good if an elected prime minister gets daily instructions from the darbar of the dowager queen. I failed to see how two decades of sycophancy had emasculated my partymen, who would see someone like me as no more than a forgettable blip in the history of the dynasty. I can now see why the Congress party’s official historians will give me less space than even Gulzari Lal Nanda.

SCREAMING, SILENTLY

If Ruchika were your daughter.

2 December 2000

On 12 August 1990, Ruchika Girhotra, just 14, went to play at the Haryana Lawn Tennis Association (HLTA) courts at Panchkula, near Chandigarh. She complained to her father that S.P.S. Rathore, a senior police officer and president of the HLTA, felt her up. After some deliberation, he and her friend’s parents made a formal complaint to the then Haryana chief minister, Hukam Singh. He asked the then director-general of police (DGP), R.R. Singh, to investigate. Singh concluded after enquiries that an FIR should be filed against Rathore.

The very next day, on 4 September 1990, the state financial commissioner accepted the DGP’s report and asked for a case to be registered under Sections 342 and 354 of the IPC. For one and a half years nothing happened. Nothing. Until 13 June 1992, when the state law department woke up again and recommended that an FIR be registered against Rathore. This is when the real action began.

By this time Ruchika’s brother Ashu had turned fourteen and, boy, wasn’t he going to be made to pay for his sister’s ‘sins’. Between 6 September 1992 and 30 August 1993, Haryana Police, instead of moving against Rathore for molesting Ruchika, registered six FIRs against her brother for auto thefts. All cases went to court. In each, he was fully acquitted. But the harassment, the humiliation, the expense of litigation claimed their victim. Four months after the sixth FIR was filed against her brother, Ruchika, now 17, committed suicide.

In early 1994, the Haryana chief secretary again recommended action against Rathore. Again, nothing happened. Ruchika’s family went to pieces, even into hiding. In July 1997, Ruchika’s friends’ parents gathered the courage to file a PIL in the Punjab and Haryana High Court asking for a CBI probe. On 17 November 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet—chargesheet, not merely an FIR—accusing Rathore of molesting Ruchika.

If the story doesn’t sicken you already, if it doesn’t make you bristle with anger—and fright in case you happen to be the parent of a teenager—read on. Ruchika’s father, who had been in hiding fearing police harassment, asked how it was that Rathore was charged only with molestation, but not for driving his daughter to suicide? The brother’s life, after the humiliation, the torture and the litigation at such a young age, is a mess.

And Mr Rathore? He is now the DGP of Haryana and continues to be in that job despite the chargesheet. Here, Advaniji, is a first in your long and distinguished political career—someone charged in a court with molesting a fourteen-year-old child, yet commanding the police force next door to Delhi. Surely, Sardar Patel wouldn’t have approved of this.

Had Ruchika survived the trauma, had she been stronger, born with a thicker skin, she would have been a woman of twenty-four. She would, by now, have voted in three elections, may have even raised a family of her own. But she chose to complain when she was harassed as a child, and paid for it. What lesson does her fate hold out for other young women in our schools and colleges, workplaces, playgrounds? Shut up and suffer silently if some old uncleji feels you up? Particularly if he happens to be powerful, even more so if he happens to be a cop? And mind you, this did not happen in some unreachable political jungle of western Bihar. This happened in an upper-middle-class suburb, the kind of place people like us inhabit.

Quite frankly, Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala’s reasoning for not removing or suspending Rathore is so ludicrous there is no point wasting time countering it. The CBI, he says, is famous for framing people with fictional chargesheets—he should know, he says, having been a ‘victim’.* But the point at this stage, Mr Chautala, is not whether Rathore is guilty or not. The point is, in which civilised society would you appoint as your DGP a man accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old, whose brother’s life was devastated with trumped-up cases, whose father went into hiding and who, eventually, committed suicide? Which parent, and which child, will feel safe in that state any more? What view will that state’s police sub-inspectors, station house officers take of all the reforms the courts and activists have brought about in the police’s treatment of women? As such, it is not a state known to possess the most polite policemen in the country. Now, when they see their government toss aside the National Human Rights Commission’s strong suggestions to remove the DGP—based on a series of reports in the Indian Express—or the Central Vigilance Commission’s advice to do so, they will draw the obvious conclusion.

Who is to tell Chautala any of this? The BJP, which supports his government in the state, has demanded Rathore’s removal, but he couldn’t care less. As for Rathore, it’s life as usual. The case, he says, is a frame-up: ‘I am under no moral obligation to resign.’

