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Wake Up And Smell The Coffee

Each morning at my office in Lutyen's Delhi, cocooned from the rest of the world, I read the daily newspapers to keep track of politics at home and abroad. Most of the analysts and commentators are known faces -- one meets them at the most expected (Press Club) and unexpected places (politicians' bedrooms). Often one does not have to read the entire article to get a hang of the thesis since more often than not one has already read it in another paper on another day.

Last weekend I was in Goa and it was a delight to read the local papers, refreshingly different from the pompous Delhi dailies. While Delhi papers flaunt their late night murder of the English language, the stories in the Goa papers were well-edited and free of non-sequiturs and terrible malapropisms. It is in one of these papers, Gomantak Times, that I read Margaret Mascarenhas's column, 'Wake Up And Smell The Coffee.' A rather charming name for a column, very appropriate for Goa but, and regretfully so, a misfit in Delhi where one wakes up and rushes off to work, smelling carcinogenic car exhaust fumes and hoping to make it before the lights turn red. But we digress.

She had written her column in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was also in Goa for the weekend. In a disarming manner, quite different from the cynicism that pervades political columns in the Delhi papers, Margaret Mascarenhas said: "...Believe me, Mr Prime Minister, when I tell you that the people of Goa are sick to death of India's version of democracy as applied in Goa. I think I can safely guarantee that a majority of Goans frankly couldn't care less anymore who runs Goa, provided their roads are repaired... provided they have electricity and their telephones work... provided they don't have to pay anyone off to conduct legitimate business. They want clean drinking water, clean hospitals..."

I wish I had the time to meet Ms Mascarenhas because I wanted to tell her that she was speaking for the entire country (minus Lutyen's Delhi) and not just Goa. In Lutyen's Delhi, there is obsessive, indeed sickening, interest in politics and politicking. Endless hours are spent trying to understand, largely on the basis of gossip, who is in and who is out. Politicians and political analysts stay up nights working on various permutations and combinations that could run India if the present arrangement were to collapse. Each absurd demand of Selvi Jayalalitha is written about as a strategic political move.

Thanks to my assignment, I get to travel a lot, often to places that one was not aware existed. This has afforded me a glimpse of how the other India -- that India which lies beyond the fashionable dinings spots at Hauz Khas village and whose citizens will never participate in the politics that is spun out in the oddest of places, ranging from night clubs to drawing rooms of government bungalows whose walls are painted a hideous green. The people of that India, like Ms Mascarenhas, could not give a damn about politics and politicians; nor are they bothered about who occupies the masnad.

All that they are interested in, and rightly so, is that they should be allowed to lead their lives with the least amount of disruption. That they should get, and rightly so, basic amenities that are necessary if human dignity is not to be lost sight of. That they should not be made to pay bribe money to bureaucrats and their political patrons. That their tax money should not be spent on mid-term elections for which greaseball politicians and not citizens are responsible.

I have a gut feeling that if we were to have a country-wide opinion poll right now, on this day, the results would tell us what Ms Mascarenhas has said, only that Goa would be substituted by India. For example, we would derive from the findings that "the people of India are sick to death of India's version of democracy as applied in India." Our politicians should be thankful that Indians do not have the stomach for a bloody revolution.

If there is anybody to blame for this increasing disinterest in and cynicism towards politics and politicking, euphemistically described as "the democratic process," then it is that species known as politicians. Systematically, through their shenanigans and utter greed, they have dismantled the structure of democracy to an extent that the people now want to junk it. Want evidence? Let me take you back to Goa.

An opinion poll conducted in that state shows that most people would be perfectly happy if assembly elections (the Goa assembly had to be dissolved and President's rule imposed after mass defections and cross-defections) were indefinitely postponed. That they are not bothered about not having a chief minister and other ministers. So much so, they would like the Election Commission of India to forget about Goa. The idea was conveyed to the Chief Election Commissioner and he reacted with a homily on the need to "restore democracy". He was laughed out by Goans.

Yet, it takes so little to restore the faith of the people in the system. The governor of Goa, General J F R Jacob (of Bangladesh fame), if he were to allow it, would be carried through the streets of Goa in a procession and kissed till his face had blisters. All that he has done during these months of President's rule is to get things going. Suddenly the people find the bureaucracy working without being bribed. Various departments have become active. The police is no longer accountable to politicians and their crooked friends. I wonder how many hundreds of gallons of uraak (the horribly potent first distillate of feni) have been drunk by the 'common people' of Goa this past two months in General Jacob's honour and to celebrate the demise, albeit temporary, of made-in-India democracy.

I will be back in my office in Lutyen's Delhi tomorrow, wading through reams of newsprint and picking up pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that put together will once again present me with the ugly face of "national politics." I would be happy to trade place with Ms Mascarenhas. At least she could teach my fellow analysts a thing or two about the truth we so adroitly avoid each time we put pen to paper.

Kanchan Gupta is a political analyst based at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in Delhi and editor of the party's official organ, BJP Today.

Kanchan Gupta