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Tied to the old school
In the 125th year of St Stephen?s College, as this very august (and from my point of view, beloved) institution celebrates its contribution to India?s national life, one of St Stephen?s proudest alumni, who once apparently even wrote in the college book, ?Everything I am is because of this college,? finds himself in a very un-Stephanian-like situation.
In the 125th year of St Stephen’s College, as this very august (and from my point of view, beloved) institution celebrates its contribution to India’s national life, one of St Stephen’s proudest alumni, who once apparently even wrote in the college book, “Everything I am is because of this college,” finds himself in a very un-Stephanian-like situation. Natwar Singh, former External Affairs Minister, was stripped of his portfolio after the Volcker Committee report suggested that he had been a beneficiary of largesse from the Saddam Hussein regime in the now notorious oil-for- food programme. Now as the NDA opposition — fresh from its Bihar success — begins its attack on the government and as two separate inquiries investigate Volcker’s charges against Natwar, another question comes to the fore: why is Natwar such a soft target?
Forget the BJP, but why do even some of his party colleagues — as he has himself hinted — almost welcome this opportunity to eagerly junk Natwar from the cabinet? It can’t be just because they can’t stand his book reviews. In fact, the reason is that in today’s politics, Natwar is unfortunately a social dinosaur, a leftover from an old world of privilege, an embarrassing symbol of the old school tie which in many ways excluded (sometimes brutally excluded) others from the upper echelons.
Natwar’s an example of the old St Stephen’s with its laidback princes and sporty rajas who married each other and didn’t bother with anyone else. He’s not really an example of the new St Stephen’s, a college with the most competitive cut-offs in India, where it is talent and it is percentages that gains you your seat.
Natwar represents an India whose obituary was written a decade-and-a-half ago, when the economy was at last set free, when the licence permit raj was sentenced to death and when family, birth and college were made irrelevant. Natwar is a feudal socialist of the Sixties, when to be a communist you needed to be a rich landowner. In those days it was only if you didn’t need any money that you could argue for a government that sternly put down wealth creation for all.
India’s Left-wing landlords knew each other well, patronised the arts, were generally decent people but ran the State as an extended family. For the Left-wing landlords of the Sixties, hatred for the BJP is not just about the secular communal divide; in fact it’s equally about the traditional zamindari snobbery for the mere businessman.
No wonder Natwar, the landed Nehruvian from Bharatpur, alumnus of Corpus Christi at Cambridge, friend of E.M. Forster and privileged member of the Indian Foreign Service, loathes the BJP, a party in many ways identified with the thrusting mercantile and trading energies of liberalising India.
There is, of course, a clear political reason for the BJP’s attack on Natwar. Desperate for a recovery, the BJP is anxious to claw out of 18 months of 2004 poll debacle crisis, identity crisis, leadership crisis, Jinnah crisis, Uma Bharti crisis and really become an aggressive opposition. And the UPA, already encircled with the Mitrokhin Archives, tainted ministers, the forthcoming detailed Supreme Court judgment on the Bihar assembly dissolution, probably found it safe to remove Natwar for sound political reasons. Yet, it’s interesting what a relief the departure of Natwar seems to be for the government. Why is Natwar’s departure a relief?
The truth is that the elite souls of the Natwar era, with the right table manners and book collection, have become burdens on the political process. The Harvard educated P. Chidambaram and the St Stephen’s educated Kapil Sibal are effective politicians not because of the families they come from or the schools they went to but because they are skilled solid professionals, even though they can by no means be called mass leaders. Today, in the era of Pappu Yadav from Madhepura, Mulayam from Etawah and Shahabuddin from Siwan, the St Stephen’s educated politician who makes his elitism his calling card, without perhaps the professional skills of an Arun Jaitley or even the political efficiency of a Praful Patel, simply cannot survive.
Interesting that when the Volcker revelations first came out, one of the first statements made by Natwar’s son Jagat was, “But my father’s not an ordinary Indian citizen! He’s the External Affairs Minister!” Excuse me, not an ordinary Indian? What is he then? An Extraordinary Indian?
Perhaps Jagat forgot that the party in which he’s the MLA claims to be committed to the ‘Aam aadmi’ or ordinary Indian and that extraordinariness nowadays is not decided by ministerial gaddis and flashing red lights on ambassador cars but by — guess what? — talent and achievement. With perhaps the exception of Jyotiraditya Scindia, who became a professional and now slogs at his constituency, most feudal sons became accustomed to living off the fat of the land, hoping for Daddy to line up a good job and falling prey to all kinds of rotten ways if they didn’t.
Of course, there were a lot of very good things about India of the Sixties, or Natwar’s India. Manmohan Singh is the classical educated Sixties public servant. They were Left-leaning, but they built modern India. S. Nurul Hasan and the Indian Council for Historical Research, Pupul Jayakar and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, V.K.R.V. Rao and the Delhi School Of Economics, all those Nehruvian frontiersmen who built the IITs and IIMs. It was the Nehruvian Sixties vision, after all, that located Hal, Nal, HMT, DRDO, Isro in Bangalore, thereby creating an educated middle-class, that powered it to its present global stature. The Nehruvians were idealists. They worked to reject Winston Churchill’s statement that India was a failed political experiment. They built institutions, they read poetry, they played instruments. And they wore the humble ‘bush shirt’.
By contrast, the new liberalising India is in danger of becoming savagely normless, rapacious, a uniformly noveau riche country where almost everybody aims to become newly rich and nobody gives a damn about the old ways and manners of Nehru. So accustomed have we become to bad manners and barbaric behaviour that we were knocked quite breathless when the Bihar results were announced and a civilised Nitish Kumar opened the doors of his house to offer his apologies to the gathered press outside his residence. Manners? Civility? Surely, all that was buried in our new Republic of Rudeness!
So indeed there was a lot that was good about the Nehruvians. But unfortunately, Natwar Singh is not the best exemplar of Jawaharlal’s legacy. Not because he doesn’t love Nehru well enough, but because he’s failed, unlike Nehru, to change with the times. Natwar’s remained imprisoned in the trappings of class and birth, indeed made a fetish about his books and intellectual friends, without actually making the intellectual leap into New India and its changed needs. That’s perhaps why Natwar Singh today is so eminently dispensable. Stephanians have always served India well, but only when they managed to leave their undergraduate days behind.
The writer is senior editor, India Broadcast NewsSagarika.ghose@gmail.com
