The policy of rotating the team and ensuring that ‘youngsters’ get to keep playing in the interests of building a team for the future seems on the face of it, much to commend it. The accepted wisdom is that the Indian team finds it difficult to make room for younger blood, and senior players can take their own time in deciding to fade away into the sunset. Without giving enough opportunity to build new talent, it is clear that Indian cricket will face even greater challenges in the years to come.

So far so good. The problem is that the framing of the issue in terms of seniors and juniors is spurious, particularly when it comes to batsmen in ODIs. The so-called youngsters are anything but; when measured in terms of matches played and the number of opportunities received to play in the last few seasons. For instance, Raina has 137 caps,Kohli has 76, and Rohit Sharma has 74. In the same ball park are ‘youngsters’ like Kevin Pietersen (123), Hashim Amla (54), Dale Steyn (60) and Jonathan Trott (40).

Now it is difficult to imagine these names being referred to as ‘juniors’ by any stretch of imagination. Nor is it true that in recent times, the older players have denied the juniors enough opportunity to play. Over the 2010 and 2011 seasons, Raina has played 53 games, Kohli 59 and Sharma 31- contrast this with the seniors- Sachin with 13 games, Sehwag 24 and Gambhir 33. In terms of performance, most have done well; Sachin with an average of close to 55tops the charts, and most of the others hover around the 45 mark, with Raina the only straggler at about 34.

None of the arguments proffered, that there are young players who are being made to wait without enough opportunities, or that the jaded seniors are a drag on the team or even that the players in questioned can at all be labelled ‘juniors’, hold up to scrutiny. When it comes to Test matches, the story is admittedly a little different, but certainly not when we discuss the shorter forms of the game.

If the batsmen under discussion involved included people like Manoj Tewari or Rahane, the question of giving the younger players more opportunity might have come into play, but not when we talk of Messrs. Raina, Sharma & Kohli. Quite simply, there is little to choose between the players going by recent form, and it would make sense to pick whatever seems like the best team on the day without an overarching objective.

The tendency to locate any issue in a larger emotive frame is clearly at work here. By seeing this as a question involving a choice between older, established and more powerful names and younger, fitter, determined but more put upon younger players emotionalises the issue, giving it darker tones and making a conspiracy seem nigh. The seniors versus juniors trope is a familiar one; going through frequent ups and downs, without missing a beat in terms of emotional intensity.

This is a common pattern; explanations are commonly sought using frames that use sentiment in manners that are overwrought. Tendulkar in particular invites this kind of speculation all the time. His 100th century is seen as a national monument, worth more than any Indian victory by some and by others as the reason for the dismal performance of the Indian team. In both cases, the logic, such as it is, is presumptive. As Mukul Kesavan has so persuasively argued, the hundredth century is a meaningless milestone for it brackets two very different kinds of achievement into a single arbitrary frame, and the argument that Tendulkar’s quest for this milestone has come in the way of the entire team is just plain silly. It is we who see every Tendulkar 40 as a missed hundred; in any case if all he wants is to score a century, surely that cannot be bad for the team. And if he does fall closer to the number because of anxiety, remember that the difference between a 99 and a 100 is only one run for the team; the catastrophe that is experienced by all of us is entirely because of the symbolic magic of three figures.

The trouble with the way cricket is played today is that it seems to exist to create unhappiness. We do not savour our victories enough; who remembers the World Cup win last year? It is worth recalling that for almost three decades we made do with recycled images of the 1983 win to such an extent that every ball bowled in the key games is now permanently etched in our collective memory. And yet, one would be hard put to recall anything of note in a victory that took place less than a year ago. When it comes to the shorter forms of the game, there is no great crisis to overcome, no conspiracy to battle; just the wonderful ability of sport to surprise us with its unpredictability. Deep breaths, people.

