Shashi Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel

I stayed on after the ceremony, after the shamianas had been dismantled and the shamas, their songs over, had flown away I sat before the marble whiteness of the monument, already yellowing with the sulphur dioxide from the fumes of a near-by oil refinery, and watched the darkness drape itself round the familiar dome like an old shawl. Night had fallen many times upon the Taj; many times had dawn broken the promises of the last sunrise. But it had endured; chipped and vandalized and looted and trampled upon and scrubbed and admired and loved and envied and exploited, it had endured. And so would India.

The hopes raised by that moving ceremony were soon betrayed. Krishna went back to his southern district and it was almost as if he had taken with him Agni’s boon of creative accomplishment. The Front began rapidly to dissipate its energies in mutual competition and recrimination. Yudhishtir was as stiff and straight-backed and humourless as his critics had always portrayed him, and his colossal self-righteousness was not helped by his complete inability to judge the impression he made on others. As the ‘strongmen’ of his Cabinet — a term they assiduously encouraged the media to employ — quarrelled querulously at every meeting, the Prime Minister remained tightly self-obsessed, seemingly unaware that half of those who sat on the executive branch with him were busily engaged in sawing it off.

Yudhishtir suffered particularly from the failing of expecting everyone to take him as seriously as he took himself. When, in response to a question from an American television interviewer, the first journalist indiscreet enough to ask in public what her peers had cheerfully confirmed in private — ‘Mr Prime Minister, is it true that you drink your own urine every day?’ — when, Ganapathi, before a prime-time audience of 80 million incredulous Americans, quintupled by satellite newsfeeds to every television channel in the world with the money and the lack of taste to broadcast it, when, with the same lack of reflection he had shown in accepting Shakuni’s challenge, Yudhishtir launched into a sanctimonious homily on the miraculous properties of auto- urine therapy, he dropped the dice of government back at the Kauravas’ feet.

His positive response was quoted in every one of India’s resurgent newspapers. Cartoonists and cocktail-party wags combined Yudhishtir’s confession with his well-known stance in favour of Prohibition (‘If I drank what he drinks, I’d be for Prohibition too’; ‘Would you ever invite the Prime Minister to a Bring-a-bottle party?’). Graffiti appeared on public lavatories across the country, more than one entrance signboard being repainted to read ‘Yudhishtir Juice Centre’. As the Prime Minister unsmilingly continued to make himself the laughing-stock of the nation, his coalition gradually unravelled beneath his feet. Write it on his epitaph, Ganapathi: our Hero piddled while home burned.

Not that the unravelling Front had ever been very tightly knit. Within weeks of its assumption of office it had become the vehicle for the personal ambitions of at least three veteran politicians besides the Prime Minister. With their adeptness at camouflaging petty self-interest under wordy speeches on the uplift of (depending on the precise nuances of their electoral bases) the ‘backward classes’, the ‘backward castes’ or the ‘backward strata of society’, they rapidly acquired for their party the sobriquet ‘the Backward Front’. As they stumbled from argument to argument, lawlessness erupted, prices spiralled upwards, government offices sank beneath dusty cobwebs of red tape, and every policy decision was hamstrung by factional disagreement. Their ineptness helped Priya Duryodhani rapidly to recover from the shock of her ouster. ‘The Backward Front government can move the nation neither backward nor forward,’ she was able to declare to uneasy applause at surprisingly well-attended public meetings. ‘It is merely awkward.’

That she was free at all to lavish such scathing contempt on her conquerors was one more instance of the weakness of the Front’s combination of virtue and avarice in the face of so formidable an adversary. Just across the border, chaos following charges of intimidation, ballot-stuffing and vote-rigging in Karnistan’s show election had led to Zaleel Shah Jhoota’s being toppled and jailed by his generals; his military tormentors were now debating whether to have him publicly flogged for his misdeeds or hanged or both. In India, however, the Front had decided to take the former Prime Minister to court on the esoteric charge of détournement de pouvoir, which was a polite legalistic way of saying she had subverted the Constitution. Since everyone who had lived in India for the last three years with his eyes open knew she had subverted the Constitution, it did not seem to be a charge that required much proof. Yet the chosen means did not serve the choicest ends: the lawcourts, Ganapathi, with the solitary recent exception of post-Falklands Argentina, are not the place for a people to bring their former rulers to account. Priya Duryodhani and her skilled lawyers (minus Shakuni, who was now loudly asserting his democratic credentials and disavowing the Siege, the ex-Prime Minister and all her works) ran circles of subtlety around the Front’s witnesses.

It was all like an elaborate game between teams of unequal strength. Law, of course, rivals cricket as the major national sport of our urban élite. Both litigation and cricket are slow, complex and costly; both involve far more people than need to be active at any given point in the process; both call for skill, strength and guile in varying combinations at different times; both benefit from more breaks in the action than spectators consider necessary; both occur at the expense of, and often disrupt, more productive economic activity; and both frequently meander to conclusions, punctuated by appeals, that satisfy none of the participants. Yet both are dear to Indian hearts and absorb much of the country’s energies. The moment the law was chosen as the means to deal with the former Prime Minister, it was clear that the toss had gone Priya Duryodhani’s way.

As with cricket, the problem with law is one of popular participation. The lawcourts of India, Ganapathi, are open to the masses, like the doors of a five-star hotel. Priya Duryodhani could afford to command the best in the profession; ‘the people’, on the other hand, though she was being prosecuted in their name, could not always find a place in the courtroom where she was questioned about her crimes against them. Whatever purpose her trial served, it was not that of popular justice.

The case dragged on and, after the first few sensational revelations, lapsed into unreality. Duryodhani’s lawyers so effectively turned it into a showcase for their forensic skills that the issues behind their legalistic hair-splitting were soon forgotten. The fatal turn occurred: people became bored. Their ennui banalized her evil.

The trial was in its fourteenth meandering month when the crisis within the Front, hopelessly riven over conflicts of its own making, came to a head.

The issue that brought the simmering pot of mutual dislike to a boil was ostensibly the government’s attitude towards the Untouchables — Gangaji’s Harijans, or Children of God. It all started with a sage whom Yudhishtir went to see, an ochre-robed godman whose vocabulary was as out of date as his garments.

Godmen are India’s major export of the last two decades, offering manna and mysticism to an assortment of foreign seekers in need of them. Once in a while, however, they also acquire a domestic following, by appealing to the deep-seated reverence in all Indians for spiritual wisdom and inner peace, a reverence rooted in the conditions of Indian life, which make it so difficult for most of us to acquire either. These backyard godmen, unlike the made-for-export variety, are largely content to manifest their sanctity by sanctimoniousness, producing long and barely intelligible discourses into which their listeners can read whatever meaning they wish. (If religion is the opium of the Indian people, Ganapathi, then godmen are God’s little chillums.)