Riding a high horse to nowhere

Which of the two is funnier: a government flying off the handle, or an Opposition soaring away on a flight of fancy?

The colour of such humour is black, of course; but then we are no longer in control of our choice of entertainment. We have to live with what we have.

I am completely baffled by the inability of governments to appreciate a lesson as old as fable and as new as fact: you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. You cannot put a monster into political play when you need it and then expect it to go back obediently to bed when you need to reappear with your respectable mask. You cannot get away with deception either.

Facts refuse to change when they become inconvenient. Moreover, the days when facts could be buried under various forms of pressure are over. I am not talking about a demarche from the European Union here; India has never lived behind any curtain, iron or bamboo, or indeed that horrifying curtain of European collusion and silence behind which the rape (the word is not a metaphor) of Bosnia continued for years before the Americans intervened.

A democracy

India is a democracy in fact and spirit. It has media and civil institutions that rise to meet the challenge of oppression, using the power of honesty and conscience to shake the power of authority. A Gujarat awakens that conscience and suddenly even a dormant government institution on human rights discovers a soul.

A retired police officer like Julio Ribeiro uses the weight of his reputation, the authority of his contribution to the nation's fight against terrorism in Punjab to draw a line in Gujarat.

NGOs move in to serve the afflicted and speak the truth that is being denied by ministers. The courts wait to lend their credibility to the cause of civilised values. The multiple points of power in the spread of democracy come into play to protect the principles upon which democracy must rest in order to work.

Democracy is not protected merely by the freedom to vote on one day in five years; democracy is the right to be free every day of your life, and the right to protest against oppression and barbarity whenever it happens, wherever it occurs. Indians will not let the truth of Narendra Modi's Gujarat remain buried; that is the great strength of India.

It is too easy to blame the media, which is the classical response of any government, of whatever colour or dispensation it might be. The ploy is too trite to succeed.

I may as well add, talking from the inside, that "media conspiracy" is an oxymoron. The only thing that editors really conspire about if they conspire at all is about one another. This may seem less dramatic than conspiring against government, but alas it is the truth.

Editors do not hold cloak and dagger meetings and then, presto!, all headlines take a U-turn the next day. Each newspaper or television channel takes its own decision about how to handle a developing story. If there is one thing that media people guard with extreme jealousy, it is their independence, and this includes independence within their own tribe as well.

But media has to be sensitive to both the street as well as its own values. Frankly, there is no daily demand on the conscience of a mediaperson, which is why you might get the impression so often that media does not have one. Maybe that is why governments get a shock when suddenly there is evidence of a conscience, and call it a conspiracy.

Politics of hatred

The politics of hatred cannot be switched on and off. It certainly cannot be stopped by the person who started it. That is the problem with the Narendra Modi administration. It has no credibility left. The truth may be bad enough; his image has become far worse than the truth. You can keep him in office for as long as the BJP has a majority in the Assembly, but he will not be able to run a government.

Power is not the ability to give an order. Power is the ability to get an order obeyed. Authority is dictatorship without a moral element, and Narendra Modi has no moral authority left. There is nothing secret about what he did; the world knows that the revenge-riots were ordered by him.

It is true that a failure to protect law and order cannot be reason these days for the removal of a chief minister; very few if any would survive such a principle. But we are not discussing weak administration in Gujarat; we are discussing maladministration, or power used for malice and deliberate, wanton terror. We are talking about state terrorism.

If the BJP does not remove Narendra Modi from Gujarat, then Narendra Modi will remove the BJP from Delhi.

Indians, of all hues and religions, may at times get swayed by the powerful hypnotism of communal hatred, but India will never elect a government that permits the use of hate as policy.

The Congress response to this complex point in our history is curious. It has begun to behave as if it is already in power. One can discount the swagger in the step; any Opposition force that marches into space vacated by the ruling party has the contemptuous bounce of a victor surprised by the enemy's retreat. Other things cannot be as easily discounted. The party has divided the country into two Indias, a Congress India, with its own council of chief ministers, and the unfortunate rest.

Sonia Gandhi is the Prime Minister of Congress India and the rest of the country must oblige her with the status and protocol due to such eminence. The conference of the Confederation of Indian Industries was indicative of this new approach. Sonia Gandhi would not play second fiddle.

And so the outgoing president of the CII, Sanjeev Goenka, son of a Congress Rajya Sabha MP, R.P. Goenka, broke precedence and invited Sonia Gandhi to speak before the Prime Minister through a contrived plenum.

Sonia Gandhi chose to underline her new eminence by announcing that the winds of change were blowing even through the CII, so everybody please take note and begin practising genuflections. After hearing the speech someone commented that the CII had been renamed the AICC, but we can ignore once again such disobedient humour.

We noted at the beginning of this column that no one had told Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. But he did know another proverb, which he conveyed to Sonia Gandhi at the newly-politicised CII: don't count your chickens before they have hatched.

A national election is the sum total of regional moods. This was proved once again in the last general elections, when the wave that lifted the Prime Minister to power could not stop a BJP defeat in his own state, Uttar Pradesh.

The Congress is sanguine that the 14 states where it is in power will ensure a majority for the party in the next Parliament. Even mild political analysis exposes such naiveté.

Inevitable price

Leave out Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra and the number of Parliament seats in the other dozen do not add up to the number sent by UP and Bihar alone. In all 14 states the Congress will pay the inevitable price of incumbency, and get fewer seats than it got in the last general elections. In four decisive states where the Congress is not in power, UP, Bihar, Bengal and Tamil Nadu, it has no