In Delhi’s political circles they are mourning the demise of the Left. And it is not just the caricatured ones from ‘civil society’, JNU and NGOs that experience this sadness. It is perhaps equally true of the Congress and its government in the UPA. For the first five years of its perch in the cockpit of governance, the party and the alliance faced internal turbulence on every issue directed at it from its own friend cum critic, the Left parties. From market liberalization (insurance and retail), to the scope and breadth of NREGA (something many journalists were quick to cite as a reason for the 2009 Congress victory) to ultimately the decisive (and fatal) clash over the nuclear deal three summers ago. Neither the Left, nor the UPA has really recovered from that collision, despite a return to power that spoke as much for the vanquished as it did for the victor.

The Congress since then has been on an auto-pilot. The Prime Minister, having braved a confrontation that many thought him incapable of causing and having achieved what he believed to be a significant domestic and foreign policy victory, seems to have lost energy and drive. It appears as if the 2009 polls for him were the end of a race and not a pit stop that many observers assumed it to be. These days he resembles an unwilling sportsman, forced out of retirement (or in his case being forced against retirement) to lead a team where disinterest is the prevailing feeling. The Congress seems to have mistaken the period between 2009 to 2014 as one that simply requires the completion of the formality of staying in office. The real pie is the next election when Rahul Gandhi is expected to take over the reigns and a new era of posturing can begin. UPA II then is the foster child the parent is not too keen to engage with. It is a necessity to be borne but the imagination is hidden for better times expected to come ahead. That perhaps explains the indifference and apathy running through this government since its inception. The Prime Minister has been low key, but unlike his first term when this was an asset, in his second term where allegations of corruption have abounded and ministers have been speaking about everything except their work, this silence has conveyed helplessness to favorable and weakness to the less charitable of his supporters.

The problem with playing a waiting game is that two critical elements, time and circumstance, always remain out of control and can turn and twist causing discomforting pain to even the most numb of bodies. In a sense, the UPA’s problems are seeded in its first term when a blind eye was turned to dirty secrets that many thought would either never come out or were underestimated with respect to their potential impact. But both the Telecom scam and the shenanigans of the Commonwealth Games have put the ruling coalition on the mat from which it is still wriggling to escape. It has not helped that multiple public agitations, high profile in nature and media coverage, have never really allowed the government to shift the focus away from the misdeeds in the corridors of power.

To use corporate jargon, the ball has been dropped. And several times over. As evidence slowly crawled of irregularities in Telecom and CWG deals, standard bureaucratic responses were dished out. There was little attempt, in the face of political compulsions, to decisively act and grab the initiative from the opposition, which despite its own disarray has managed to find a voice that it lacked in the UPA’s first term. The result has been that both the government and the party have been made to defend on the backfoot, right from the disastrous announcement of Telengana in the winter of 2009.

Democracy demands governments to possess a thick skin, but also combine it with a large heart and a sense of magnanimity. While the right to free speech requires us individually to listen to a lot of things we would privately consider as trash, governments must not only put up but also accommodate with groups, persons and views that may seem unrealistic at best and churlish at worst. Given that outcomes in our system only appear after years of grind in the bureaucratic machine, intent becomes more important than immediate action. And this government has done every action to let the voter question its intent. When the well heeled and well off middle class agitates for a stronger anti-corruption law, they must be co-opted and not discredited. When a gimmicky godman ‘fasts’ a few hours of the day demanding the return of black money, death for the corrupt and courses in Hindi, there are certainly more deft ways of taking away his sting than by forcibly evicting him and his supporters from the middle of the national capital. Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev will not stand up in polls but the UPA has now given itself the tag of being a government against peaceful protests, howsoever whimsical and misdirected.

The arrogance of power can often lead one to believe that the reaction is temporary and will not affect electoral outcomes. But in a democracy as chaotic as ours, it is foolhardy to rest on such cushy assumptions. Shifting caste identities and a perceived stamp of corruption from Bofors decimated Rajiv Gandhi’s super majority in 1989. For the Congress to think that anti-corruption anger is a middle class drawing room phenomenon and that a disunited NDA along with a beaten Left present no challenge three years from now is to adopt hubris at par with the NDA’s India Shining posturing of 2004. The electorate threw a surprise out of nowhere then and it is perfectly capable of doing it a second time. The initiative has been lost, the momentum was never there and now along with scandal comes the tag of being insensitive and brash. The government stays in office, its electoral fortunes may point north in the coming days but is moral compass is pointing a firm south.

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2010 stands the risk of entering Indian history as the year of graft. It was a year where incidences, coverage and adjectives of corruption reached hitherto unseen limits. Instances of illegal money making were sector and space neutral. They ranged from sporting events, a cricket league, telecom licenses to the usual bad boys of real estate and mining. Some of the stories uncovered had a ‘I told you so’ ring to them, as with the 2G spectrum and license saga. Some like the Adarsh society, came out of nowhere and created a tsunami that swept all before quietly retreating into the calmer waters of middle page news. Like the scandals, their perpetrators or suspects too respected the Indian heritage of diversity. Politicians led the way, followed closely by organizers, mining barons, industrialists, high flying highly visible sport administrators and in a bit of surprise for the public at large, generals and journalists.