This isn’t merely one more case of police high-handedness and political protectionism. It raises some very serious questions. First of all, why isn’t there, in the media and Parliament, the kind of outrage that would have erupted had Rathore been a politician instead of a senior IPS officer? The Supreme Court and Narasimha Rao had made almost half his cabinet resign because they had been chargesheeted in the hawala case which was like a bicycle theft compared to child molestation. Only a fortnight ago, the BJP forced two of its own ministers from Gujarat to resign because they had been chargesheeted in a rioting case. Why should the same principle not apply to senior civil servants? Innocent until proven guilty, but step aside from authority or a position where you could influence the case.

The opposition’s lack of concern we can understand. There is special delight and gain in attacking rival politicians for their misdemeanours. Civil servants are less interesting targets. But why should we see the same relative indifference at the popular level? Why are we so much in awe of the civil servant? Because he falls in the PLU (people like us) category? Would the response of the media in general have been the same had Rathore been the home minister of Haryana rather than its DGP?

The second question is an even nastier one but more relevant in the context of Chandigarh. This case has dragged on for a decade now. Why has this not evoked a hundredth of the kind of protest that the Rupan Deol Bajaj–K.P.S. Gill case did? It is nobody’s case that one kind of sexual harassment is different, or lesser or greater, in its severity than any other. But Rupan was a senior IAS officer and more capable of defending herself against a DGP than a fourteen-year-old child on the tennis courts at Panchkula. Where are all the women’s organisations, civil libertarians, legal luminaries who hit the streets on the Rupan case? The impetus in that case had come from members of the civil service in Chandigarh, so outraged at so blatant a case of sexual harassment. Where were they for four years while the file on Rathore’s prosecution was put in deep freeze, while Ruchika’s kid brother was being tortured and buried under false cases? If they had shown even a fraction of the dogged outrage they did in the Rupan case, Ruchika would probably have been alive today.

Maybe even the almighty bureaucratic protests in the Rupan case were more about protecting the honour of a fellow IAS officer rather than just another victimised woman? Class camaraderie more than moral indignation? And the feminists and civil libertarians and so on? Would it be too unkind to suggest that, as in the case of politicians, cynicism gets the better of them as well? Maybe the protest and anger in the Gill case were not so much about gender equality or civil liberties as about the political opportunity to destroy a tough, brutal cop whose guts and methods you hated?

This argument can go on and on. But for people like Vajpayee and Advani, honourable, middle-class people with sound family values, great personal integrity, the facts are clear enough. They need to only look at the chronology of events. If, after that, they do not find enough reason to force Chautala to move his DGP aside, it could only mean that, as politicians, they are no different from the others. They could, then, go and see, along with their families, Mahesh Manjrekar’s Kurukshetra, which is all about a chief minister fighting to save his rapist son, killing his victim in the hospital, destroying her family. Bollywood is not particularly known for political understatement but when you go home and review the facts of the Panchkula story, you would wonder how fast real life is catching up with dark cinema. It will shame you.

Postscript: On 16 November 2000, the CBI filed a chargesheet against Rathore. In December 2009, a CBI court found him guilty of molesting Ruchika and pronounced a six-month imprisonment, which was increased by the sessions court to eighteen months. The police filed closure reports in cases involving both a cover-up in Ruchika’s suicide and the false cases against her brother—these were accepted by a special CBI judge on 1 June 2012. At the time of going to press, a petition filed by Ruchika’s friend’s father against this, claiming that her father’s and brother’s consent was taken under duress, is still in court.

ASSAM’S LOST DECADE

A ‘people’s movement’ that became a cruel joke.

5 May 2001

Every journalist pays his dues somewhere in the course of a long career. I believe I paid mine as a reporter for the Indian Express covering internal strife in the troubled early 1980s in the Northeast.

The Northeast, particularly Assam, was then a unique story, perhaps the only one in independent India when the national media’s sympathy—even admiration—was with the agitators. Most of us on the beat, barring the Calcutta media, never even called them troublemakers. In print, we called them the Assam movement leaders. In conversation, they were just ‘boys’. We were so forgiving, so much in love with the ‘boys’. They had rejected (then home minister) Zail Singh’s ‘suitcases’, defied (then IG, law and order) K.P.S. Gill’s lathis, braved the scorn of the Bengali media. They lived in modest hostel rooms in Guwahati University’s rundown campus, where they sometimes did not have five rupees to buy you bhaat at the mess but at whose call the entire population of Guwahati would come out on the streets, turning Governor L.P. Singh’s curfew into a joke.

