The Department of Things in General

I’m no computer whizz, but I don’t think Google quite understands the nature of Delhi traffic. Its blue-yellow-red colour-coding of traffic levels is the latest in a long line of Western attempts to make India legible. Once again, we defy the attempt. Red might mean a slow but steady rush-hour crawl homeward, or it might require you to skilfully steer your car through waves of pedestrians milling about in a mandi, or it might just mean it’s time to settle in, turn the heater up and the radio on, and hum along to Bollywood classics from before I was born on 92.7 FM. That’s what it felt like for most of last week as our unseasonable cold wave seemed to have frozen the traffic in place.

Such thoughts bounced around my mind as I idled at a red light on August Kranti Marg on my way to my first visit to the Centre for Civil Society. When I finally got out of my car, I was a bit surprised. I walked up and down the narrow residential lane in the Hauz Khas housing society for some sign of the Centre for Civil Society, which I had always assumed to be something of a grand institution. I was saved by two other latecomers, onto whom I latched myself, finding the entrance tucked away at the end of a nondescript driveway with a humble metal plaque announcing it as the home of the CCS. It’s not quite the Hotel du Parc overlooking Mont Pelerin, but you go to war with the think tanks you have, not the think tanks you want.

Appearances, as is so often the case, deceive. Inside, the crowning jewel of the centre has to be its magnificent library. It might not be the towering stacks of the Wren, but it contains treasures otherwise almost impossible to come across in India, including the Centre’s own slim volume, ‘Friedman on India,’ which collates the few but deeply insightful pieces Milton Friedman wrote about India. We were told that once, in his twilight and the Centre’s nascence, he visited these very offices. I was immediately reminded of those Kashmiris who insist Jesus Christ spent his final days in Srinagar. Sensing this incredulity, we were assured that there was photographic evidence and we duly repented for our lack of faith. It would be an understatement to say that the library tour left me wanting more.

The evening’s event was a book discussion with Professor Aditya Balasubramanian, the author of a recent history of the Swatantra Party, the star-studded but ill-fated political experiment which sought to challenge the license-permit raj being introduced by socialist India. It’s a cracking read and which I can wholeheartedly recommend to readers interested in a rigorous but racy read on modern Indian history. There’s an amusing anecdote in there about how the CIA refused to use Minoo Masani as an asset because he was so publicly and vehemently anti-leftist that he would be of no tactical use in a socialist India.

There was, as there always is at such events at such places, a dash of antiquarianism about the whole thing – nostalgia for a ‘bygone age of respectful disagreement’ and so on. It’s not that I don’t sympathise with that nostalgia, but I can’t share it. That era is too alien to me. The past is a foreign country, and I wasn’t born there.

I attended the event with a friend who had emerged from monastic isolation for the evening. He’s preparing for ‘the exam,’ which in our part of the country is a proper noun with only one meaning (for my international readers: the Civil Service Exam, through which the higher rungs of Indian administration are staffed). We hung around afterwards for a chat with some of the other attendees, one of whom made no bones about being rather unimpressed with my friend’s chosen field of toil. We were audience to an ornate philippic about the evils of the Indian bureaucracy, with which we could not really disagree, and a stern reproach to anyone ever considering joining it, to which we nodded along dutifully. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to bask in his moral clarity.

To me, this attitude bares the Achilles’ heel of libertarians, which they share (if one can share a heel) with India’s upper middle class more generally: they disdain political power too much to ever truly exercise it. During the discussion, Prof. Balasubramanian made a point relevant to this tendency: libertarians have rarely captured the ‘heart’ of an electorate. In recent decades, free market or free-r market ideas have only enjoyed the run of things in one of three circumstances: a crisis forces the hands of socialist governments, as in India in 1991; a deeper conservative or nationalist movement accepts market liberals into the fold, as did Reagan’s ‘moral majority’; or an authoritarian government commits to reform at all costs, as Deng did in China.

It is only in the first of these ‘ideal type’ situations that the house intellectuals of the liberal right find themselves at peace. The worst has come to pass. The gold is being mortgaged. Their lessons in economic common sense have begun to be heeded by spendthrift politicians and grudgingly accepted by the cloying masses. Power has been delivered into their lap and they may savour it for a while. But suddenly, the ground shifts beneath their feet and they don’t notice. Welfarism and import substitution are back, and the engine of growth is turned on only to the extent needed to fund the ever-expanding welfare state. The market liberals have shuffled on to academic posts abroad or been stuffed into the darker corners of academia at home – and I’m not sure they have a plan to get back in the game.

All I can say for sure, and with much gratitude, is that they still know how to host a top-notch discussion with samosas and jalebi to match. I look forward to many more such.