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Flattery, please; who wants friends?

M.J. Akbar
***Our saving grace may be simply this: greed for power will trump greed for money. Indian politics is full of characters without character. The voter with a billboard is checking them out.***
ONE of the most instructive stories I have read about democracy comes from 1865. John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher, was an independent parliamentary candidate for Westminster that year. He was campaigning to extend the franchise to the working class. He was making his pitch before an audience when someone entered the hall carrying a billboard. On it was a quotation from Mill: “The lower classes, though mostly habitual liars, are ashamed of lying.”
The proverbial thunderbolt had interfered, and it could have left the candidate dead. He was asked, had he written those words? Mill paused, but for only a second. “I did," he said. There was another pause. And then audience erupted, applauding, clapping, whistling, and stamping their feet in approval. Their leader, George Odgcr, cheered Mill with a classic remark: "The working class had no desire not to be told of their faults; they wanted friends, not
flatterers.”
Friends, not flatterers. If you emptied Delhi of flatterers and limited the political-bureaucratic ruling class to friends, the city’s population would come down by 99%. It is pertinent to note that Mill got elected.
The point of the story is not the honesty of the intellectual, but that of the working class. The electorate would have punished a lie. Obviously, not everyone was blessed with such virtues, but you have to be blind not to recognise the value system that made Britain, a nation of shopkeepers (Napoleon's phrase), into the 19th century's pre-eminent superpower.
They had a word for it, character. Character was a moral asset that combined honesty and loyalty to a fellow citizen or comrade-soldier. It is a reflection of contemporary morality that we have changed th e meaning of the word. Today a character is either a chap with a tic in his metabolism, or a role in fiction, film or television. From a truth, character has changed to artifice.
The front page of every newspaper in
Delhi provides daily testimony to the fact that Indian power politics is about flattery, which is why loyalty has overlapped completely with obsequiousness. The sycophancy may be marked in Congress, but other parties are hardly immune. Mayawati routinely demands cringing obedience from those hapless enough to have taken a favour from her, and uses humiliation as a political tool. Stories from the South are worse.
Andhra Pradesh is rife with thuggery. You might ask, legitimately, why newspapers do not expose this odious stink. The price of independence is high. When the chairman of the Eenadu group, Ramoji Rao, refused to be Andhra chief minister Rajashekhar Reddy's lackey, the state government went after his businesses with vicious ferocity. Every instrument of coercion in the state government, the union finance ministry, the registrar of companies, the income tax department and even the Reserve Bank of India, was used against Ramoji Rao's Margadarsi Financiers.
When this did not break Rao, bulldozers were sent to demolish permanent structures in his Ramoji Film City on the excuse that they were built on land assigned to weaker sections. Quite clever, that: not only does Rajashekhar Reddy bludgeon the media, but he tries and milks it for votes as well!
The currency of political discourse has
also been devalued. Confronted with a billboard today, the politician would have issued a press statement claiming that he had been misquoted. Misquoted in his own book?Yes, of course; the printer did it. What he had actually written was: “The lower classes, though mosdy never liars, are always ashamed of lying." It was obvious that the printer was in the pay of the opposition.
But there is some hope. Corruption is the most venal sin in the checklist of the voter. Politicians might think that they haw hidden the evidence by muffling or strangling the media But you can fool all the voters only some of the time. Word travels, if not through print and audiovisual, then through the air, borne by the tongue. There is some evidence that no politician can erase: when there is theft, something has to be stolen, and in the case of irrigation projects it is the fact that there is no water where there should have been water for the farmer.
Equally, the message is going out that those chief ministers who are clean will get re-elected. Our saving grace may be simply this: greed for power will trump greed for money. Indian politics is full of characters without character. The voter with a billboard is checking them out.
MJ. Akbar is Director of Publications. Covert