This was the early 1980s. It is such a pity there was no television to record those heady times. Prafulla Mahanta and Bhrigu Phukan led a people’s movement that fired the imagination of not only gullible young reporters but also old Gandhians and JP-ites who were quick to compare it with satyagrahas of the past. People came out in lakhs, blockaded refineries, oil pipelines, roads, railway lines. For more than three years the writ of the government did not run. If the government imposed a curfew, people would fill the streets and defy the CRPF to thrash them. Then, to rub it in, on a national day like 15 August, the student leaders would declare a ‘people’s curfew’ and you couldn’t stir out unless you had a ‘curfew pass’ from them. And just so they wouldn’t be misunderstood as being anti-national, Mahanta and Phukan would hold their own Independence Day celebration a day earlier or later. If during some period of quiet the movement seemed to be flagging, they would announce a ‘martial sounds day’. All of the Brahmaputra valley would come out on the streets at a fixed hour, clanging anything they could find in their kitchens, thalis, buckets, pots and pans, anything that would make a racket. Then they would declare a ‘people’s blackout’ and all of the valley would look as if the Chinese were again probing what was left of the perimeter defences of Tezpur.

The ‘boys’ were then gods. They could do nothing wrong. They could never be bought, fooled scared, enticed. They were so perfect, so sincere to not only the Assamese but also to the national cause, so indivisible, so incorruptible and so brilliant they even topped all their examinations in spite of spending all their time on the streets.

The past decade has, however, shown how wrong we all were and that is not only because we figured much later that doting professors and deans sometimes sat and answered the question papers for their favourite ‘boys’. The coming election will further prove how touchingly stupid people like us were in not being our usual, sceptical, questioning selves.*

Ever since Rajiv Gandhi enticed them into the mainstream political process after the peace accord of 1985, everything the former agitation leaders have done has underlined just one point. That deep down, they were as cynical, selfish, divisible and greedy as other politicians. Mahanta and Phukan started out like Vajpayee and Advani, chief minister and home minister, and were often called Ram and Lakshman by their followers. Today they are the most bitter of enemies. Mahanta’s direct electoral rival is Atul Bora, the former general secretary of the All Asom Gana Sangram Parishad, the ubiquitous bearded presence in so many group photographs at negotiations with the Centre. Mahanta has run a government twice as corrupt as any the Congress gave Assam in the past and about a tenth as effective as the late Hiteswar Saikia’s. Ask any IAS/IPS officer of the Assam cadre and he will talk so nostalgically of Saikia.

The subcontinent specialises in producing a particular breed of demagogue, one who voices a minority’s grievances, real and imagined, so well as to build a mass persecution complex. I have made much of my living as a reporter dealing with the type. Bhindranwale, Prabhakaran, Subash Ghising, Pakistan’s Mohajir leader Altaf Hussain are all masters of the same craft. But there was no one better at that than Mahanta and Phukan. Their real masterstroke was giving their very regional movement a nationalist colour—they were, after all, only fighting Bangladeshi infiltrators. But at a ‘people’s’ Independence Day rally they wouldn’t forget to ask how it was that the national anthem (written by a Bengali) made no mention of the hills and valleys of Assam.

They also built this elaborate secular façade . . . they were not singling out Muslim infiltrators, they wanted the Bangladeshi Hindus out equally. Those of us who witnessed the massacres during the February 1983 elections at Nellie and elsewhere were often confused by the even-handedness with which both Hindu and Muslim Bengali settlers were slaughtered. We were confused because we instinctively looked at riots through a communal prism. So we missed the point that this was, pure and simple, ethnic cleansing. If you spoke Bengali, you were an ‘infiltrator’ and, therefore, in trouble. But what Mahanta, Phukan and others also proved subsequently was that ethnic hatred was negotiable as long as they had political power. They forgot the foreigners’ issue and deported even fewer infiltrators than the Congress governments had done in the past.

Mahanta has run the most unimaginative and worthless government in Assam. His own voters are now going to make him pay for it. The very Assamese caste Hindu who treated him and the other student leaders like gods is now set to boot out each one of them. The Asom Gana Parishad will now finish whatever remained of its old romance, ideology, regional commitment.

Let me also suggest that nothing could be better for Assam. The demise of the AGP, and thereby the final burial of the nostalgia over the old movement, is as welcome a change as the growth of the BJP in Assam. For many of the loyal Assamese caste Hindu supporters of the AGP, it will be a logical homecoming to the BJP. With its bitter and bloody divisions of ethnicity and language, Assam, more than Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, will benefit if its politics is run and contested from a more national standpoint, something the rise of the BJP as the main challenger to the Congress would now do.

Funny that we should so happily anticipate the death of a regional party in this era of coalitions. But Mahanta, Phukan, Bora, Bharat Narah, Nagen Saikia, Arun Sarma, all the legendary leaders of that great movement proved so incompetent at converting a people’s movement into a credible political force. Assam, as a consequence, has lost a decade. The only good this has done is drive more and more talented Assamese outside the region in search of jobs and opportunities, something they were unwilling to do in the past. Besides this, a decade of rule by alleged people’s power has done nothing for Assam. It is such a pity so many of us, this writer included, were fooled into believing these ‘boys’ would actually change the face not only of Assam, but also that of national politics. But then we too were young, idealistic and gullible.

