The decision to turn Raj Bhavans into Lok Bhavans, after a stint as Jana Raj Bhavans, recalls Sarojini Naidu’s famous jibe about the cost of keeping Mahatma Gandhi in poverty. Not that new names for old gubernatorial mansions will be all that expensive compared to the extravaganza of Delhi’s Central Vista Redevelopment Project. But pandering to India’s sense of hierarchy, which is responsible for many of the country’s social abuses, is a costly and unnecessary frivolity. It would have been like declaring all scheduled castes are Brahmins if disadvantage itself hadn’t become a privilege.
This isn’t the only incongruity. Adlai Stevenson III, the Democratic senator from Illinois, told a seminar I attended in Chicago some years ago that far from being the world’s biggest democracy, India wasn’t a democracy at all. Not in the sense that the United States of America is. Despite the avalanche of names of voters, candidates, political parties, ballot boxes, ballot papers, symbols, posters and hordes of canvassers that wide-eyed TV anchors throw at viewers, the most that India can claim, Stevenson said, was representative government. Pondering on that distinction, I am forced to agree that politicians would not have found it necessary to dress up like maharajas in order to win votes if voters were not seen as subjects.
Old Esther Dudley in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s moving, eponymous story about a faithful royalist who dies in Massachusetts’ last British government house murmuring, “I have been faithful unto death... God save the King!”, would have understood. So would many Indians, although hardly any would have followed the cause to the grave like her. Indian society is polarised. As Kipling sang in “We and They”, “Father, Mother and Me,/ Sister and Auntie say/ All the people like us are We,/ And everyone else is They.” At another level, there’s the Bengali tale about the villager who takes a rupee to the local fair. Finding at the end of the day that he still has a couple of annas left, he uses the change to file a case against his brother. Given the folk wisdom born of experience that nurtures such stories, the piety of the ancient Latin saying, vox populi, vox dei, ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’, would seem neatly to capture the opportunistic cant of a courtship that relies on glorifying the multitude.
No wonder the phrase is most often used ironically or in mockery. This is so even in Europe where an 8th-century scholar warned the Emperor Charlemagne that the “riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness”. One of the few instances of the words being used literally may have been when Elon Musk, regarded as the wealthiest man in the world and the largest donor in the 2024 US presidential election when he supported Donald Trump, was asked whether or not the ex-president’s banned Twitter account should be restored. “The people have spoken”, Musk tweeted when the poll results were announced, “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” Classics came again to the rescue when Musk, involved in an on-again, off-again flirtation with the erratic American politician, shrewdly repeated his verbal investment in the future. “The people have spoken”, he tweeted again. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
Raj Bhavans and Raj Niwases aren’t alone in being threatened with rechristening. The Prime Minister’s Office and the so-called Executive Enclave have been (or are being) renamed Seva Teerth, the stress being firmly on the first word, ‘seva’, service, thereby further strengthening the theme of monarchical benevolence. Gandhi’s little fads are child’s play compared to the Central Vista Redevelopment Project’s Rs 20,000 crore budget. The dollar equivalent, now officially calculated at $2.4 billion, will depend on the depths to which the already shaky Indian rupee plunges. What seems certain is that the project will turn the capital and, indeed, the country inside out with ash-smeared mendicants padding about Parliament, saffron pennants fluttering, incense, chanting, clashing cymbals and all the vocal and visual piety that the late Rajendra Prasad only dreamt of when the new Somnath temple was inaugurated.
It would be heresy to think of the number of air purification systems that could have been installed with that fortune to enable Delhi’s poor to breathe while the rich luxuriate in their hermetically sealed bubbles. Or the cleansing plants to service recent advances in ‘Nano Bubble Technology’ so that the stagnant Yamuna becomes potable. Or the number of competently staffed and properly equipped primary schools that could convince a whole new generation of Indians that literacy doesn’t only mean being able somehow to scribble your signature. Or that there is a crucial difference between a nursing sister trained in a modern hospital and a village dai.
According to scanty media reports, the Executive Enclave is meant to house not just the PMO but also the cabinet secretariat, National Security Council secretariat and an intriguing entity called ‘India House’ to “serve as a venue for high-level talks with visiting dignitaries”. It’s intriguing because it is customary to style consular and diplomatic missions abroad India House. An India House in the national capital sounds as if the movers and shakers have forgotten the distinction between home and abroad. No wonder Soli Sorabjee, the distinguished jurist, was moved to invoke Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” when considering how India’s Constitution has fared at the hands of Jawaharlal Nehru’s successors: “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Where indeed?
Keepers of Constitutions are often obsessed by a certain folie de grandeur. Wallowing in that delusion and believing that “India should be ruled from a majestic palace and not from any country house,” Lord Wellesley began constructing a palace that was never finished. The grandest of all proconsuls, Lord Curzon (“My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,/ I am a most superior person./ My face is pink, my hair is sleek,/I dine at Blenheim once a week”) opined that “The [Calcutta] Government House is, without doubt, the finest Government House occupied by the representative of any Sovereign or Government in the world.” Not for Bengal’s current governor, C.V. Ananda Bose, therefore, the humility of Sir Frederick Burrows, the last British incumbent, who reminded the starched pucca sahibs of the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry that, as a railway porter in Britain, he was “hootin’, tootin’ and pullin’ while they were huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’”.
Few Indian politicians are as self-effacing. But while Nehru might have liked a buttonhole and Indira Gandhi’s white plume stood out, it’s only in the last decade that any political office-bearer has affected flamboyantly flowing turbans, embroidered waistcoats and curly-toed pumps. Sometimes a sceptre completes the ensemble, sometimes a tiara is clamped over the turban. But this is the ostentation of the few. Most men would shy away from such self-advertising. Asked “Who do you think you are?” they would respond like Bakshi, one of the characters in Mrs Gandhi’s favourite story in the 1968 Peter Sellers film, The Party, “In India we don’t think who we are, we know who we are.” Mrs Gandhi was probably convinced that people who have to grope with fancy dress to find out who they are because they don’t know it already should never be in charge of others.