Occupying the high ground of magisterial wisdom, Dr Manmohan Singh set out a five-point agenda for the government in the new year, an agenda that would have come as a breath of fresh air for anyone living under a rock these past eight years, or to members of his beleaguered government seeking respite from their efforts at doing precious little.
Dr Singh promised clean government, a strong Lokpal Bill, reforms to erase poverty: in short, he assured the Indian people that come 2012 his government would, well, govern.
To some sections of the media, that message meant the PM would take matters in his own hands, that henceforth he would drive the agenda for change.
Read as a tongue-in-cheek statement it makes sense, given the record of studied indifference or ineffective intervention so far; but interpreted literally, it suggests just how successful the official discourse on public life has become at confusing cause and effect, in appropriating the lack of governance as inspiration for governance.
Appropriating language
Dr Singh's New Year speech was the coda as it were, to a series of brilliant moves that pulled the rug from under “Team Anna's” feet.
Presenting a Lokpal Bill more “radical” than Anna's, for instance, by the inclusion of minority quotas on the Lokpal bench, the Congress showed where its mastery really lies: in appropriating and twisting language for an absurd public discourse and decisive inaction.
The Lokpal Bill in Parliament was constitutionally unviable and therefore politically unpalatable. But its essential message of selective inclusion embraced minorities, hitherto excluded from the discourse on anti-corruption, and excluded the Opposition hitherto included in it.
The confusion that followed with the Opposition now becoming virulently hostile to the Lokpal Bill (and by implication, Anna Hazare) appeared to large sections of the media as a “setback” for the Congress.
But it was not. Dr Singh's lament that “the Bill could not be passed in the Rajya Sabha” indicted the Opposition and transferred the onus of its final resolution in Parliament squarely on an Opposition hostile to scrutiny by any “unconstitutional” agency.
Poverty of Language
More than at any time in the life of the nation, the present shows the ruthless way language-as-communication has been subverted for the status quo in Indian society; not just by the government to retain its power but by every privileged community as well.
In his essay, Politics and the English Language , written in 1946, George Orwell sought to show that political regeneration required cleaning the English language of the slovenliness it had acquired; not only did current writings (barring fiction) reflect unclear thoughts but, in turn, created more ambiguity that led to unclear writing that, in turn, resulted in lack of political vigour.
Orwell and India
Indian public life since the last decade offers ample justification of Orwell's thesis and reasons for extending it to a wider degeneration; a moral collapse in public (as opposed to just political) life that strips discourse of meaning, an effect that in turn divests public conduct of its moral/ethical foundation in a cause-and-effect spiral.
How is this done?
When Rahul Gandhi tried to convince the harassed potato farmer in Uttar Pradesh of the merits of FDI in retail, he left out other options; his empathy for the farmers' plight was like an insurance agent's pitch, practically logical but stripped of an ethical vision that would have generated choices springing from and rooted in the farmer's life: for the farmer it is Walmart or hunger.
When Anna Hazare insists on his own vision of the Lokpal Bill, he too restricts the idea of a struggle for ethics and honesty in public life to a game of realpolitik and eyeball confrontations.
When the urban middle-class, flush with new purchasing power, happily watches builders destroy nature to create the “natural” (landscaped gardens, water bodies) it conspires to disrupt that ethical unity binding man to his environment.
currency of dying metaphors
In his essay Orwell pointed to “dying metaphors”, inappropriate phrases that have lost their capacity to capture the vividness of life they are meant to invoke. He complained of a lack of precision that obscures political action.
In Indian public discourse, the problem is not precision so much as abstraction or reification.
Phrases such as “lifestyle housing” “sustainability” “inclusion” or even the “Lokpal Bill” lack precision but, more dangerously, become reified metaphors that define public discourse about yet another set of selective metaphors such as “growth” “Brand Name India” “fiscal deficits” and “poverty.”
Evading moral responsibility
Such abstraction increasingly isolates those engaged in public discourse from their moral responsibility of locating a metaphor's roots in the real world.
The Food Security Bill is novel enough but it is also an indictment: after sixty years policymakers have to legislate to eradicate hunger.
What blinds most commentators to the absolute necessity for precisely such legislation are the objections encapsulated in a few metaphors.
Thus, some warn, the fiscal deficit will not bear the cost of feeding the large numbers of the poor; others, that the delivery system is too faulty while some policymakers complain that farmers will lose out. Concepts or ideas exclude, by their very logic, large swathes of Indians living beyond the wash of neon-lit growth.
Rich or poor?
Other metaphors exclude even the privileged few. The data on accidental deaths and suicides provided by the National Crime Records Bureau shows a sharp rise in the number of young people between 15 and 29 years taking their own lives.
The report mentions economic and social causes while experts in media reports point to “pressures to perform” that drive even school kids to that desperate act.
But peer pressures, competition or lack of parental guidance are as much part of the huge costs being wreaked upon Indians; they are uprooted as never before from any moral or ethical vision that can temper and moderate the desperate urge to live the lives of others, or to be other people.
As W.C. Fields is reported to have quipped: “A rich man is a poor man with money.”