Arun Jaitley erred on the side of moderation when he commented that "every fourth man in Delhi when he breaks the law say[s], ' Pata nahin main kaun hoon!'". Class struggle may be an unfashionable concept nowadays but affirmations of class are far from muted. Perhaps Jaitley means that only every fourth law-breaker in Delhi can command name recognition, for he must know that no one who enjoys the privilege will miss an opportunity of flaunting it. Nor is the phenomenon confined to Delhi. A Calcutta sports reporter proudly boasted he had merely to put his head out the window and rattle off his name for the policeman who had stopped his car because of traffic arrangements for some Maidan event to jump to the salute and let him through.
But Jaitley is wrong to lump Sonia Gandhi's "I am the daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi. I am not scared of anyone" in that category. I have no knowledge of the Congress party president beyond what appears in the media but a simple reading of her admittedly defiant-sounding boast suggests she was not trying to pull rank in the way of the sports reporter cited earlier. In connecting with her mother-in-law's fearlessness, Sonia Gandhi was claiming the same bravery. She was probably also gloating on the mess Morarji Desai and Charan Singh made of trying to fix Indira Gandhi legally. The parallel can be faulted but not on the grounds Jaitley invoked.
Nevertheless, he touched on a crippling aspect of the Indian character that merits attention. It's crippling at a personal level because it can cause profound and irremediable unhappiness if everybody wants to be the exception to the rule. Any Indian whose job entails enforcing some regulation, howsoever trivial, has to contend with those who insist on exemption as a matter of prestige. It was curious the number of visitors to my old office who thought it demeaning to obtain a slip from the reception desk and present it to the liftman. Everybody yearned to be a Robert Vadra before Robert Vadra. It's crippling at the public level, too, because the world's much vaunted largest democracy is reduced to a hotbed of nepotism with status the principal determinant. The mills of parliamentary government will continue to grind but as the American politician and academic, Adlai Stevenson III, argued, representative government is not the same thing as democracy. India didn't become a gender-equal society just because the vote was foisted on Indian women before their sisters in Switzerland or Liechtenstein.
The particular elitism Jaitley deplored is more pernicious than others because its remedy doesn't lie within the law. Any hierarchy based on discernible factors such as caste, community, region, language, religion, sex or age can be explicitly forbidden. Bans are never absolute as we know from reported caste atrocities; indeed, legislative electioneering may actually have reinforced caste feeling and made caste solidarity more rewarding. But at least no one is left in any doubt about society's formal disapproval. However, there is no simple antidote to what the British call the "old school tie". After Britain's 2010 general election, The Times noted under the headline "Tories' old school tie still rules" that 6 per cent of the members of the parliamentary Conservative Party were Old Etonians. Theoretically, a law can exclude Old Etonians from Parliament as Jews and Roman Catholics were once excluded, but influence defies legislation.
Influence is especially insidious in India. Consider this passage from Krishn Kaushik's article in The Caravan magazine on NDTV employees, past and present, "Vikram Chandra is the son of Yogesh Chandra, a former director general of civil aviation, himself the son-in-law of Govind Narain, a former home and defence secretary and governor of Karnataka. One of the NDTV's top business heads, K.V.L. Narayana Rao, is the son of K.V. Krishna Rao, a former army general who also served as governor of Jammu and Kashmir and other states. Rajdeep Sardesai is the son of the cricketer, Dilip Sardesai, and the son-in-law of Doordarshan's Bhaskar Ghose. Barkha Dutt's mother, Prabha Dutt, was a senior journalist. Arnab Goswami is the son of Manoranjan Goswami, an army officer and BJP member; Manoranjan's brother Dinesh was a union law minister in the V.P. Singh government. Sreenivasan Jain is the son of the economist Devaki Jain, and L.C. Jain, a well-known activist, who served as a member of the Planning Commission and as India's high commissioner to South Africa. Another early hire, Nidhi Razdan, is the daughter of M.K. Razdan, who has been the editor-in-chief of the Press Trust of India. Vishnu Som is the son of Himachal Som, a former senior diplomat. Chetan Bhattacharji, a managing editor, is the grandson of Nirmal Mukarji, a former cabinet secretary and a governor of Punjab.
"Sandeep Bhushan, who worked with NDTV for almost a decade, told me it seemed more than a mere coincidence that the channel should hire so many ' babalog' - people with bureaucratic connections. Bhushan said that he applied to work with the channel around the year 2000, and gave a 'damn good interview' in spite of which he was rejected. 'The next time, I went with clout,' he said. Armed with a reference from a bureaucrat, he reapplied for the same post soon after. He was hired."
Of course, NDTV is not the definitive index of the social mores of a new India emerging from the interaction of orthodoxy, modernity and globalization, brought about or hastened by economic liberalization. The channel may have dozens of senior employees who are not babalog. Even those who are may not throw their weight around or try to cut corners. But all the same, there is a glimmer here of what constitutes middle class India - not the nearly 50 per cent in practically any bracket (urban, rural, lowest-income, highest-income) who think they are middle class but the 2 or 3 per cent of the Pew Research Study who are the leaders of society.
Some might see in this the final extinction of a natural aristocracy which British rule had destroyed in any case, as Marx noted in the Tribune. Some might deplore a world of catch-as-catch-can, get-rich-quick arrivistes. Others would applaud it as the triumph of meritocracy. It can be compared with Singapore's growing gulf between "scholars" and "commoners" which gives a sharper edge to the definition of class as "the manifestation of economic differentiation". Scholars are young Singaporeans who win state scholarships to the better British or American universities. Commoners are educated at home. A robustly egalitarian society like Singapore naturally doesn't make an official distinction. But scholars walk into plum jobs in government. They speak better English, are more familiar with Western lifestyles and tend to marry other scholars. In my time at least, they also joined or supported the ruling People's Action Party which further guaranteed their elite position.
Singapore's strict legal propriety rules out any of the ' Pata nahin main kaun hoon!' nonsense that vitiates every aspect of Indian life, lending substance to the Hegelian proposition that "all political revolutions are matters of indifference to the common Hindoo, for his lot is unchanged". As for government, the manipulated shenanigans in Arunachal Pradesh recall Hilaire Belloc's satirical lines on elections, "The accursed power which stands on privilege/ (And goes with women, champagne and bridge)/ Broke - and democracy resumed her reign/ (Which goes with bridge and women and champagne." Given this feudal eternity, it isn't necessary for a Nehru-Gandhi to be so crass as to demand special attention. If he or she is denied it, that, too, is a tacit acknowledgment of rank.
