India Today Editorial Director M.J. Akbar India Today Editorial Director M.J. Akbar

Photo: Saurabh Singh Photo: Saurabh Singh

The British, damn them, confused us so thoroughly that we still cannot find an economic policy. They gave us both Queen Victoria and Karl Marx; and then Lord Curzon and the Fabian Society. It was merciless.Their own vision was clear. Ideology was appropriately dressed: Top hats for silks, caps for toilers. Lenin knew better than to challenge the British identity template; he wore a cap. A hat is not revolutionary. We will never know what Lenin, who died at the age of 53, probably of syphilis, would have been wearing if he was still in the Kremlin at 73. His successor in the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev, proudly took his mother for a tour of his office and chandeliered dacha. The old lady asked, worriedly, "But Leonid, what will we do when the Bolshies return?" The story may be apocryphal but the metaphor is true. Corruption is not an Indian monopoly.The British were unimpressed by Marx. They buried him in the 19th century and exported him in the 20th. Among Marx's destinations was India, where he met Gandhi.Gandhi had a radical approach to clothes. He abandoned them. This did not make Gandhi naked. He was always wrapped in poverty. Marx's proletariat may have driven out the Romanovs from Russia, but mendicant Gandhi's starving Indians dismantled the mightiest empire known in history. How could Gandhi, who smashed the chains of fear that had shackled India into so many prisons, who was caustic about greed and egalitarian about need, who owned very little himself, be ever considered right-wing?The Indian left scorned Gandhi with unforgiving ardour because Gandhi subsumed economics into nationalism. Gandhi's horse was Hindustan; the cart, its economy, came later. His model for governance, developed at Tolstoy Farm in South Africa and published in 1910 as Hind Swaraj, was a potpourri of shibboleths linked by the rigidity of an ashram. The only economy it exhibited, frankly, was an economy of words; its length was no bigger than a preliminary chapter in any Marxian treatise. And yet the workers of Britain, whose cloth he had burned in 1920, cheered him to the rafters when, flashing his toothless smile, he visited them in Lancashire in 1931.In 1945, as Gandhi and his heirs prepared for self-rule, Jawaharlal Nehru dismissed Hind Swaraj as "completely unreal". Nehru had 'confessed', as early as in December 1929, that "I am a socialist and a republican and am no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry... whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy". Gandhi got on pretty well with kings and princes, contemporary or old. Jamshetji Tata sent him donations for his heroic South Africa campaigns; G.D. Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj picked up Congress bills through the freedom movement. Nehru's critics were convinced he wore foreign underwear under khadi, but could never be certain whether it was purchased from Harrods or the socialist cooperative down the road. Gandhi was tart in his response to Jawaharlal: "He likes to fly. I don't. I have kept a place for the princes and the zamindars in the India that I envisage."The inevitable compromise followed: Co-existence, without any sharp lines. But it was uneasy private-public relationship. The private sector hit below its weight; the public sector added weight without muscle. Stagnant or desultory economic growth encouraged exploitation in one and waste in the other. The state paid for its mistakes with tax cash, and changed the rules arbitrarily to curb its competition. The private sector howled when leashed, and cut every corner when it thought no one was looking.Indian Marxists, from their cubby hole in Bengal, specialised in ambivalence, arguing that since socialism was impossible in a bourgeois democracy pseudo-socialism would have to do. Cross-dressing is a peculiarly Indian political alibi. Those who understood the deception shrugged off their dilemma. Jyoti Basu was once asked why he flew first class. Because, he answered, he was a first-class Communist. Wit is a formidable defence mechanism.A crisis was inevitable. In 1991, the government finally stepped back, but liberalisation was soon to encounter a far more dexterous and dangerous rival than weedy socialism: Populism. This anarchic demon swallows money that doesn't exist in an insatiable desire for votes. Ideology cowered briefly, and then disappeared. Both right and left now survive on a wing and a prayer, bereft of serious or even comical ideas. The UPA Government is honest when it says it has no clue why the rupee is shrinking; the citizen has no clue as to why UPA wants to be in power for two more years.An ideological vacuum inevitably makes politics personal, and decisions become whimsical. The emperor, as in the familiar fable with a moral, believes he has appeared before the people with new robes. He bows to the applause. Only a child knows what he does not; that he has none. That child has a vote.