What stood out in 2010 was the eagerness of the corruption scandals to devour their victims, many of whom would not have been mistaken to believe that the storm was one they could ride out. Many are still battling the choppy waters, refusing to abandon ship, not realizing perhaps that the hull and the mast have suffered irreparable damage. In terms of resignations and exits, the year was certainly one of the busiest. Notable among the martyrs was a greasy Union Minister whose stubborn resistance against facts for over two years seemed inspired by a Sunil Gavaskar innings, a loquacious Minister of State who required only 140 characters to be felled, a Chief Minister who would have much wished that he could escape with the American president he was seeing off minutes before being given the pink slip, a cricket czar whose one error gave his numerous enemies the tiny sliver of opportunity they had waited all along and two senior journalists who could not keep their egos within the confines of the press club.

Towards the end of the year, the leaked Radia tapes provided a new form of online voyeurism, to which this author himself claims affliction. They provided much amusement for the listeners and much embarrassment to the conversing parties. At a higher level they brought home a painful reality we have been afraid to admit for long – the country is being run by an elite of oligarchs and politicians for whom universal suffrage is only a constitutional formality. It was not the influencing of appointments and rewards that should be a cause of worry as much the blatant system of monetary patronage of all classes of our political life. The revelations tarred all. The politician’s debauchery was only vindicated, the industrialist’s mildly affirmed and the journalist’s discovered. A smaller scale of the loot would have made the public more cynical, the current scale can only cause disillusion. The executive ran from one hiding corner to another and the legislature decided to spend time shouting for political points than discuss the corrosion. It would only be the judiciary, battling its own demons of graft more than ever before this year, that would give a call and question both the actions and inactions of the executive offices.

The Union enters the second decade of the 21st century struggling to live up to the ideals of its founding fathers and the spiritual guidance they left in the Constitution. It gasps to find substance over form. It aspires to seek its place in the world but undermines its own values at every stage. It experienced political liberation six decades ago and an economic liberation two decades ago. It will never be able to live up to its promise for all but to meet the aspirations of most, and not just a privileged few, it needs to experience a new moral discovery and liberation.

Much as it is tempting to focus on the big bang of graft that swamped all the other noise around us, the year also brought some redeeming affirmations. A high court stretched the logic of justice, summoned courage and tackled an issue that politicians, religious leaders and the society at large had refused to entangle. In their own words, the justices set foot upon ‘a piece of land where angels feared to tread’ against the advice of ‘sane elements’ who had ‘advised them not to attempt that’. They pleased none of the three litigants completely but caused much satisfaction to the man on the street. It was evidence that our noisy and chaotic democracy could find some way, even if it took decades, of tackling inflammable, contentious and religiously dividing issues. A peaceful resolution of the property dispute at Ayodha is as much a litmus for India’s social integration as Kashmir is for its political. In the valley meanwhile, the Indian state dithered, bore the brunt of stones and calls of ‘azadi’, heard calls of sedition issued from an air conditioned Delhi auditorium from a wasted socialite but in the end summoned the one quality that is the hallmark of statesmanship and is much needed for internal stability – a generosity of heart. The pain lingers but Vajpayee’s framework of ‘insaniyat’ survives. However much Pakistan, Arundhati Roy and the Hurriyat Conference think to the contrary, that framework does not stand in contradiction with the Constitution.

In Delhi, a nation held its breath and had almost collapsed out of anxiety as a mismanaged sporting event threatened to erode all the gains of the new economy. The post liberalization urban generation, used to playing with global standards of quality, watched in horror as the task of constructing stadiums and organizing athletic events turned into a business school case study of mismanagement. The world saw our lack of project management skills and for once the excuse of the slow moving democracy could not act as a cover for our exposed skins. The much heralded Indian jugaad, codified as our Sports Minister repeatedly stated, in the Punjabi wedding drama, came into play. The games and the participants, while they were on, won the city’s appreciation. The cost went to the tax payer and more damagingly to India’s image.

While Delhi went comatose in the last two months of the year, engulfed in a verbal fog of 2G, spectrum and tapes, one of the last caste outposts of the country fell and a politician swept to power on basis of a positive political perception. It will not eradicate caste from our political or social lives but Nitish Kumar’s victory will remind others that tangible development efforts have a longer shelf life than voting coalitions. Lalu Yadav discovered that this year. Mayawati and the Left seem set to discover it in the coming two. Nitish’s victory may also do the country one more benefit, if the BJP so chooses to encash it. It opens up a roadmap to victory for the wilting lotus, if only it decides to open its eyes. Gujarat and Bihar are indicative of the distance between India’s west and east and also of the political distance between the where our largest opposition party is and where it ought to be.

In this sad and at times depressing year, one can be cynical and say the winner of the year was the Chief Minister of Karnataka – the only man who successfully managed to brave the corruption windstorm and keep his chair, if not his image and integrity. But a happier event towards the end of the year provides an escape from that gloomy conclusion to this post. The greatest Indian sportsman reached a landmark many of his contemporaries and those to come in the future will view as the Mount Everest of batting accomplishment. Sachin Tendulkar completed fifty test centuries, scored a one-day double hundred and at age thirty seven pulled a fair distance away from his current crop of challengers into a summit of his own. Like always, he stood out in contrast to the negativity around us. He bore the burden of showing the discipline, fortitude and dedication that many in our public circles chose to abjure. He bloomed when many expected him to gracefully wilt. He summoned reserves of energy when the competition began to tire. He explored no short cuts and summoned no privileges. He lived up to the one lesson every dedicated teacher and parent instills into their ward – there is no substitute for hard work and honesty. It is a lesson worth recalling this new year.

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