The smell and taste of power made them arrogant to ground realities
During the counting of votes for both the 1998 and 1999 general election, I was in the studios of Doordarshan for two full days helping the presenters with the political and statistical analysis of the results. Let me assure you there is no better place than a TV studio to scrutinise both the exhilaration and the despondency of the main political players.
It was during one of those days that I first encountered the CPI general secretary A B Bardhan face to face. He came across as a lucid, if somewhat humourless, communist of the old school. He didn't have the charming Stephanian facetiousness of the CPI(M)'s Sitaram Yechuri, the sombre gravitas of Prakash Karat or the self-effacing charm of his colleague D Raja, but Bardhan always weighed his words with care. You could have been sure that had he not chosen to remain the top honcho of a relic called the CPI, he would have made it to the top echelons of a "bourgeois" party.
Last week, surfing the TV channels, I came across a very different Bardhan. The lucidity was there but the humility had evaporated. Jabbing his fingers at young TV reporters in a frightening sort of way, Bardhan literally barked his frightening certitudes against disinvestments and privatisation. He told the world that Arun Shourie could go and stew and that the economic policies of the NDA would be reversed.
What mattered was not so much what Bardhan said but how he said it. With 10 Lok Sabha seats under his belt, the CPI boss was behaving as if he had just emerged victorious crushing some Kronstadt uprising. Bardhan was an epitome of arrogance. He could just as well have exchanged places with Jyoti Basu, who remains, in my reckoning, the most arrogant and conceited politician in India.
Having watched election after election for more than three decades, I have seen both winners and losers. The winners have an extra spring in their step and the shoulders of the losers tell a very different story. That is a part of the game. The voters have come to expect this as part of the levelling process of democracy. They digest everything in their stride. But if there is one thing voters cannot stomach it is arrogance.
More than anything else, it is arrogance that leads to the undoing of candidates and political parties. In recent times, Ajit Jogi was undone by his wily arrogance by the voters of Chattisgarh last December and last week Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi was jolted by what people perceived was his arrogance.
I have little doubt that arrogance played a role in the NDA's debacle last week. Six years in power had changed the body language and demeanour of many of those who were complete non-entities before 1998. The smell and taste of power has a frightening effect on individuals. The army of security guards, personal staff and obsequies hangers-on make otherwise decent people think they are superior. They forget both the realities on the ground and the negative impression they have on ordinary people. They create the groundswell for retribution and even revenge.
It is truly amazing what power does to people. In the NDA government, I known politicians from the days the BJP had a measly two seats in the Lok Sabha. They were ordinary, decent individuals fired by a passionate idealism to change the workings of the government. They had seen how arrogance and greed had corrupted the Congress party, particularly during the Emergency and, subsequently, a decade of power from Indira Gandhi 's triumphant return in 1980 to Rajiv Gandhi's downfall in 1990. You would have imagined that the pitfalls of conceit had been ingrained into their psyche. Yet, the same mistakes are repeated, and with predictable results.
The fundamental mistake made by successful politicians, particularly ministers, is in imagining that their importance is recognition of their personal standing, not the office they hold. Consequently, they allow themselves to be dazzled by the bright lights, the expensive Diwali gifts and the page three photographs. I have been struck by the number of politicians who, after a defeat, complain of the total desertion by people they imagined were their new friends and whom they had so willingly obliged.
The political set-up nurtures a breed of people who are committed, short-term supporters of the RPI - the Ruling Party of India. These parasites come from all walks. There are socialites who get a kick from rubbing shoulders with politicos, there are the commission agents who are forever willing to oblige with household chores and personal favours and there are the courtiers who just hang around.
The courtiers are the worst. Old friends often maintain a distance from politicians thinking they are too busy. This is a grave mistake. Politicians, in normal times, have ample leisure. They need people around them who can hear their boastful words, feed them titbits of social and political gossip and, above all, keep them amused. The courtiers combine company with flattery. And there are few human beings who can rise above flattery.
The net result is isolation from the real world. During the onion election of 1998 that left the BJP decimated in three states, I was struck by the number of senior politicians who could not appreciate the havoc caused by the shortage and price rise of onions. They were tempted to dismiss reports as either exaggerated or a function of media hostility.
Indeed, so much time and energy is expended on media management that politicians end up as victims of their own manufactured hype. True, nobody and just about nobody, expected the NDA to be so conclusively defeated in this election. There was an undercurrent that neither the media nor the pollsters could accurately judge. Yet, even when adverse reports kept coming in, the tendency was to either discount them or look for imaginary improvements. This was particularly true of the Tamil Nadu picture where the NDA leaders seriously believed that somehow or the other Jayalalithaa would pull it off. L K Advani, for example, had his penultimate meeting of the campaign in the Chidambaram constituency of Tamil Nadu. He had been told that it had become a winnable seat. The BJP candidate ended up in third place.
It is this complacency born out of misinformation life that functionaries of the new government must be mindful of Bardhan's arrogant outbursts triggered the collapse of the Sensex. On those two fateful days, exasperated investors voted with their pockets. Some years down the line, they will vote with their finger in the polling booths.
What goes up, Newton told us centuries
ago, invariably come down.