          

The really interesting question is as to why this entire phenomenon exists in the form it does- why do governments act as they do and why do groups- religious, cultural and social react with such touchiness, often to events and utterances they have personally not been exposed to, like in the case of Salman Rushdie’s book or the TV shows in question. Indeed, we often hear of the triggers for the outrage only through reports of outrage; we become offended upon hearing that we are offended. One proximate explanation is that in a 24X7 media world that is intricately inter-connected, any small act of taking umbrage becomes blown up instantly and becomes mainstream news; in a fragmented political system, shorn of any ideological beliefs, any lever to organise voters in a collective becomes attractive, both as a device to catch votes as well as a form of insurance. Principles are abstract and secular, while sentiments potentially translate into voting blocs.

But what when votes are not involved like in the case of Clarkson’s comments? It would seem that here touchiness comes from another place; those who have traditionally been at the wrong end of the power ladder are displaying their new found sense of place by flexing the outrage muscle. The idea of getting insulted and demanding redress is a time honoured method of drawing boundaries and agitating for respect. It is a reverse form of bullying that relies on the fact that the dominant politically correct narrative of the times decrees that emerging cultures and social groups be treated with exaggerated deference. The right to be offended becomes an important weapon in the armoury of minority and power-deprived groups.

At a deeper level the state, by virtue of being part of a discourse of rights and individual freedom has begun to play a much greater role and having a much more influential say in the social life of its constituents. What was earlier a function of social, cultural and religious formations has increasingly become part of the state’s mandate. An extreme example of this can be seen in the episode unfolding in Norway, where the state acting under universalist notions of rights, has interpreted culturally specific behaviour as an infringement of the childrens’ rights and has in the name of doing the right thing, traumatised the family.

In other times, infringement of social norms attracted action from social structures; society represented itself, on cultural issues, for most part. The reversal in the power equation between state and society has meant that the state feels the need to take responsibility for acts of cultural transgressions, something that it is intrinsically ill equipped to do. Democracy helps cultural considerations infect the otherwise secular nature of the state, which uses the framework at its disposal, the one that uses rules, boundaries and rights to deal with these intangible issues.

At the heart of the problem lies the confusion created by the tension between excessive political correctness that mandates a certain level of touchiness about symbolic actions and celebrates the intolerance of any perceived faults, and the underlying hypocrisy that governs behaviour in the real world. We profess one thing and practise another be it in questions of race, gender, ethnicity or religion. At one level we must be respectful of other cultures, faiths and viewpoints that we may not fully understand or agree with, but the moment that involves anything more than symbolic agreement, we have a problem. It does not help that matters get muddied by all parties seeking to get mileage out of these controversies, with each posturing for its own perceived constituencies.

The use of a rights framework converts relative truths or untruths into absolutes. Fatwas are issued on both sides, in a manner of speaking. The idea of freedom of expression is pushed to its limit, in order to exhibit the principle, and the right to get offended hardens into a self-righteous licence to violence. Of course, the battle is not always an equal one as we have seen in this country recently, for those holding the banner for the right to free speech do not have the political clout of those being offended but as we saw in Norway, it works the other way too. The touchiness of activists is no less fearsome than that of religious zealots, nor is their mode of reaction any less religious.

In a multi-cultural environment of any kind, good behaviour is much more about reciprocity than about rights. Social mechanisms have much greater subtlety and flexibility than do rigid notions of right and wrong. The problem today is that bad behaviour gets valorised on all sides; those taking extreme positions get rewarded. Minor acts of intolerance or provocation make headlines while major acts of reconciliation and accommodation go unheralded.

Intemperateness is mistaken for strength and what should been the realm of some hard but good natured negotiation of intangibles becomes an arena of conflict where every concession is the loss of something fundamental.

The government’s reactions in recent times are both difficult to understand and defend. At its worst, they have been cynical and expedient and at its best naive and silly. But deeper issues lurk beneath this surface, and those are unlikely to be resolved by the framework and vocabularies we have at our disposal. They need a kind of wisdom that we currently do not seem to have a way of reaching.

