NEWSMAKERS
The Desai verdict
HINDOL SENGUPTA
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Maverick economist Lord Meghnad Desai reveals his take on the recent elections.
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What will win elections is the politics of hope.
Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
Words of advice: Watching India with a keen eye.
The portly man with shocking white hair and Archies comics lips stood outside the Indian Parliament and looked at the sky. He was about to do a live TV interview and the grumbling skies above a 44° centigrade Delhi threatened a sudden downpour. Faced with wet lawns, a nervous producer and a soggy interview, Lord Meghnad Desai, for more than 40 years one of the world’s sharpest, maverick economists, as excited by Hindi cinema as he is by Marxist ideology, laughed.
“What is the problem?” he guffawed. “It’s just rain! Boss, I live in London. There is a lot of rain there. If it rains, I will just sing a rain song, maybe I will sing ‘Ab Ke Sajan Sawan Mein’. Unexpected things are the most fun.”
On target
A few months ago, Meghnad Desai who has written books like Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism and Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the life of India, argued fervently in London that the UPA led by Manmohan Singh would get a majority even as every other pundit and TV channel was alternatively palpitating and salivating about a hung Parliament and nights of vicious horse trading.
Now with not-so-reticent Manmohan and Sonia Gandhi beaming from every TV set, Desai — in India to promote his first fiction, a political thriller no less, called Dead on Time — was talking about why the idea of Manmohan-Rahul was greater than the sum of the men.
“They have the opportunity to really dynamically change the landscape. The duo is quite a handful. The prime minister is regarded by everyone as an honest and competent man, a man who knows his job and is keen to get on with it. And I am persuading myself to be impressed by Rahul Gandhi.”
Persuade seemed to be just the right word. All of India, it seems, is persuading themselves to rethink of Yuvraj Rahul Gandhi. “The Yuvraj is a bit funny, isn’t it? I mean there is all this dynastic thing and that’s why perhaps we all tend to undersell Rahul Gandhi. But remember what Rahul Gandhi has achieved is remarkable. He has revived this old party in place (Uttar Pradesh) where the base of the party used to be but for years and years the state had gone completely out of the hand of the Congress.”
He is right of course. Before the polls, Amar Singh told me: “Look at the line of the Gandhi-Nehru family from Uttar Pradesh — Motilal, Jawaharlal, Indira, Rajeev, Sonia, Rahul, Priyanka, all associated in some way or the other with Uttar Pradesh and they still don’t have the state!” Rahul Gandhi, in one stroke of daring, by going it alone in Uttar Pradesh, has changed the game. The dual war between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party seems the past, the 1.0, to the 2.0 of the Congress palm.
Under Meghnad Desai’s gaze, Rahul Gandhi seemed a bit like the man Desai likes so much: a young, dashing Dilip Kumar, earnest, eager, uncompromising and always willing to go the extra mile for the good of the country. Under Meghnad Desai’s gaze, it seemed that Rahul Gandhi had become Nehru’s favourite hero.
Meghnad Desai, who once wrote a book called Marxian Economic Theory, believes that Rahul Gandhi has the once in a lifetime chance of the changing India with the help of the only man to become prime minister twice post completing a full term after Jawaharlal Nehru, Manmohan Singh. Feeling a little full of the Congress and fulsome praise for the Family, we turned the conversation to the Left, Desai’s favourite people.
On the Left
“The Left should stop all its imperial fearmongering nonsense,” said Desai, who speaks in a bit of a rush but with the enunciation of a man who has lived for a long time in London and clearly, therefore, spent a long time trying to get himself understood in English.
“The world has changed and it has changed irretrievably and the Left, especially the Indian Left, has just got left behind. Their politics is still the politics of the 1960s but this is 2009 and this kind of politics does not work. They made the wrong best and the people served them the verdict. I feel bad for them,” sighed Desai. Quickly, I asked Desai the one thing, the one advice that he would want to give to Prakash Karat. “Think. That’s what I want to tell him. Think.”
I was about to move to the next question when Desai grinned (he has the grin of a school boy post-prank) and said: “Remember I said think. Not resign! You know I want to tell them I can tell you how to do this better, how to connect better with this country, I will not join your party but I can help you do this better!”
Perhaps he can, perhaps he can’t. The point, though, said Meghnad Desai, is that if India is going to change, pure politics or even populism will not do the trick. What will win elections is the politics of hope. If, for instance, you are able to show people the hope of good governance, the hope of good infrastructure and the hope of non-controversial leaders like Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, then the goodwill spreads across the board from assembly to general elections.
In some senses, this vote has created a move forward where voters are giving a chance to hope after years of voting on disgruntlement. The vote for unfulfilled entitlement seems to have given way to the vote for upcoming benefits.
Image matters
“I have always believed that the image of cleanliness, honour and integrity in my old friend Manmohan Singh creates hope among millions of people and they would vote for him and the continuation of that clean image in government.”
So that was that. Finally, like in an advertisement, image was everything. The idea of the government, the idea of the clean image, the image of good, clean, fair governance ideas had taken supreme position. And Manmohan Singh, the man who lost the only election he ever fought, had, like Aamir Khan in a Cadbury’s ad, towered and glowed with honest confidence.
Hindol Sengupta is Associate Editor, UTVi.
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