The lives of others
Politicians behaving badly,and what we do about them
Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Arnold Schwarzenegger are only the latest in a long line of powerful men who blew up their own lives in acts of fabulous stupidity. The story of moral trespass and public flagellation is an old,old one. In fact,all scandals have a fairly conventional form,a three-part juridical structure — a transgression occurs,it is exposed,the person is publicly denounced and cast out. Sometimes,one “outing” could cascade into several more revelations. Even without an explicit trial,there is a sense of ongoing public judgment.
But context is everything with scandal,it determines the difference between a minor ripple and a real typhoon. As Laura Kipnis,one of the few to have attempted a theory of such events in How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behaviour,explains,the dimensions of a scandal depend on the kind of violation,the fame/ status of the individual involved,and what else is going in the news cycle at the time. What is outrageous in the US may be barely worth mention in France,or India.
It’s hard to tear your eyes away from splashy self-sabotage,the destruction of a reputation built over years. Especially if there’s hypocrisy involved — like the priggish Tiger Woods or former New York governor Eliot Spitzer,who had publicly gone after prostitution rings until it was discovered that he was privately going after prostitutes. There’s some satisfaction,for many,in watching high eminence trip and collapse. It is cathartic,like the Greek idea of tragedy — there is a pity and fascination about the marked man. You read social pathologies into his action. You search your own life for parallels,you cluck and exclaim and mock. A scandal is,in essence,a bit of social theatre that ends up affirming conformity. By scapegoating an errant individual and casting him out,a set of values is illustrated to a saucer-eyed audience.
But for all that,momentarily,it shows us life as it might be if we just didn’t give a toss about rules and other people’s feelings. We relish scandal because it shows us our own untrammeled appetites,our id on the loose. As Kipnis puts it,“scandals are like an anti-civics lesson — there to remind us of that smidge of ungovernability lodged deep at the human core”.
The reporting template for sex scandals remains Victorian — the popular press thrived on the gap between public rhetoric and private impulse. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians changed the biography genre forever,savaging the civilised,tearing down the facades of virtue. But the sex scandal has been perfected by Americans — every sanctimonious senator,every cheating celebrity is a fresh start to the same conversations. As the journalist Paul Farhi joked,Enron was unlikely to become a big deal because it was an Incomprehensible Washington Scandal,understood only by participants,partisans lawyers,and a few very nerdy journalists. Simple Washington scandals,though,are mostly about sex.
Compare that to Strauss-Kahn’s France,where the most memorable scandals have been firmly public affairs — party financing,corruption,government rent-seeking (literally,in the Alain Juppe affair),contractual malpractice,etc.
India,too,can be rocked for months over corruption,but sex scandals rarely find traction. Whether it comes from a sense of delicacy or jadedness,we’ve never had a sex scandal that really reverberates across the nation over time and bleeds its way into pop culture,the way Britain had its Profumo moment or the US had Bill Clinton. The private affairs of the powerful do not make for dignified national conversation here. We don’t link personal propriety to public office,and a measure of hypocrisy is also taken as a given in public life.
Smaller communities,though,as uptight enclaves of shared norms,have been intermittently shaken by scandal. In 1905 in Cochin state,the last smartha vicharam (adultery trial) of a feisty Brahmin woman led to over 60 men of influence,pillars of the establishment,being named and banished. Perhaps one of the few times that a private drama posed larger questions was the famous K.M. Nanavati trial — pitched as a wronged husband killing his wife’s lover for not doing the right thing,it gripped Bombay society. The tabloid Blitz championed Nanavati’s cause,and it was subtly cast as a story of the old cosmopolitan elite and Sindhi arrivistes. Nanavati was acquitted 8-1 by a moved jury,but the case went to the high court and the Supreme Court,which sentenced him to life imprisonment. As Salman Rushdie put it,the case had clear Ramayana undertones,as India was asked to choose between the rule of law and the rule of heroes. (The rule of law won out,and jury trials were abandoned.)
This is not to say our media isn’t intrusive — there was a yucky salaciousness to the Aarushi Talwar reportage,there has been no real attempt to link it to a larger social malaise. And as far as our public figures are concerned,the media politely looks away from most indiscretions. We might have responded to a case of coercion or rape,as in the Strauss-Kahn example,but certainly not infidelity. The N.D. Tiwari affair,for instance,barely scraped our consciousness — but imagine what the British or American press would have done with that material. Even when a private affair spills into the public sphere,or has national security implications (like an IFS officer who turns out to be a spy),we rarely dwell on the details. There aren’t even any lasting political gains from exposing a scandal — though Kerala might be agog with details about the P.K. Kunhalikutty ice-cream parlour sex scandal,he has just been sworn in as a part of the UDF government.
And so,the intimate lives of our public figures are still off limits. Could that consensus crack,as is reportedly now happening in France?
Share