          

The bonfire is a universal invitation card. In winter nights, especially in the North, you cannot walk ten yards without coming across some bonfire or another, often fashioned out of cardboard boxes and other residues of modernity with a motley group of people huddled around it. These fires are motels of warmth where you check in while on the way to somewhere else. All are invited and no one is specially so- you come and go as you please. Around the fire, you take the warmth that comes your way and add your little bit to the group that’s already there. No one needs to ask for permission to gather around a fire.

To that extent, all we are around a fire is a warm human body. We become our temperature; for we belong to the group purely on the strength of our being alive. The fire tells us that the winter, however seductive to a tropical country like ours, is in fact our natural enemy. We are ready to drop our civilisational accoutrement and revert to being a genus of a particular species very quickly. The cold that seeps into our bones, and the air that cuts the nose off from under our face makes us insensate to our own selves. We cannot feel our body; we lose our sense of being ourselves until the proximity of fire coaxes us to emerge from within our bodies, as we thaw out gently. Life returns in a gentle flush, beginning with the ears, enveloping the face, making our palms ruddy with the warmth of blood till only the nose remains; a frozen iceberg in a sea of warm currents.

Warm clothes are good at staving off the cold; they are fierce bodyguards, keeping the enemy at bay. But once the cold enters the body, clothes are not satisfying enough. They don’t reverse the clamminess of the body; we need a fire to help us restore warmth inside us. Fire speaks directly to our blood in a private dialect that we do not quite understand but are eternally grateful for. The only warmth that compares with that produced by the fire is of course that which is beamed down at us by the sun. The sun in winter makes sunflowers of us all, as we bloom under its benevolent magic. The fire is the human attempt at manufacturing miniature versions of the sun; transferring its life conferring properties on demand, creating a new channel through which to funnel life.

Fire produces human bonding in strange ways. An unlit cigarette allows any stranger to seek fire from you. There is no taboo, no hierarchy involved in sharing a matchstick between two people nor any in lighting a cigarette from another. Fire is seen as a natural right; strangers light up in mute masculine camaraderie, cupping hands together as the matchstick struggles in the wind. Fire produces a presumptive ownership that cuts across class divides. To that extent all fires are socialists; although their version trades the carping resentment of their political cousins for the warm benevolence of humanity.

The home too is nothing but walls built around the hearth. We huddle together on the kitchen floor or the dining table, breaking chapattis together, with fire giving us the food which sustains life. The feeling of home is linked inextricably with the kitchen. When we shift into a new house, it becomes home only when the kitchen, or more exactly, the chulha starts operating. Traditionally, meals meant the serving of chapattis hot from the tava straight into the plates. We like our food to crackle with the heat of the fire on which it was made. Cold food to the Indian sensibility is like eating something with rigor mortis- the dead flesh of yesterday’s life. Culturally today we have learnt to deal with cold food, even enjoy it, but even now, real food to most of India is that which is served piping hot and bursting with life. No wonder, chapatis are always garam-garam, as pakodas are garma-garam. There is something plural about warmth with nothing singular seeming appropriate when there is a fire burning.

The fire is perhaps a metaphor for the blood that courses down our veins producing heat and life. It kindles in mere flesh a spark of vitality as it stirs the bones into action. We rise from the dead every time we banish the clammy cold that has seeped into our bodies. We warm to things, things heat up, they start to go on the boil, they warm the cockles of our heart. The sun in the winters is a proof of divinity. It makes us bloom as it fills our bodies with the radiance of life. To laze in the sun, to shell peanuts and eat chikkis, to slurp tea noisily and lie outstretched on a charpai. Now that’s life.

          

The underlying reasons have to do with political expediency; the possible cost of upholding principles is deemed too high to take a chance with. In this particular instance, both the objection by the Deobandis as well the reaction by the government smack of naked opportunism. Rushdie has come to India before and has attended the same literary event without any significant objections; if the UP elections were not round the corner, it is likely that there would be no issue to resolve. Of course, even without elections being a variable, given the track record of the state in these kinds of issues, it seems safe to hazard a guess that the government’s action would have been similar.

