Nothing worked. The Obama plan backfired as the American president, on his way to the airport, waxed eloquent on the growing religious intolerance in the country in a public address, a charge he repeated a few days later in his country. The pomp and bonhomie of the Republic Day celebrations began to look farcical.
Worse signals were sent out by the suit Prime Minister Narendra Modi wore during one of his public appearances with Mr Obama. It is supposed to have cost Rs 10 lakh and had Mr Modi’s name woven all over it. In one stroke, Mr Modi lost the plot. He was no longer a humble teaseller’s son who went through long deprivation in his early years. That carefully crafted image gave way to one bordering on narcissism and megalomania. A worse communication disaster couldn’t have happened.
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What was more appalling, the BJP leaders failed to read the signals. So smug were all of them that they didn’t even bother to communicate the party’s agenda for Delhi. All they did was launch personal attacks on Kejriwal. It boomeranged on them. With some deft twists from Mr Kejriwal and his spin doctors, the BJP’s ill-advised advertising campaign contributed in a big way to the rout.
The same arrogance can be seen in the Congress. There is serious leadership deficit in the party, but leaders go around as if nothing has happened. Talk to any one of them and their cockiness will hit you. All of them still feel they are, and will remain forever, the mai-baap of the poor and the minorities, and after 10 years, if not five, people will vote them back to power. All we need to do is wait and watch, and the novices will tie themselves up in knots, they seem to think.
Actually, arrogance is in the Delhi DNA. You will find it in the old business families who live like royalty and talk down to others, never mind that their business is down to a trickle. I know a member of a now inconsequential family whose visiting card would introduce him as the prince of … . Today, he can best be described as an also-ran. One businessman was, in front of me, called “Raja Sahib” by a visitor, and he looked very pleased about it. All that’s left of his inheritance is a tiny factory and that, too, is up for sale. Many others, and this includes executives, often ask inquisitive reporters about the health of the editor, which makes the message hard to miss: don’t mess with me, I know your boss.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I had gone to interview a businessman in his south Delhi office that was as big as a tennis court. The secretary’s room was good enough to hold a board meeting. When I remarked about the abundant space, he invited me to see his office at his factory, which he boasted could accommodate a football field. I could sense some sort of a feudal delight in him. Worse was to come. For the meeting, he had lined up all his senior executives, most of them much older – and wiser – than him. A harmless question I asked him, about the role of his overseas partner in running the company, riled him no end. “Just because they are foreigners, you think they are my masters? Well, you are wrong. They are all my servants, just like these fellows here,” he thundered with a sweep of his hand. The men didn’t know where to look. Over the next few years, each of them quit and took up a job elsewhere. For many more years, they would feed stories about the businessman to anybody who cared to listen.
It was this haughtiness that led to the downfall of Delhi’s business families. Only a handful of them count amongst serious businessmen today. Most others have melted into oblivion. They refused to listen to well-intentioned advisors. Slowly, they were beaten at the game by those whom they had labelled upstarts. The newcomers carried no baggage, were humble and accessible, and never let pride get the better of their judgement.
While arrogance is the currency of Delhi, I find that businessmen in states often carry their humility to ridiculous levels. At a function in Lucknow some years back, I was shocked to see an aged businessman spring from his chair to touch the feet of a bureaucrat, who was at least 20 years younger than him, as soon as he entered the venue! What pained me more was that he wasn’t ashamed for a moment. In fact, he was beaming right through the function.