Delhi is India’s most sycophantic city and even bows, as the old Punjabi saying goes, to the rising sun. So as a conscientious objector to India having an Italian prime minister I have been dropped from the invitation lists of those who hope Sonia Gandhi may grace their glittering events or humble abodes. Sonia is the risen sun, the centre of Delhi’s political universe, the most important political leader in India and nobody would dare incur her displeasure by inviting churlish columnists who continue to assert that it is bad for a country’s self esteem to have a foreign-made leader. As a result of being persona non grata, socially and in 10 Janpath, I have been unable to follow closely enough the political evolution of our current Mrs Gandhi. I have seen her on television, of course, and heard on the grapevine that she is the moving force behind such retrograde and unworkable laws as the ones that seek to guarantee impoverished Indians employment and jungle-dwellers a piece of jungle. These reek so strongly of the tokenism of the other Mrs Gandhi’s 20-point-programmes and ‘‘gareebi hatao’’ slogans that until last week I was under the impression that Signora was still watching videos of mama-in-law and trying to walk her talk. Last week, I discovered I was wrong and as someone who seeks, ever humbly, to be a true raconteur of our times find it necessary to put this on record. By accident, in the daily journalistic exercise of switching between news channels, I happened to catch Sonia live at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit and listened carefully to what she said. Sadly, only her comments on the Volcker report and its consequences got played up because her most important remarks related to the recognition of the role civil society now plays in India. She conceded that civil society was leading the way in many areas and that many of those who represented civil society were more sincere of purpose than politicians. Why do I think this is more important than Natwar Singh getting the royal boot? Because it is the first time I have heard a politician from India speak this way. It is my humble view that a new kind of polarisation is taking place in Indian politics and it is not between political parties but between politicians who speak a modern language and those who continue to bang on about secularism and communalism, caste and creed. At this point it is important to remember that so far Sonia Gandhi’s only political cause, the raison d’etre for her being in politics, was ‘‘secularism’’. An odd kind of secularism in which even Shiv Sena MPs and MLAs become secular the minute they join the Congress party, like a kind of shuddhikaran (purification) without the usual Hindu rituals. From ‘‘secularism’’ to civil society’s role in improving India’s miserable lot is a huge advancement and a backhanded admission that civil society has, in many areas of development, got ahead of the political class. On my travels, these days, I am constantly bedazzled by some new civil society initiative as I am constantly disappointed by the inability of governments to take up from there. Last week I was in Bangalore to interview Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and she told me of an initiative by her company, Biocon, to bring health insurance to those who lived on the edge of subsistence. For less than Rs 200 a year the scheme provides healthcare that includes heart surgery. A pilot is already underway in Karnataka and 60,000 people have been enrolled. This is terrific stuff and like Akshaya Patra, the midday meal scheme from Bangalore, provides a wonderful example of what civil society can do. But, if government does not come in and take things further we will continue to have the largest number of poor, illiterate and unhealthy people in the world way into the middle of this century. There is only so much civil society can do. Sonia Gandhi appears to be the only major political figure who has recognised this. Unfortunately she is surrounded by so many old style povertarian politicians (Laloo Yadav, Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechury, et al) that she may never be able to do more than talk but talking is at least a beginning. Povertarians need poverty to exist for old style politics to continue. As their leader she needs to persuade them that even if her government can do two things well — a nationwide midday meal scheme of Akshaya Patra standard and nationwide health insurance for those below the poverty line — we could see the end of India’s shameful poverty within the next decade. If she can do this it does not matter if she is Italian, French or double Dutch. Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com