The time has come to ask a difficult question. So what if there are riots which involve the possibility of violence and even fatalities? The very idea of a structure like the state rests on the inviolability of some fundamental principles. The state is duty bound to protect these even if it involves paying a price. Nobody would ask questions of the state if in defending territory, it uses violence and suffers the loss of lives. Most actions of the state have a differential impact across constituencies and there is simply no way that its action will please everyone. Protests are thus part of the democratic process. The act of protesting does not carry any implicit and automatic legitimacy. When the state allows groups with narrow partisan and often cynical agendas to have their way, it creates a situation where any caste or religious group can manipulate the system by blackmailing it. The more these protests get encouragement by way of acquiescence, the more frequently we are likely to witness instances of enacted touchiness. It takes nothing for a few to claim that ‘sentiments have been hurt’; and the state cannot take responsibility for the emotional fragility of all its constituents.

Why is it that religious protests get special treatment? Many lives have been lost because of the Telengana movement and no one uses the fear of the possibility of violence as a reason to concede the demands being made. There is no shyness in carrying out a bloody and oppressive campaign against the protests in Manipur and similarly, when the state believes that it has something important to defend, as in the case of Kashmir, it is not afraid to use force over extended periods of time. The idea that the threat of violence should automatically lead to a retreat is not practised in any other instance save when a principle is involved.

Perhaps because, it is after all, only a principle. Easy to disregard, transact and negotiate around. There is little advantage seen in standing up for it, while the costs loom large. In a world where action has become detached from a larger belief system, the cost of compromising principles becomes invisible. Every action can be evaluated purely on the basis of immediate profit and loss and when viewed from this lens, it makes very little sense for the political system to stand up for an abstract principle.

What is interesting is that while on the one hand principles that define the nature of democracy in the country are deemed to be too symbolic to be concerned about, we are otherwise reacting to symbolic slights and perceived insults all the time. The most recent episode involves the apparent denigration of India by a BBC programme, something that has been officially taken up the government with its British counterpart. This is part of a long line of such perceived insults, which are routinely reacted to with much anger and outrage. At one level, the reactions reveal the inherent discomfort felt when confronted with the wrong end of the freedom of expression and at another, the importance of an ego outwardly projected rather a belief, inwardly valued.

It would seem that the idea of power is more central in our consideration than are principles. When an abstract attack is made on one’s perceived self-respect, be it as a country or religious or social formation, the reaction is one of extreme touchiness. When a principle is attacked, it is felt that nothing really important is at stake. Defending a principle is seen to be an expendable chore; the impulse is to privilege expediency over any deeper belief. Actions then do not emerge from a larger canvas of belief but from a collage of expediency.

It is the responsibility of the state to uphold some principles, whatever the cost. In this case, in all likelihood, had the state stood firm, there would have been no real repercussions given the patently cynical nature of the objections. Not just in this instance but in several others, had the state taken a stronger stand, many protests would have withered away. But regardless of whether that is the case or not, by going down the path it has, the government has confirmed that it has little interest or belief in the foundational ideas that hold up democracy in the country. In the absence of a larger ideology backing them, principles become burdensome, and democracy itself becomes nothing more than a marketplace for competitive power games.

          

One of the criticisms of the Lokpal movement has been the enormity of the task that it seems to be taking on for itself. The fear is that the act of policing the system on such a large scale will create a giant bureaucracy that will be very difficult to manage. There is more than a little merit in this question and it begs a deeper one. What kind of culture would an obsessive desire to clean up things breed? What kind of consequences, both intended and unintended can this potentially bring about?

The idea of transparency is by itself unexceptionable; but it comes at a cost. The difference between truth and its bureaucratic version is that the latter mistakes the absence of visible suspicion to be equivalent to the truth. Bureaucratic truth seeks to confer on all actions a presumptive guilt and proceeds to eliminate one by one, all elements that are suspicious. The question of who will monitor wrong-dong is a highly loaded one, for how do we know that those doing the monitoring are themselves free of suspicion? As we saw in the case of Team Anna itself, it is virtually impossible for individuals to be free of any suspicion of wrong-doing, in a world where some form of corruption is a norm.

