This article has been modified. Please see the clarification at the end.
This new sarkar is boring. Even when it's not doing anything naughty, it keeps its head down and its mouth shut. It allows too much to be made of trivialities such as dusting and de-cluttering in North Block, and too little of significant things like its startling antipathy to environmental NGOs. The party's spokespeople don't speak, its TV blowhards have clammed up. The government's own publicist, the Press Information Bureau, reportedly doesn't know what to do - other than repackage anodyne tweets from the PMO.
As a result, and for possibly the first time ever, we citizens have nothing much to say about our rulers. You might venture mild approval, I might raise a questioning eyebrow, but as for vigorous, informed agreement or disagreement - what about?
Almost with fondness, one now remembers the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) whose cartoon crew treated Indians to a nonstop barrage of entertaining conflict. What fun it was to listen in! How enriching as a citizen to regularly be faced with fundamental questions about democratic institutions and their functioning. To learn of the zigzagging and all too human routes by which policy decisions were arrived at, and then perchance resiled from.
It would be far too kind to see in the UPA crew the cast of characters of the little village of Asterix and Obelix, home to the few indomitable Gauls who held out against the Roman Empire and the world-conquering Julius Caesar in the famous French comic series by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. But tell me if the illustration with this column is not apt.
And you just have to think of Chief Vitalstatistix (wielding the shield) to recognise some shade of the former prime minister - respected to a point, reasonably well liked but not at all feared, and with a domineering female partner to boot. It only twiddles the metaphor to note that Vitalstatistix' chest must be rather more than 56 inches around.
See what I mean? There was always something comical about UPA. Even its biggest scams involved notional losses. And those scams gave us citizens a civics lesson, on natural resource policymaking and on the institution of CAG. Such kindnesses this new government looks unlikely to repeat. At least not so publicly.
Which is to say that the new sarkar is stiff and grim by comparison. The careful adherence of its members and its party backers to the protocol laid down by the PMO, the focus on access control and centralised decision-making, the frequent references to the party's and the mother organisations' "foot soldiers", things like this draw an inevitable contrast to the disorganised Gauls, and that is a Roman army camp, like one of those that surrounds the Gaulish village of Asterix and Obelix' Gaulish village. But there the metaphor fails - not least because the Roman soldiers and officers are hopelessly lazy, stupid and venal, and no Indian political party is that well organised. All we need note here is that it's not possible to learn anything worthwhile from Asterix's Romans.
Goscinny and Uderzo began publishing the Asterix comics about half a century ago. But this year marks a quarter century since the Berlin Wall fell, and also 25 years since the publication of The End of History, an article (and later a book) by the now world-famous academic Francis Fukuyama in the National Interest. In that article Fukuyama said that the Marxists had got it wrong and that history and progress were going to lead in the direction of liberal democracy and a market-based economy rather than towards any ultimate communism.
Fukuyama revisited the piece a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal to reconcile what he said then with what we see today: a rise in authoritarianism, even within democracies. Examples include Russia, China, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, West Asia, even India. In such conditions, he observes, democratic institutions, and the strong middle class that is the foundation of modern democracy, become vulnerable. His prognosis: ultimately okay, but in the short term (historically speaking) rocky.
Summary: messy good, rigid bad.
rraote@yahoo.com
CORRECTION
An earlier version of this article mentioned Press Trust of India instead of Press Information Bureau, which has been corrected. We apologise for the error.
