Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

“Never come back to this place,” he says.

I retrieve my license and leave the room. I get in the car and drive home. This time I arrive successfully.

The house has been empty all day, and the air is stifling. By this stage in the year, the bricks of houses have accumulated so much heat that they continue to bake the rooms even at night. I turn on all the fans.

Then I go to the fridge and take out two ripe mangoes.

In a new shopping mall you cannot escape the voice of a woman jabbering into a mike: “… seventy-eight Gandhis, seventy-nine Gandhis, eighty Gandhis, eighty-one Gandhis… ”

You drift into a shop. You come out. The noise is still going on. Now her speech is more excited and rapid. She shouts, “one-forddy Gandhis one-forddy-one Gandhis, one-forddy-two Gandhis… ”

You wonder what all this is about. You look for the voice. By the time you reach the central atrium, where she stands on a publicity podium with her arm around a beaming couple, her counting has reached near-hysterical excitement.

“Two twenny-seven Gandhis — two twenny-eight Gandhis — two TWENTY-NINE GANDHIS — we have a WINNER!”

The couple’s two tubby kids are sprinting around in mad orbits, ecstatic with victory. The presenter holds up a wad of notes to the audience. “Look at all these Gandhis, people!”

The contest is this: they are giving away a free Reebok watch worth Rs 2,500 [$50] to whomever is carrying the most thousand-rupee notes — on which there is a picture of Mahatma Gandhi — at the mall this evening. The winning couple has pulled out from a handbag 229 of them [$4,600] thus demonstrating more fidelity than anyone else to the nation and its hermit-father. 41

It should not be any surprise that this was a highly corrupt place.

Corruption does not stem primarily from wicked or greedy individuals; it comes from destroyed social relations, and, as we have seen, history had placed a great strain on Delhi’s social relations.

Delhi had become a society that had, in its bleakest moments, ceased to believe in the idea of society — which was why the state, and religious identities, and other surrogates for ‘society’, were so fetishised. And when there is no society, you might as well despoil away, because you cannot harm a society that does not exist. If you don’t do it, everyone else will, and for just the same reason.

It is often thought that it is effective law enforcement that keeps corruption in check, and of course this is partly the case. But it is also prevented by inner restraints and in Delhi these inner restraints had been significantly dismantled. You met them often, the old bureaucrats whose first words on meeting you were, “I never took anything from anyone, I could have made millions but I never took one rupee,” and you could see what obsessive zeal it had required to keep hold of that principle. You wondered if they were still trying to convince themselves it had been a good idea.

Delhi’s cynicism arose from its history, and from its age-old feeling that the human world existed to steal away, destroy and desecrate what you possess. It would have been corrupt in any circumstance. But the reason that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, its corruption had reached the dizzying levels it had, was that it was the capital, and the seat of federal politics.

• • •

Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, another high-minded Congress man, who had been a close colleague of Nehru’s ever since the freedom struggle. But Shastri survived Nehru by only two years, and in 1966 the party faced a succession question.

India had been in the hands of the one party since its inception, but cracks were appearing everywhere. The lofty momentum of the freedom struggle had run out, and, by the mid-1960s, the Indian reality was mired in dysfunction. Despite twenty years of managed development, the country was in the grip of an agricultural crisis, and depended heavily on food imports from its ideological foe, the United States — a measure which did not prevent a famine in the eastern state of Bihar in that same year, 1966. A mushrooming population was partially responsible for these deficits: while in 1947 the growth rate was just over 1 per cent per annum (doubling the population in seventy years), by 1966 it was nearly 2.5 per cent per annum (doubling the population in thirty years) — and India had become the preferred case study for the renewed Malthusian fears of the international managerial class. Meanwhile, wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965) had necessitated exceptional purchases of arms from abroad and further diminished India’s already precarious foreign currency reserves; inflation now ran as high as 15 per cent. Partly as a result of these problems, many regions and communities had become disenchanted with the very idea of India: the state faced secessionist struggles in Andhra Pradesh and in the north-east, an increasingly militarised and desperate relationship with the region of Kashmir, and, in south India, widespread demonstrations, even self-immolations, in protest against the imposition of a foreign language, Hindi, as the lingua franca of politics (the policy from above was to phase out the other lingua franca, English, which would have greatly disadvantaged the non-Hindi-speaking south). In a Hindustan Times article entitled ‘The Grimmest Situation in 19 Years’, one senior journalist remarked, “The future of the country is dark for many reasons, all of them directly attributable to 19 years of Congress rule.” 42

It was a dangerous and volatile time, then, for the Congress Party, and one that required flexibility and pragmatism. The best way forward, in the view of the powerful collection of party bosses and chief ministers known by their opponents as ‘the Syndicate’, was to have a weak leader who could be controlled easily from behind the scenes. This was why, in 1966, they lent their support to the candidacy of Nehru’s daughter, Indira. She was a woman and she was young — forty-eight — and they supposed she would put up little fight. They could not have been more wrong. Indira Gandhi — she was the widow of a Parsi politician and administrator named Feroze Gandhi — turned out to be one of the most ruthless political fighters of the twentieth century.

She had worked closely with her father during his premiership, but there is no sign that Nehru ever intended her to inherit his position: the idea of a ruling dynasty would have sat awkwardly with his democratic, anti-feudal sentiments. And he may not have considered Indira a plausible candidate: certainly she possessed very different attributes from her conspicuously — perhaps even squeamishly — cerebral father. She failed to complete, for instance, her degree at Oxford. The political speeches she gave were pragmatic and slogan-filled, and displayed none of her father’s preoccupation with big ideas. And indeed her long period of influence — which lasted until her assassination in 1984 — turned Indian politics into so naked and brutal a struggle for power that post-Independence utopianism was entirely driven out. For most observers it has been difficult to believe, since her time, in any reason for political action that does not arise from the simple lust for power and money. Of any set of possible explanations for an event, in fact, the most craven will attract the widest belief.

• • •

The newly appointed Indira Gandhi responded to India’s currency crisis by falling in line with World Bank and International Monetary Fund demands for the devaluation of the rupee. Hitherto pegged at 4.76 to the dollar, the rupee was, in March 1966, devalued by nearly 60 per cent to 7.5 to the dollar.

Such deference to capitalist imperialism was an offence to many, particularly those on the far left. It seemed to align the prime minister with the voice of free markets and free enterprise. This voice was increasingly articulate at that time: an emerging party, the Swatantra Party, had been set up to promote a free-market reaction to Nehruvian controls in 1959, while the Congress Party itself was moving further in this direction under the influence of the Syndicate, which was close — notoriously so — to big business.