Every decision involves an element of judgement; in a world that seeks bureaucratic transparency, every decision is thus inherently suspicious. Every official is by definition a player of an assigned role that is distinct from his or her personal identity. In an atmosphere of suspicion, the act of demarcating official judgement from personal interest becomes exceedingly difficult for it asks an institutional mechanism to make inferences about the intention of the individual. When the a priori assumption is that people are dishonest (based on good evidence), then it is extraordinarily difficult to prove otherwise. By making honesty a central virtue, we run the risk of sacrificing the quality of the outcome that a decision is meant to deliver. It is true that corruption enables wrong choices; the bribe is a way in which merit is often superseded. But the opposite is also true; the desire to ensure uniform fairness leads to a recurring inability to exercise one’s judgement. If every bad decision attracts accusations of corruption, then the quest for bureaucratic truth can become a paralysing straitjacket. Any system that does not allow for bad decisions, cannot hope for good ones. Good decisions are likely to be the ones that are clean but the reverse is not necessarily true. As reported by the Economic Times, the recent Roongta Committee report warns against over-governance which “promotes conservative, cautious and risk-averse organisational culture, with procedures being paramount and outcomes becoming secondary”. In a culture where outcomes have never been of primary consideration, an air of suspicion only compounds the problem. After all, if any action carries with it a possible cost and inaction is tolerated, where would we find any incentive to move things forward?

The paradox about transparency is that it works best when in an environment that is fundamentally honest. Honesty in a system depends on its prior existence. It is when by and large we expect individual and institutions to act in good faith that we can isolate acts of bad faith and act punitively. The absence of a priori honesty makes everything appear dishonest. Otherwise, the hierarchy of suspicion does not end; it is noteworthy that the Jan Lokpal team finally reposed its faith in ‘a group of eminent people’ who were deemed for no good reason to be above suspicion. Eventually, we need to place our faith somewhere and this is by its very nature a leap of an axiomatic nature.

The trouble with pushing for change that is too far ahead of a current and entrenched reality is that it becomes a breeding ground for unintended and distorted consequences. The desire for total transparency is likely to produce the same result for all that it can reveal in today’s world is that we are all naked in our complicity. And yet, without this attempt, nothing seems likely to change. The Lokpal may well be overzealous and unrealistic in its ambition but it is an honest attempt at bringing about systemic change. In dealing with change, one needs to look beyond simplistic notions of right and wrong, honest and dishonest, good and bad. One needs to acknowledge that it will be a messy affair, moving in a trajectory of sequential distortions. Too little transparency will give way to the stasis produced by too much which in turn might lead to the next level of disequilibrium with a new axis of conflict. Every change is a struggle between certitudes this one will be no different. There is no neat resolution, no final answer; only a series of new questions.

          

Some would attribute this to the nature of the coalition beast. By definition , only limited agreement is possible between parties that may not even have been allies at the time of going to elections (not the case of course with the Congress and the Trinamool), and therefore disagreement on major policy issues might only be expected. We saw this at work in the first UPA government where the Left played a big role in making life very difficult for the government by virtue of its own ideological positions, most notably in the case of nuclear deal with the US. It was widely expected that this government would be much better off, not being saddled by the creaking and rigidly inflexible ideological apparatus that is still being lugged around by the Left. After all, regional parties were known to have limited interest in larger questions of policy ; in most cases if the CBI was not actively pursuing any prominent regional leaders, smaller parties were not expected to get in the way of major policy initiatives. This time around, however, that somewhat tidy division of labour has disappeared.

But there is division of labour of another kind. It has become the lot of the national parties to take note of the niceties involved in the democratic process and to be seen to be saying and doing the right things while the regional parties seem to have freed themselves from this burden. This was particularly clear in the case of the Lokpal bill; it was apparent that the government was forced at gunpoint to draft the bill. Left to itself, it is extremely unlikely that this would have a priority for any political party. It was forced to do so in the face of sustained pressure brought to bear by the media’s showcasing of the anti-corruption movement.