AH, THE SWEET SMELL OF POVERTY!

Forget what Dil Chahta Hai, we’re wired to rubbish the rich.

1 September 2001

Why does Dil Chahta Hai mark such a seminal turn in Bollywood history? Certainly not because it has a great storyline—its plot is thinner than Bangaru Laxman and Jaya Jaitly’s defence. And certainly not because it does not rely on a star cast—it has three of the hottest male stars chasing three of the hottest women, even leaving the odd top model or VJ jilted on the sidelines. It also certainly doesn’t spread any social message.

But when was the last time you saw a Hindi film that celebrated riches, the high life, luxury so unapologetically? In the usual formula, one of the three friends (Aamir Khan, Akshaye Khanna and Saif Ali Khan) would have hailed from a poor family, brought up by a widowed mother. His would have been the one home with happiness and his mother’s the shoulder his friends cried on, for she would have been the fount of all wisdom, generosity, and hers a genuinely contented life. The poor guy’s girl, then, would have had to be the richest, with evil, unhappy parents. And she would have redeemed herself by renouncing her riches for love, and moving into his chawl.

Not in this case. Here all of them are rich. They (including the women) drink champagne. They coolly ditch old boy/girlfriends and hitch on to new ones. They flaunt the symbols of affluence: cellphones, resort holidays in Goa, 51-inch flat-screen televisions. They ride a Merc now and a Lexus then, yet use seat belts. Can we name another Hindi film that was so relaxed, so non-judgemental, so merrily in your face about being rich?

If popular cinema mirrors the mind of our society, are we seeing the first stirrings of a post-reform urban India that is not embarrassed about being wealthy? Where the rich are not wretched by implication and the poor, similarly, spiritually so well endowed? Too early to jump to that conclusion perhaps. But no harm in imagining that because, unless that change comes about in the traditional Indian view of wealth and its creators, we have no real future except to become a colony of China.

The famous and equally outrageous American writer P.J. O’Rourke raises this very important question in his latest book, Eat the Rich: A Treatise on Economics: Why Do Some Places Prosper and Thrive while the Others Just Suck? (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York.) It can’t be the brains, he says, because ‘no part of the world is dumber than Beverly Hills and the residents are wading in gravy. In Russia, meanwhile, where chess is a spectator sport, they are boiling stones for soup.’ He similarly dismisses the other likely factors. Education is ruled out, because how could America then be so rich when its class four school students ‘know what a condom is but aren’t sure what is 9x7’. If culture made the difference, America would have been a basket case. And if civilisation made people rich, the Chinese would have been ruling us all for ages. Even if the key was natural resources, Africa would have been richer than Scandinavia.

His conclusion, after travelling and studying economic systems around the world, is that places that respect wealth, its creators, enterprise and the free markets which enable them to do so become rich.

We do very poorly, actually, because as Dhirubhai Ambani pointed out so bluntly in his acceptance speech at ‘The Economic Times Businessman of the Year’ award night two weeks ago, not only do we not respect creators of wealth, we hold them in suspicion and contempt. Whatever controversies the Ambanis may have featured in, they have built real wealth, and our system cannot stomach that. It has worked, therefore, over a decade, to find what they have done wrong, what laws they have twisted, which levers they have turned to build these world-class assets. How has a first-generation Indian enterprise come so far without its owners going to jail even once? The problem with our country, unfortunately, is not that it has Dhirubhai Ambani. The real tragedy is, even the decade of reform has failed to produce a couple more Dhirubhais. If that had happened, not only would we have become a better economy, even this Dhirubhai would have been kept on a leash, and on his toes, by real competition.

The ugly rich, the thieving capitalist, the ostentatious pig are our stereotypes that precede the fake Nehru–Gandhi socialism when the only abuse worse than that was to be called a stooge of the Birlas–Tatas (read capitalists). This suspicion of enterprise and repudiation of competition, enterprise, individual quest for riches go far back in our past.

Was the caste system, then, Manu’s idea of a kind of licence-quota raj? Nehru’s socialism said, thou shall only produce this many cars of this engine capacity and make and no more of this, or nothing else. Manu said, you were born with these skills, with these genes and whatever your forefathers left you, so thou shall endeavour to do no more, at least not differently. So the rich, whether financially or intellectually, would remain so through generations while those with skills would remain poor. The net effect was an institutionalised barrier between skills, intellect, enterprise and aspiration for all time to come. With the rich now guaranteed their status forever, without threat or competition, it was so cynically convenient to glorify the poor as daridranarayan, the humble image of