Sunil Sethi: The murky twilight of Indian leaders

AL FRESCO

A journalist asked where she had been all these years and the acerbic Ms Parker delivered one of her best-known one-liners: "You can either be young or dead."

Indian public figures won't agree. Several of them are currently engaged in the kind of battles that may possess all the trappings of power struggles but are, in fact, to do with retirement.

From RSS boss K. S. Sudarshan's (himself no spring chicken at 74) attack against L.K.Advani (78) and Atal Behari Vajpayee (81) that they should make way for younger leaders to the bucolic environs of Anand in Gujarat where India's foremost milkman, 84-year Dr Verghese Kurien, resolutely refuses to hang up his boots, ageing Indian leaders appear to mitigate against the traditional concept of vanaprastham---of spending their twilight years in sage-like meditative tranquility.

Hypocritical old Sudarshan exonerates himself from calling it a day---or from calling the shots. There is no retirement age for social service, he says in justification, as opposed to active politics.

(How does that excuse him from setting age limits for others?) But assuming he has no axe to grind, he has a point: Why do Indian leaders cling to office, play politics and wage legal battles for control of organizations long after superannuation age? Why won't they publicly hand over the baton as the CPM leaders did the other day, gracefully accepting their position as respectable---and respected---grey eminences of the party? If there is a clear-cut retirement age for civil servants, soldiers and even corporate board members, why not for politicians and milk-men?

Partly it must be that after a lifetime as elected or nominated representatives, of holding office and presiding over the destinies of millions, such leaders can't handle the emptiness of old age.

How much poetry can Vajpayee can write now that he's no longer prime minister or how many more milk cooperatives can Kurien manage when the young cubs he reared turn on him as full-fledged lions? (In a recent profile of Kurien's former protege Amrita Patel, she says that when she first approached him for a job at Amul, he told her Amul did not recruit women, "not even as telephone operators".

She had to work gratis for 11 months before she was offered a three-month temporary position, later converted to a full-time job, because no one was "willing to work in such a godforsaken place").

And partly it must be the logistical inability to handle a life shorn of the trappings of power""no sarkari bungalow, no staff car, a skeleton staff, callers reduced to a trickle, mounting bills and dwindling invitations. It's a prospect that even the well-prepared civil servants find difficult to handle.

The consequences of a gerontocratic political elite are all too visible. The average age of the UPA cabinet is 63 years. And Indian parliament which celebrated its golden jubilee not long ago has produced some depressing figures.

The 13th Lok Sabha has the highest average age of MPs-""55.6 years (the oldest member was 84 years and the youngest 29)""whereas the average age in the first Lok Sabha in 1952 was 46.5 years.

Contrary to the popular impression that the current Lok Sabha has a great many fresh young faces (Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora et al), there has been a discernible drop in the number of young MPs (between 25 to 35 years).

There are only 29 such in the 545-member house, amounting to a marginal presence of 5.3%. But the concentration of MPs between 66 and 85 years has been on the rise""73 such in the present Lok Sabha.

"It's only natural," says a parliament official. "There are more elderly people in India today than ever before."

But India is also a country with one of youngest electorates in the world and 35% of its population is under 15. If taken beyond the ambit of just one party and applied to a broader swathe of Indian public life, K.S.Sudarshan has a point that is worthjy of expansion and debate.

It can only happen if Indian leaders can get a handle on how to copy with their murky twilight years.