And yet, purely in electoral terms, the government could have got away by doing very little. The noteworthy thing about the Anna Hazare-led anti corruption movement was that it was for all practical purposes, electorally insignificant . Whatever Team Anna might think about their ability to influence electoral outcomes, most politicians were unlikely to have spent too many sleepless nights worrying about the prospect of an election campaign carried out by this group. It was a largely urban middle class movement; its intensity was formidable , but in electoral terms, it did not really count for much.

It would seem that we have two concurrent democracies running the country — one that is enacted for us on television cameras and the other that actually determines who comes to power. For the television democracy , appearances do matter, although there is great and often misplaced confidence , on both sides, in the ability to argue any case with the help of lawyers. For the electoral democracy, a completely different set of calculations come into play, and this is where the smaller regional parties have an advantage. Unlike the national parties , they are under no great compulsion to be seen to be the doing the right thing as deemed by the consumers of television democracy, the audience. Disrupting the house, tearing up bills, taking positions on national policy that are based on narrow political concerns and coming in the way of progressive legislation are actions that carry fewer consequences for these parties. It is not that the national parties are necessarily more progressive in their outlook; it is just that they have no choice, but to participate and be seen to be doing a good job in the television version of democracy. It is instructive to think back to the extreme reluctance with which the BJP took action against Yeddyurappa or in its recent dilemma about the induction of tainted BSP leaders in its fold in UP; nothing illustrated the conflict created by having to perform in both versions of democracy better than these instances.

For a coalition government to function , it needs to get some leeway for issues of national importance. The inability to move things forward at a national level because of regional political considerations makes governance of any kind extremely difficult. Simultaneously , the ability of state governments to escape scrutiny of the kind that the Centre is subject to, partly owing to the fact that today leadership is much stronger at a regional level, allows them a freer hand to do what they wish to with the democratic institutions under their control. This presents a significant challenge for the national media too, which arrogates to itself the power to make or break governments. What we are seeing is the appropriation of effective power by groups that do not have either this mandate or accountability and the lack of a mechanism that can act as a counterweight to this phenomenon . Of the two democracies in operation, one gets too much scrutiny and debate, but eventually seems to not matter much while the other gets its own way simply by saying no. Bluntly and very often.

          

This week on Storyboard, Santosh Desai gauges effectiveness, picks the campaigns that worked, and puts all of it in the context of the times we live in.

          

Memories of mornings as they used to be invariably involved the radio. There was something about the AIR signature tune that did not merely usher in the morning; it became the morning in all its unfolding sonorousness. Meter bands sprang gently to life, and tanpuras filled out the empty spaces in the day, curling into the distant corners of the room. The sound became the light, as the tanpura echoed the coming to life of a new day, contemplative, unhurried, setting the background to the activity to follow, refraining from giving us any concrete signs of what might follow. Somehow morning time is tanpura time; where the intent of the day is not fully ripened, where time is rubbing sleep from its eyes and settling down, stretching to give itself room to eventually take some shape and form. Sound that creates diversion but avoids shape; that gesticulates musically without articulating any precise content; that is all aura and little substance. Gradually strains of sunlight streamed in through the verandah, light claiming territory patch after bright patch. Window panes glowered as if caught unawares; light began to get tinged with heat, stirring the bones into some form of activity.

If the radio understood that the morning called for quiet saturation, the newspaper put us in direct touch with the very idea of time. Every day brought a new newspaper, freshly printed, ink still wet, the world crinkling between one’s fingers. Whatever the contents, the newspaper made the world fit into one’s hands and made it comprehensible. Unlike the untidy and unpacked nature of time today, where news tumbles out of media every single moment of the day, in earlier times, news deferred to time and kowtowed to order. News came to us decorously, knocking on our doors every morning. This was still a time when editors knew best; even if what was called news often consisted of the most mind-numbingly boring utterances of the people in power, it was still news, and mornings decreed that we read about it.

