I have been carrying Dante’s Inferno (Robert Pinsky version) on my back like a cross for some time now. On Friday, it got rid of me at Bhubaneswar airport. The parting was subconscious—and perhaps designed. The air hostess might have had something to do with it though. I was a lone passenger on the emergency row. Before the plane took off, the hostess came up and said not to open the heavy-looking but invitational door unless she or the captain said, “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” I had been eyeing the door.
In my younger days, I might have telepathically persuaded her to utter the word thrice right away and proceeded at least in my mind to open the door. Aren’t we in all some kind of emergency at all times and looking for an exit? But these are days one could get into trouble for lesser thought crimes, and I refrained.
A couple of hours later, I went past the TV showing Gaza news on my way to the airport lounge. Transaction over, I made my way out. There was a little confusion as the driver who had come to pick me up thought I was Ms Pinky Mishra, and I had to make a couple of calls to prove to him this was not the case.
It was only later in the car that I realised that Dante and I had parted company. And, later still, it struck me that the cautionary words uttered by the air hostess in her sing-song voice held a kind of relevance to Indian politics.
On Saturday, a liberal media house released a pre-poll survey that said the Narendra Modi-led NDA front had a ‘comfortable 12 percentage lead over the rival alliance, INDIA’. One of the conclusions said the Modi loyalists ‘swore by the welfare schemes undertaken by the government’. The newspaper sounded disappointed.
It is not as if the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has been less generous than the PM in his promises to the public. For example, in Dhule in Maharashtra he recently promised to deliver Rs 100,000 every year to every woman in need. This is in addition to many other welfare schemes and ‘guarantees’ that the opposition and the government have been promising, though admittedly the BJP manifesto released on Monday shifts the emphasis to development. But, in his campaign speeches, Modi has been large-handed. His direct cash promises and welfare schemes together constitute a new politics of guarantee. Indeed, the prime minister has been a real innovator in this sense. No speech of his complete without a mention of the inspirational ‘Modi Ki guarantee’.
On both sides, the guarantee politics is little more than baiting the poor with candies. The material nature of the transaction is quite similar to the electoral bond scheme, which the opposition is critical of. It is essentially a quid pro quo. Only, we cannot tell for sure. In our world, more than ever, the good and the bad are inextricably mixed. Reality is a ghost haunting our consciousness. I think it was the French historian Jules Michelet who said that humans have invented a language in which truth can never be fully articulated.
The BJP talks of development. Which, of course, India could do with. In the heart of our hearts, who doesn’t want an India that looks a bit like the gleaming Nordic Europe, no matter that the Indian genius for dirt and chaos militates against that orderly and snow-crusted dream?
In addition to the guarantees, the Congress talks about caste census (another guarantee, really) so that proportionate representation is enforced. Well, if instead of merit only caste is considered, would you really like your heart to be operated upon by a caste-quota doctor or an upper-caste dude with greater surgical skills?
To come back. All elections, of course, are fought on promises. But at no point in Indian history have both the incumbents and the opposition been so competitive in a campaign catering to the basic material urges of a people. Our money, your vote.
The vote, then, is like an electoral bond. It is the same Faustian principle at work. In the first, the political party buys your vote. In the other, a company sweetens up a political party. There seems little of ideology at work when it comes to the masses. How different really is this transaction from auctioning? The highest bidder hopes to rule. It is our modern variation of the papal bull, an official letter from the pope in the Middle Ages that could exonerate the donor from the sins he might have committed.
In Inferno, Dante mentions the formerly pagan Emperor Constantine of the 4th century CE, who ‘donated’ vast amounts of land and money to the pope before he died converted as a Christian. In return, the lately pious emperor was guaranteed a safe seat in heaven: “Ah, Constantine, what wickedness was born—and not from your conversion—from the dower that you bestowed upon the first rich father!” deplores Dante.
To cut a flight of fancy short, all of us seem to be seated on one long emergency row, one eye on the door, one ear to the crew. We fasten our seatbelts, stretch our legs, think about donations, our votes, their promises. We wait for the plane to take off, vaguely wondering about emergency exits, waiting for the captain or the crew to say, “Evacuate! Evacuate! Evacuate!” Silence. We are relieved. How lightly we float.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer.
His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)