Like many of his generation, my father was, what we would call, an honest-tothe-core public servant. The kind who would carry a set of pens, paper, ink, envelopes and stamps to office for personal use as separate from the stationery provided by office for matters of state. He would not use his office staff for personal work even though that said staff was designated as “personal” assistant.I am not sure of this, but it is quite possible that he waited for office hours to end before he wrote that rare “personal” letter. And I never dared to ask him what he thought of using office space for personal matters! Honesty can make the honest look and sound ridiculous because there is no half-way. It is an absolute virtue; you are either honest or you are not.The third category which we euphemistically call “practical”— as opposed to being “idealistic” — is just an improvised tool, a lever if you will, designed to lighten the load on our conscience for doing things that laws and ethics don’t permit.

Single Agenda

Honesty is all encompassing. You cannot be honest in one place and be less honest or dishonest in another. So an honest person can stretch things to the extremes, to such extremes that honesty can stop being a virtue and start to look more like a fetish (such as my father’s inventory of personal stationery items). Honesty is also a one-point agenda.Honesty first, last and at all times. Just like corruption and Jan Lokpal Bill became the be all and end all of Arvind Kejriwal and his unique experiment at governance. One of the wonders of Arvind’s ascension to the chief minister’s chair was the fact that the aam aadmi miraculously got entry into the exalted portals of the state.Thus far, all our efforts at change were necessary outside-in changes. Outsiders demanded changes and insiders granted a wish here and a wish there, all the while erecting bigger walls to keep the outsiders where they belong: outside.We could clamour for change as much as we wanted but all we were allowed to do was keep knocking our heads against the hard wall of the system. If wear and tear could cause a faint crack somewhere, we were lucky and were expected to be satisfied. But Arvind and his team got an unparalleled chance to change the system inside out.If you consider that in 60 years of being a parliamentary democracy, this was the first time the aam aadmi got a real shot at governance, you will understand how impenetrable the system had become for other than those already inside it.If all of the Anna movement and AAP’s formation and its stunning performance were the preparation for a revolution, Arvind Kejriwal taking oath in the presence of thousands of hopeful aam janta was the revolution itself!Arvind came to office with an 18-point agenda. He needed to show equal allegiance to each one of the agenda items. Though governance wouldn’t have ended with achieving any or all of them, it was a good starting point, a clear road ahead. Task lists are meant to keep focus, not to act as hurdles to trip up against each one of them.Like items on any to-do list, there would always be some that would be achieved, some that would be in process, some that would take a lot of pushing and heaving to get started and others that just refuse to take off.But that’s not the way Arvind looks at stuff. So, within days of assuming office he almost brought his government down with an unprecedented dharna in the heart of Delhi on just one aspect of one agenda item (women’s security) and sacrificed it on Jan Lokpal, which he calls his core agenda item.By thus doing Arvind and team seem to have adopted a streak of honest absolutism where there is only success and failure and nothing in between, no marks for trying, no room for patience and perseverance.If item No 1 is a failure, then the rest of the items don’t hold any meaning and are worth dropping altogether. If Jan Lokpal cannot be placed in the Delhi assembly without giving the Lt. Governor the benefit of a preview, then it is worth getting out of government altogether. That makes Arvind’s idealism bigger than Mahatma Gandhi’s which allowed for mistakes, failures and retrials. And that is what makes comprehending what Kejriwal has done that much harder. Another problem of the honest is to assume that the world is out to get them, that they are the only ones wearing the honesty cap.In the eyes of the honest then, everybody is guilty till proven innocent, even other honest persons. So they clang with the system at every level and every twist and turn. We got loads of that from Arvind and the Aam Aadmi Party. They never tired of telling us that they are a party of the lay person, they had no motive other than to clean up the system and that they were not here to hanker for power. This is how Arvind and his team spent their short tenure in the Delhi secretariat.For example, Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, a career bureaucrat with a reasonable reputation, could have been co-opted as an ally by Kejriwal in his attempts to change the system. Jung even seemed inclined to accommodate a few oddities of Arvind and his team in their attempts to change the system. But it did not take long for AAP to convert a “friend” who sent parathas for Arvind’s dinner at the dharna into “a Congress agent” and a corporate plant to subvert the Jan Lokpal Bill. My father passed just about the time the Anna Hazare movement was sprouting.I often wonder how he, who often talked about a mass uprising as the only way out of the quagmire of corruption in public life, would have reacted to the Kejriwal phenomenon. It is easy to imagine he would have jumped on to the AAP bandwagon. But then, my father was a stickler for rules, too. His honesty included adhering to all laws, rules and conventions of society and governance that are in existence, even if he thought those were unjust or ill-conceived. Kejriwal got a rare opportunity to get into the system to change it. And he blew it. No, I don’t think my father would have seen eye to eye with Kejriwal on the Jan Lokpal drama he chose to enact as an escape route to resignation.Even if the Congress and BJP prevented Arvind from pushing the Jan Lokpal Bill, which in the end they didn’t, would the world have ended for AAP or its support base? Would there be nothing else left to do? Would it be such an inviolable promise that their supporters would not have pardoned them for? Especially after they didn’t seem to mind when Arvind changed his mind about not forming a government with the help of the Congress party and then did just that? The bigger question my father would have asked Arvind is: how can you be picky-choosy about the laws you will follow and those that you will not follow?But from one honest person to another, I doubt if Arvind and AAP will understand where my father would be on this issue because, that’s the other fantastic thing about honest persons, like no two economists can ever agree, no two honest persons can see eye to eye. And for that we have a ready example in Arvind and his mentor Anna.And of course, the honest assume that they are always right. Not just that they are the only ones right and we are to take their word for everything. If Arvind says that he is not power hungry, we are supposed to believe it. And even when he says that what his time in the Delhi assembly taught him is that he needs to be in parliament to effect change, he expects us to believe that there is no power equation in there. That is plain arrogance. The arrogance of the honest.(The writer is Group Editor of Samay News Network)