Opinion Age of Sleaze
Corruption creates a social culture that assumes every dark corner is hiding secrets
Corruption creates a social culture that assumes every dark corner is hiding secrets
The deeply unfortunate episode unleashed by a CD allegedly involving senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi is raising apprehensions that we might be reaching a low watershed in Indian politics. For the most part,our politics,as silly and fatuous as it sometimes could be,had been spared the ignominy of being reduced to prying pornography. Whether driven by social conservatism or plain common sense,we never quite bought into the degraded version of the idea that the personal is political. But this dam has broken. The possibility of politics being deluged by this kind of sleaze is now making even those parts of the media,which under the self-righteous cloak of public interest made prying second nature,scurry to reassert a taciturn distinction between public and private. But it is important to understand why this genie will not so easily be put back into the bottle. The Age of Sleaze is upon us.
As often in Indian politics,there is an overdetermination of causes,and an excess of meaning attached to an episode like this. The current framing of this episode is largely in terms of the usual gossip: there must be some kind of political conspiracy behind this,whether in the Congress or outside. Then there is the undoubted slipperiness of the social media that makes any form of control virtually impossible without a high price being paid in terms of freedom. There is also a kind of ruthlessness in social media that really abstracts away from the complexities of real life,reducing people to punching bags,as if there are no human beings with their complex vulnerabilities. The more mainstream media fell silent on the story,the more insurgent social media became. It probably did not help that,if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by,the right of Indian politics tends to be far more active in this space. But mainstream media had also,in the past,displayed political partisanship in these matters: this was revenge time.
There was the usual question: what is the public interest in this story? The proximate answer was the possibility of abuse of power; whether influence was being exercised for appointments to high office. It will be inappropriate to prejudge whether this charge is true in this instance. The story also became a counterpoint for other possible sub-themes: the past association of the legal profession with a complicated history of sexism. Then there was the angle of the driver,not so much the blackmail,but the sense that this episode was really about the weapons of the weak; a disgruntled driver showing the privileged their real place. How can there ever be a freely chosen private act in a country where every action can be made an exemplar of some social trend,and hence of public interest? There is also the paradoxical fact that cultures which supposedly move towards more individual freedom have more interest in the lives of others. Will the new age of freedom and access,of knowledge and individuality simply produce a culture of selfishness,crudeness and fatuity or a culture of integrity,sophistication and discrimination? We often test this on the lives of the powerful.
Sociology apart,what is it about our political moment that will now make restoring the line between public and private so difficult? The short answer is: corruption. The blurring of the line between public and private is the essence of corruption. To be sure,there is a lot of mean vicariousness in the way this episode has been received. But in societies which come to believe that corruption is ubiquitous,it is a short step to imagining that nothing is or can be purely private. In a corrupt society,the construction of the private,even the relationships of the powerful,is simply a function of political power.
India is not unique in this respect. A pre-eminent theme of social criticism in contemporary China is just this: members of the communist party are more likely to get all the girls. This theme is reflected not just in bestselling novels like Yu Huas Brothers. It is also the ultimate form of social criticism,a reductio ad absurdum of a corrupt system. And if you want some historical sense of the corrosive power of pornography as social critique,you simply have to recall the fact that before the French Revolution,the ancien regime was delegitimised largely by imaginary constructions of sexual activity.
There is also a second dimension to this. Corruption has been around for a long time,but the social role of most politicians has changed. Some are still genuine mass leaders,social mediators,embedded in a web of relationships. But most politicians are now thought of as individual entrepreneurs; their corruption does not have a social function,its a personal pathology. These politicians are also easier targets,while the socially embedded ones will perhaps continue to enjoy the privilege of discretion for a while at least. It is perhaps not an accident that there is a kind of craving for a politician of virtue who has effaced the public-private distinction from the other direction: they have no private life,as it were. The entanglement of corruption with the question of public and private is now very thorny. The distinction between public and private will not be easily reinstated by pious calls. This is particularly true when these calls are often partisan: my camera captures the public interest,yours does not. It can only be reversed by politicians becoming worthy of confidence.
This point is important for a number of reasons. It will be terrific if the media respects the distinction between public and private,and becomes a bit more neutrally circumspect about what is in the public interest and what is not. But the downside of corruption is a social culture where it is assumed that any dark corner,not under the public gaze,must be a zone where something is hidden. So we condone exposure. Our demand for hyper transparency is a symptom of the sickness corruption has produced. We are also making another mistake. Indians thankfully still love democracy and they understand that politics and politicians are the quintessence of democracy. But this abstract respect must not be confused with respect for individual politicians. The corrosion of authority of politicians is severe. Embarrassed as we may be,unfortunate as it may be for the lives of individuals caught,the temptation to catch politicians with their pants down,as it were,will only grow. Politics will remain a sordid soap opera,if no one knows how to write another,better script.
The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
express@expressindia.com
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