A recent exchange between two friends on Facebook got me thinking about the word "establishment". Challenged to describe the establishment in India's capital, one of my friends had drawn up a list that, to my great surprise, very closely matched my own.
On the list of people who constitute the power and influence wielders of New Delhi were publishers of journals, editors of newspapers, hostesses of salons, cultural czars and czarinas, industrialists and professional keepers of the city's soul: judges, lawyers, bureaucrats and medical practitioners. Could it be that the names on this so-called claque of the powerful and influential was so widely accepted as to be almost consensual?
Now, if this were true of Delhi, would the same yardstick apply to other cities? Would Mumbai's establishment be formed of more or less the usual suspects too? I began to draw up my own list of Mumbai's wielders of influence and power, the men and women who were the arbiters of taste, authority and impact in the city. And sure enough, give or take a few names, generically the list pretty much matched the one that my friend had drawn up for the capital - publishers, media mavens, heads of cultural institutions, professionals at the top of their game and men and women from the world of finance and business.
All the people on this list had more or less been born into their positions - attending the top schools of their day, inheriting their membership to the elite clubs of their city and married into the clans that mirrored their own background. The more I examined the list the more I realised how insidious and suffocating the boundaries that kept power and influence within certain sets were.
Of course, most of the names on my list of the Mumbai establishment and on my friend's list of Delhi did deserve to be on the two lineups. They had worked hard for their success, proven their worthiness through decades of dependability and resourcefulness and had displayed fortitude and resourcefulness through their individual efforts. But without the initial leg-up of their privileged birth and circumstance, would their efforts have ensured them a place on the lists?
I doubt it. The watertight compartments that separate the powerful and influential in Indian society are so heavily loaded against the have-nots as to make the separation almost inviolate. They subtly but firmly create enclosures to keep people in and out of the charmed circles - and for those on the outside, it is a constant reminder of inequality and injustice.
What is most offensive about their clout, of course, is that they are based on things that, far from merit and achievement, have to do with whom one knows, which school one attended, what accent one speaks in and other such duplicitous values. But given that we live in a country with one of the youngest demographics in the world, with a rapidly expanding economy and hundreds of new people entering the middle classes and upper middle classes each day, how do we make our India more inclusive so that the feasts of its hightables are available to all? How do we reach a situation where the foremost names of the city's establishment are not the usual suspects drawn up from the same old lists but dynamic and ever changing? How do we ensure that the future generations inherit a genuinely meritocratic India based on the values encrypted in our Constitution, an India where there is equal opportunity to succeed for all?
Perhaps the real success of the Aam Aadmi Party and Arvind Kejriwal is that they have given a few new names and fresh faces to the makers of lists that comprise the city's so called "establishment".
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasmumbai@gmail.com
