Sunil Sethi: You can never know all about India

AL FRESCO

All too often, newspaper reporters, accustomed to a deadpan style of delivery, appear to lose sight of the farcical nature of the facts they are reporting. One such front-page gem the other day centred on whether a bureaucrat's notings on a file could be revealed under the Right to Information Act. The Chief Information Commissioner thought they could. But heaven-born bureaucrats disagree. They actually believe that their jottings, like divine messages delivered by sons of God for a chosen few, cannot be revealed to the public. The whole argument is so comic that in any rational debate anywhere it would be relegated to the realm of the absurd. But not in India. The pettifogging minutiae of Indian life, the endless prevarications of committees and court rulings are so dense that most Indians cannot tell you what is going on.

And not just Indians. William McCall Smith, one of the world's bestselling purveyors of detective fiction in the English language (The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, 44 Scotland Street, The Kalahari Typing School for Men), who is also a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, was travelling in India a few months ago. This is what he observes in an article published last week in a leading British weekly: "We arrived in Delhi late at night and were met by the agents without whom no trip to India can go at all smoothly. These are the people who constitute the bureaucratic layer which everything in India seems to require. They are the travel bureaucrats who intercede on your behalf with the hotel bureaucrats, the train bureaucrats and any other bureaucrats whose path you might cross...Because something that any visitor to India will learn sooner or later, no matter how many trips he has made, is that he certainly does not know all about it."

By McCall Smith's definition, most Indians are themselves none the wiser. They don't know all about it. Take just a couple of big running stories of our time""the modernisation of the Delhi and Mumbai airports, for example, or the drives in Delhi and Ulhasnagar to define the limits of urban construction. Years have gone ticking by but is there a conclusive resolution in sight to either story? Will there soon be?

Given the synopses so far, no one, not even the Prime Minister of India or the chief minister of Delhi or the honourable judges, is willing to take bets. In the kind of time they have taken to develop thus far, a diligent student could have completed his Ph D thesis or an ambitious TV company hit the jackpot with a never-ending soap.

Anxious Indians, however, who wake up in the morning in the hope that their airports will soon become more serviceable and less dangerous places or that the encroachments next door will be quietly and efficiently removed, can't say. They try to puzzle out the arcane details of the ongoing labyrinthine sagas, even if the underlying political compulsions are clear. Why for instance did the E Sreedharan committee disqualify one bidder for the airport moderisation project, knowing that with one remaining bidder left, the entire process would have to start again? Why did the Delhi High Court move against the Delhi government in the demolition story only when it transpired that several of the defaulters were elected politicians?

We will never know the truth, perhaps because the bureaucrats will not let us see their scribbled notings in files. Conspiracy theories will abound. Cloak-and-dagger items will appear in the papers. The media, too, realising the twists and turns, will worry that its readers are rapidly losing the plot. One enterprising daily ran a front-page illustration the other day""based on the coiled serpents of a Ludo game""that explained the many pitfalls the airport modernisation has suffered since 2003.

Personally, I think that the brilliant comic thriller writer and professor of medical ethics, William McCall Smith, summed it up succinctly: India is the sort of place that you will never know all about.