Of course, none of this was possible without being accompanied by a cup of tea. The function of tea was to wake us up, one sip at a time. Unlike coffee, which admittedly had its own adherents, tea delivered us without startling us alarm-clock like, into the morning. Before descending into a cup of tea, the morning has rendered us sub-human, with the idea of awakening not only being one of making peace with a new day, but also in some way returning to a human form, from the state of oneness with the primal force of sleep. Night confers on us a return to primitive unity which the cold light of day fractures into a sense of being an individual and tea helps us cleave back into being conscious and singular again. Tea helped gun our engines, while letting them idle, till it was time shift into first gear. And then of course, mornings became purposeful; time became an arrow, and the day sucked us in to do its bidding.

There was still the bath; the last frontier between a self immersed in yesterday and one having defected to today. The bath renewed us as it undid the past, by jolting us out of one state into another. The bath was a shock of today delivered on the unsuspecting torso of yesterday. It broke down all remaining allegiance to the past, and delivered us all shiny and new into the future.

Looking back from the vantage point of today, it does seem that we understood mornings better then than we do now. As a threshold that allows us to prepare for the day, as an intermediate space between the fact of being awake and alive and performing the act of living, it allowed us to inhale the new deeply before participating in it. Not that the mornings of today are completely different, or that the role they play in our lives has dramatically changed. A cup of tea is still as gentle in its embrace, and a bath just as bracing, but the quality of the morning has certainly changed. The tanpura no longer hangs on the air, making time seem momentarily infinite, nor do we surrender quite as meekly to the newspaper. We think too much, and know too much, for the morning to work its magic on us.

It is possible that it is not the mornings that have changed; it is we who have become a new version of our old selves. When we insist that everything in our life must deliver value and must have a reason for existence, we make all parts of our life instrumental, part of some grand, if not entirely well defined plan. The morning need not have a responsibility to the day that follows and the day in turn might not be an officer on perpetual duty of the rest of our lives. Without fallowness, there is no fertility and without mornings that drift purposelessly till they hit shore, we may not do justice to the day that follows.

          

Now there are several reasons why the two cities reacted to the agitation in such different ways–the timing was very different, Team Anna had lost the halo they once sported, the Lokpal Bill was already in Parliament -to name a few perfectly valid reasons, but there does seem to be an underlying variable work, and that has to do with the nature of the two cities.

In Mumbai, life is a zero sum game, everything has a cost, and every day brings with it a new set of trade-offs, choices that inevitably involve consequences. Its linear structure encourages concentration of intent and depends on clarity of purpose. One can have one priority at one time and the overriding priority in Mumbai is to maximize the opportunity value of time.

The Lokpal agitation was a worthy cause but one where the returns on personal time invested did not seem adequate. It was too transparently an exercise in tokenism for its role was to keep up the pressure on Parliament by dangling the sword of public outrage on its head.

The crowds were not expected to act but merely to be there as passive signs of a simmering revolt. If Mumbai could outsource the protest, it might have been happy to pay for it, but for it to invest its own time made little sense to the city.

If time crouches in Mumbai with limbs tensed and brow furrowed, it sprawls in Delhi, stretching itself here, scratching itself there. Life is not slow in Delhi, but it is less intently driven by purpose.

In Delhi, things unfold, they don’t just happen. Every event has its own ceremony, and work obeys the rules of bureaucratic convention, by which nothing can officially happen before its time. Rules can be broken, and indeed must be, but even here some rules must be followed. This is a city where everything is a sign of the same thing, and that thing is power and significance. It is the city where power is craved for and the powerful despised. Delhi understands corruption, for it is what Delhi is founded on–the quest to find extra-legal answers for problems that it creates for itself through the law.

The anti-corruption movement finds its emotional headquarters in the city because it is the place where the gap between action and purpose is the greatest, and corruption breeds in the space between the two.

When people in Delhi land up at an anti-corruption rally, it is not because they are habitually used to protesting; Delhi might be the capital city of protests but rarely do the residents of the city get involved. They show up perhaps because in reacting to corruption, Delhi is looking at the mirror, and the anger it feels is mixed with self-loathing. For Mumbai, corruption is an irritating problem; for Delhi, a feared character flaw.

