Which would you say are the hardest working professions? We are familiar with stories of city policemen and their 16-hour days and six-day weeks. I always chat up Uber drivers and many of them work seven days. There are stories of surgeons who work like maniacs but that in my opinion is more greed than devotion or necessity. Journalists, and I can speak with some authority here, may be ruled out of this list.

What about politicians? Not seen as hard-working in our parts, and in fact shirkers. That is untrue. In my experience, they are the hardest working people I know, with the most unrelenting schedules. This, of course, has to do with the reality that politics on the subcontinent is not a part-time profession. Indeed, successful politicians who come up from the local level all need to set aside their personal lives to attend to the everyday problems of their constituents—from school admissions and electricity bills to police cases—in an astonishingly busy schedule that never really relents.

They have to live with serious intrusions into their privacy, and are almost never alone. Something or someone is always at hand with yet another problem.

About 15 or 20 years ago, when I was editing a newspaper in Mumbai, a friend of my father’s brought along his grandson one night to the office in the hope that the boy, not having done particularly well in school (as is the wont with many of us Gujaratis) might still be admitted to a good college.

He asked if I, in my position as media grandee, could help. I asked him how and he said I could write to Anil Deshmukh, who was then minister for education in Maharashtra, and whom I did not know. I sent word and Deshmukh returned the call immediately, saying a letter in support of the boy was on its way. When the letter arrived, I rang up to thank him and, entirely on a whim, asked if it would help with the principal. Deshmukh was honest: He hesitated and said most likely it would not. He wrote, he said, and signed such things so many times a day that principals were probably disregarding him. But he couldn’t stop doing this because he felt obliged to the constituent.

As the leader rises up the ranks, this petitioning from the local resident with his local problems might end in part (never fully, of course). But he is replaced now by members of the party, by businessmen, by bureaucrats and so on, all of whom are also convinced their affairs urgently need the personal intervention of the leader.

This kind of work, requiring one to be fully switched on all the time, cannot be done by the many, only the very few. I cannot do it and incompetence is only part of it.

Those politicians who are intellectually inclined (think of P. Chidambaram, and Manmohan Singh) are useless at actual politics. This is why most such people tend to be found in the Rajya Sabha. Those who are very good at politics—and who is better than the prime minister?—tend to be disinterested in the intellectual.

It is the very rare politician who is interested in both the masses and the rough and tumble of electoral politics and also in less sweaty pursuits. I can think of Varun Gandhi as such a man, erudite and urbane but also interested as well as competent in the sharper end. I am struggling to think of others, and I am sure they exist, though it isn’t easy offhand to name even a couple.

Then there is the other side to politics that will make many of us wilt. And that is working with a group one may find truly reprehensible: the people. Let one example suffice here.

A very bright young leader from a political family in Bengaluru who is today a minister (those familiar with the politics there would have placed him immediately) told me something interesting once. He said that over half the money a politician spent on elections was spent on bribing the electorate. And of that, half was spent on the afternoon of voting, on those who had deliberately held back from voting till the last instant so as to squeeze the candidates.

In such a culture, should we blame the politician? I cannot. They are operating under rules not of their making. That they have succeeded redounds to their credit and speaks of their commitment to their work.

Narendra Modi is one of the most hard-working, disciplined people I know, as doubtless bureaucrats and ministers are finding out. Whenever I have met him, an orderly has arrived at the waiting room to take me to the presence at exactly the appointed hour.

Whatever else one may think of him, and of Indian politicians in general, we must accept that they are on top of one of the most demanding professions because of their willingness to work a lot harder than most of us would want to or can.

Aakar Patel is executive director of Amnesty International India. The views expressed here are personal.

Also read | Aakar Patel’s previous Lounge columns.

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