The revenge of India

There’s something about indelible ink staining the middle finger that generates its own paroxysms of pleasure for the average Indian voter. Just look at the percentages polled in elections to three states and one union territory last week — Tamil Nadu polled 78 per cent, Kerala polled about 75 per cent, Assam in the north-east polled 76 per cent and Puducherry polled 85 per cent. Not to be left out, Kashmiris voted in panchayat, or local self-governing councils in rural areas, for the first time in 10 years, and as much as 78 per cent of the population stood in line to cast their ballot.

According to Ghulam Hassan Dar, a grocery shop owner in Bodhana village in Budhgam district, the participation in the elections has nothing to do with ‘azaadi’ or the Kashmiri struggle, the Indian Express reported. It was really about the resolution of day-to-day problems, bijli, sadak, paani, and the determination that reasonably honest people must be elected to serve. In the frontier district of Kupwara, as many as 86.2 per cent of people exercised their franchise.

So far, nobody in Delhi is taking credit for the largely peaceful exercise. In Kashmir, the extremist Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani had called for a poll boycott, but the people ignored him. In Kerala, an unseemly spat over ageing politicians, sparked off by none other than Rahul Gandhi, dominated the headlines. Assam had none of the bitterness usually associated with the influx of refugees from Bangladesh. And in Tamil Nadu, the Congress sent its own allied leader, Andimuthu Raja, to jail over alleged fraud in which he happily auctioned himself off for millions of rupees to several mobile phone players seeking scarce telecom spectrum.

It’s clearly been the revenge of India against itself, a cleansing as it were, through the ablutions of the electoral process. Corruption has become an overwhelming concern, which is overwhelming caste, class and ideology. As large parts of India went to the polls, something had to give beyond the established carnival of the elections.

Now Jantar Mantar, a 16^th century monument built by the Rajput ruler Sawai Man Singh, around which India’s protesters have been given the right to gather and protest and shout their lungs out, is hardly Tahrir Square, although these days we’re all desperately seeking our Egyptian-ness within.

So when Anna Hazare — Anna, in Marathi, is a term of respect, equivalent to abba or father — a well-known Gandhian who has worked in India’s small towns and villages in the footsteps of the Mahatma, sat on a fast-unto-death at Jantar Mantar against the government’s silence over corruption and demanded a bill to institute a lokpal, or national ombudsman, the establishment at first reacted by ignoring him. Anna Hazare was asking that most fundamental of questions: Who has the right to question elected representatives? After all, if politicians have emerged through the grit and grind that consumes most ordinary people, is there a higher body that can question them?

Then, Anna struck a false note. Saying that most voters elected their representatives under the influence of alchohol — Ralegaon Siddhi, Anna’s village in Maharashtra, has a 100 per cent ban on alcohol, besides some amazingly successful experiments in solar energy and integrated watershed management — as well as for a mere 100 rupees, Delhi’s Anna fever began to wane as fast as it had gone viral a week ago. To trash the baby and the bathwater seemed a little excessive, even for a TV-obsessed middle class. Anna’s gilded edge was showing.

We’re all a little wiser this Monday morning. As Jawaharlal Nehru said a long time ago, democracy isn’t the most perfect of solutions for a newly independent India, but this is it, until we can find something better.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 18^th,  2011.