Life moves on in Mumbai for it has to. It is a city founded on perpetual motion and protests tend to slow things down. Mumbai is too deeply connected to the mainland of opportunity to occupy itself for too long with unproductive protest. It is Delhi that is the island where the politics of power is an end by itself.

The Anna Hazare-led movement might have been ranged against the government, but it needed a city that understood the power of government as its base. For Delhi, the anti-corruption movement is a form of exorcism, for Mumbai it is only treatment for a disease.

          

As far as the middle class is concerned, for most, there is nothing that inflames passions more than the idea of reservation, and the anxiety that the step induces about the loss of opportunities, both in terms of higher education and jobs. Reservation is seen as a device that panders to vote banks, without due regard to the idea of merit, and creates an engineered imbalance against the more deserving. Middle class objections to the idea of reservations are thus an established narrative, a story that has been heard often enough. The anger that they feel is understandable, but in the overall scheme of things, this does not lead to any change in the position of politicians on this subject. The gains, both electoral and ideological, are greater than the losses, which is why continuing with reservations has become part of the accepted political wisdom of the day.

Regardless of the near consensus around it, the current move however needs to be scrutinised in a deeper way. Reserving seats on the Lokpal is not just an extension of the familiar idea of reservations; it takes the idea to a new level, and poses some fundamental questions about the ideas of representativeness and governance. For what it proposes is the idea that fair governance for any group of people can only be provided by someone of the same group or affiliation. It is in some ways arguing that even the highest institutions of state cannot be counted upon to act independently of identity considerations and need to ensure this ability by way of reserving representativeness. If we were to accept this argument what stops us from arguing the need for the same in the Supreme Court or for that matter in the Cabinet?

The moment we begin to argue that those involved in making decisions for the rest of us, are no more than the product of their backgrounds, and cannot be counted upon to rise above who they are in making the decisions they do, we attack the very foundation of the idea of any institution. When an individual holds any kind of office, the belief is that the role played by the person allows him or her to look beyond the identity of those affected by the decisions taken. Now, we know that in real life, this is not always true and lack of representativeness in the bureaucracy and the government can skew the machinery in favour of dominant and historically powerful groups. It is important for instance for the police to include members across the social spectrum for it to deliver justice in a fair way. And if this inclusiveness does not happen on its own, then reserving jobs for unrepresented sections of society seems like a reasonable solution to the problem. A similar argument can be used to defend the reservation of seats in the Parliament for backward classes; given their numbers and the discrimination they face, there is little chance of their getting elected in the normal course of things, and hence a need to ensure a certain minimum representation seems fair.

The difference between reserving jobs in the government or seats in the Parliament with reserving places on the Lokpal is that in the former instance, the attempt is to ensure that the aspirations of all are represented adequately, that the system has ensured that all voices have been heard so that it can take a genuinely informed decision. The final outcome however, is based on secular considerations, on the merits of the situation. At some point, only merit counts; what matters is the argument, not the identity of the person making the argument. At least some of us need to be charged with the responsibility of looking after all of us; for otherwise we could move to a situation where only a Dalit judge could preside over a case involving a Dalit, and so on. We would in the name of promoting inclusiveness, be retreating into the past, freezing existing social configurations in their current form and reducing all of us into who we are. We would be implicitly arguing that individuals can only speak on behalf of others like themselves, and not of larger ideas and ideals.

Reservations have a delicate task to perform- they need to make up for the inequalities of the past by recognising their source and reversing the imbalance while at the same time working to free us from the labels that imprison us. This balance extends to the system of governance where issues pertaining to identity need both to be acknowledged and risen above. A system which considers itself incapable of rising above narrow identity concerns at any level, will end up perpetuating the very evil it ostensibly fights against. By reserving seats on the Lokpal, a line just might have been crossed. We may just have accepted that our future cannot rise above our past.