The washing machine is Indian democracy’s most useful political appliance currently. Put in a tainted politician, add some godi media detergent and out comes a patriot, pressed and ready for the next election. Suvendu Adhikari, once part of what critics called TMC’s rotten ecosystem and memorably caught on camera collecting cash, is West Bengal’s first BJP chief minister. After Himanta Biswa Sarma arrived from Congress carrying similar baggage—and later Pawan Khera, after flinging mud on Sarma’s wife decamped from Congress HQ with the Assam police in hot pursuit—the BJP’s atmospheric conditions have proved remarkably therapeutic. The mechanism is bipartisan, efficient, and completely honest in its dishonesty. There was a time when a suitcase in the wrong hands could end a career. Ministers resigned not because they were proven guilty but because shame still had constitutional value. Public morality existed as a political force, which is to say it existed at all. Bangaru Laxman, BJP president, was destroyed by footage of him accepting the princely sum of one lakh rupees, slipping the notes into a drawer with the anxious furtiveness of a man who had never done this before and clearly should not have started. AR Antulay resigned over a cement scam. Ashok Chavan resigned over the Adarsh housing scandal. The republic, in those years, still flinched. It no longer does. The uncomfortable truth is that this is not entirely the politicians’ fault.
The voter has changed the question. Not: ‘Is he honest?’ But: ‘Does the road get built?’ ‘Does the ration arrive?’ ‘Is the train running?’ ‘Did the electricity finally come?’ These are not stupid questions. They are, in fact, the only questions that make sense to someone who spent four decades watching Gandhians, neo-Gandhians and Lohiaites preside over spectacular incompetence. India has not lost its morality. It has only traded deontology for utilitarianism, which is a philosopher’s way of saying that citizens now judge outcomes rather than character. When clean governments deliver nothing and corrupt ones deliver highways, the arithmetic becomes awkward for the purists. The data is worth contemplating. The India Corruption Survey 2019 found 51 per cent of citizens had paid a bribe in the previous year and 24 per cent multiple times. The LocalCircles Business Survey 2024 found 66 per cent of businesses had paid bribes in the preceding 12 months. “Tea money” has entered the national vocabulary, which is language’s way of domesticating theft into hospitality. Max Weber believed modern states survive on legitimacy. India survives on choreography. Every citizen knows the moves: the file that stops moving, the official whose eyes suggest a figure, the middleman djinn who appears as if summoned, the policeman who takes his time, the clerk whose smile lasts precisely one beat too long. This is not deviation from the system. It is the system: a parallel tax, levied informally, lubricating a bureaucratic paralysis that could not otherwise be navigated. Which is why anti-corruption politics always exhausts itself. The Anna Hazare movement was the last great spasm of an older moral imagination, which still nursed the belief that corruption was a cancer rather than a climate. The republic discovered what cynics always knew: virtue is not a governance strategy. This explains the BJP’s political durability. Critics catalogue cronyism, institutional capture, and the spectacular rehabilitation of defectors. Supporters see expressways, digital payments, welfare transfers, and electrification. The BJP’s Bengal conquest is a case in counterpoint. For decades, Bengali politics ran on ideology, class rhetoric, and a literary self-regard that claimed cultural prestige. The Bengali voters sounded less like intellectuals debating Marx and more like consumers evaluating service providers. If the BJP ends up delivering what the Left once promised and TMC only partially provided—jobs, investment, infrastructure, integration with economic momentum visible elsewhere in the country—it will be around for a long time, and corruption allegations will matter very little. Because a society that has normalised bribery as ambient reality stops demanding purity from its rulers. It demands competence instead. These are not the same thing, but one can live without the other.
None of this makes corruption cost-free. It hollows institutions quietly, rewards mediocrity, distorts justice, and produces citizens who have stopped believing in fairness because fairness has never found them. A republic that internalises bribery eventually internalises inequality before the law. The damage is real, only the outrage has gone. Indira Gandhi once justified corruption as a global phenomenon. At the time, that sounded scandalous. Today it sounds merely accurate, which is considerably worse. India’s political morality has completed its long migration from Gandhian virtue to post-liberal realism. The politician who steals but builds may survive, but the one who is honest but ineffective will not. The washing machine runs around the clock. Because the electricity is at last working.