In a delightful short story by Ismat Chugtai (which has all the ingredients a Bollywood tearjerker) called ‘Kallu’, we are faced with this scenario: A pre-Independence upper class Muslim family with an otherwise modern outlook (the girls attend convent school, wearing pumps), mistreats the little boy Kalimuddin (‘Kallu’) it takes in as a foster child but treats worse than a servant.
That boy later returns as an IAS officer to the town the family chooses to live in post-Independence. like a good Hindi movie, he ends up marrying one of the daughters of the family, but not before the matriarch expresses her disapproval to this new democratic arrangement: “My God! What’s wrong with the GovernmentIJ It seems just about anybody can land a job with it these days!”
William Dalrymple in his 1998 book, At the Court of the Fish Eyed Goddess, makes an extremely prescient point about the difference between India and Pakistan. While Dalrymple infers that not much was different between India and Pakistan as nations in 1947 (that is, we were equally bad in most things!), what saved India was the fact that power here transferred to a professional elite, whereas in Pakistan it transferred to a feudal elite. The essential difference in the nature of entitlement between one category based on merit and the other on birth, has made all the difference in the trajectory followed by these two nations in the years since, he believes. Chugtai’s story notes exactly this point. She shows her stentorian lady protagonist complaining about the loss of eligible bachelors (the feudal upper class Muslims having gone off to Pakistan), and the loss of privileges (the abolition of zamindari and the concomitant loss of land revenues).
That India democratised and created conditions for upward mobility post-Independence was a good thing. But did we push the agenda for social justice too far without doing enough to create the right conditions for such transformationIJ When you see politicians from the Samajwadi Party blabber on national TV, and attack suspended IAS officer Durga Shakti Nagpal without any grounding on either fact or due process, you begin to wonder. Yes, the charge of elitism may well be directed at the views expressed herein, but if you can’t stand up for anything, you probably are worth nothing.
Social contract be damned, constitutionalism be damned, rational discourse and the restrictions it imposes on wilful self-indulgence be damned, propriety be damned. Simply by invoking the unproblematised keywords ‘communal disharmony’, the ruling Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh believes it can foist a credible defence for the action it initiated against Nagpal for her intrepid crusade (on behalf of the directives of the Supreme Court) against the sand mafia operating in Noida. The sheer brazenness of those appearing on behalf of the Akhilesh Yadav Government is indicative of the chasm between the political universes occupied by the likes of the Samajwadi Party, and those who still have faith in institutions and due processes.
The liberal intellectual has to direct some difficult questions at himself. While social justice and redistribution of rights are laudable objectives, what price is worth paying to witness a concomitant destruction of the very principles on which the concept of social justice is foundedIJ If a young, honest, upright and brave bureaucrat is browbeaten into submission by an emergent political formation against all norms of constitutional conduct simply because it, like louis XIV, believes it is the state itself and not just the Government (that it is sovereign, and not just the executive), then the question to ask is this: What price social justiceIJ
‘Reverse Sanskritisation’ sounds great in seminar halls, but justice, rights and equality before law are concepts of social engagement that were born out of rational intellectual investment in the collective. To lumpenise politics in the name of social empowerment and then expect rights to be fairly and equally distributed is a bit sharp. Justice cannot be ensured if there is no rational authority to ensure it. Nagpal has been done in by a political party that believes it owns the State, while it thinks nothing about how to run it. This sense of entitlement is born of the Samajwadi Party’s inability to understand the basis of injustice and the prejudices from which it has emerged triumphant. It is doing exactly that from which it is ostensibly trying to escape. Time we gave this some thought.