Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Surely even the Congress party is now slowly waking up to the fact that it has made a mistake of five-star proportions. The absurd moralising around austerity has created a monster: each and every Congressman is now in a bind,having to prove his or her moral worth as well as loyalty by progressively greater feats of simplicity and solidarity with the aam aadmi,preferably when there are TV cameras about. It is not just that this comes close to setting up the UPAs senior leaders as objects of ridicule,as the aftermath of S.M. Krishnas and Shashi Tharoors exit from their hotels demonstrated; and it goes beyond the hypocrisy and tokenism implicit in taking miniscule cuts in salary and travel arrangements when the much larger cheques for living in Lutyens Delhi and the incomparably larger cheques for irresponsible,subsidy-driven politics continue to be picked up by a cash-strapped government.
No,the concern is that now a nominally reformist party and government are trapped into a spiral of moral correctness that is rapidly taking on anti-aspiration,anti-rich overtones. If the partys leaders wish to live simply,that is their prerogative. But to imply that austere simplicity is something that the ruling coalition prizes in governance and in the India they wish to build has far too many overtones of the bad old two-faced socialist India for comfort. As Tharoor wryly said on the internet website twitter.com,in response to a question as to whether,next time he travelled to Kerala,he would do it cattle class that is,economy class: Absolutely. In cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows! But these particular holy cows we had hoped were gone forever. The Congresss leadership has made a massive blunder in raising them from the dead.
