The ruling class wars: What the VK Singh debacle signifies

Shrillness signifies the loss of credibility. And today, it permeates all our institutions. The decibel level is high in TV studios, at political rallies, on Twitter and comment boards. Everyone screams not so much to be heard, but to compensate for the impossibility of determining veracity. There are no arbiters with the required credibility to help us as a nation to determine what is true and what is not. Hence, the most improbable slurs and conspiracy theories — if delivered by a sufficiently loud megaphone — are accorded credence even as facts or figures are up for constant ideological dispute and manipulation. If we can no longer even agree on baseline statistics as growth rates or poverty numbers, a meaningful debate on economic policy becomes impossible. And when anything can be claimed, political arguments devolve inevitably into the trading of the wildest of accusations. Stings and exposes and whistle-blowing that once offered the hope of reform now end in the inevitable muck of politics, serving only to cement our cynicism. [caption id=“attachment_1132747” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The most improbable slurs and conspiracy theories — if delivered by a sufficiently loud megaphone — are accorded credence even as facts or figures are up for constant ideological dispute and manipulation. IBNLive[/caption] This observation lies at the heart of Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s column (though it requires, as is typical with Mehta, filling in rather large blanks), wherein he writes: The ponderous debates over the big issues cannot throw a cloak over the really ugly battle: India’s elites are now like a crazed pack of wolves, completely out of control to the point that they are devouring each other in an unprecedented frenzy, taking down every institution with them. The real crisis is not order versus disorder, communalism versus secularism, growth versus stagnation. The real crisis is this: what happens to a society when everyone tears into each other without restraint? It is general versus general, chief justice versus chief justice, economist versus economist, media against media, bureaucrat against bureaucrat and all professions against each other. The real battle is among an old elite now in the last throes of self-destruction, where even minimal self-awareness is too much to expect. Much of this fight is a frenzy of rhetorical excess. But alas, most of it will have deadly consequences on the ground. The recent VK Singh debacle, as he argues, has in one fell swoop eroded the credibility of the democratic process in Jammu & Kashmir, the army, and of the ruling government (which has little credibility to begin with).  To Mehta, this spectacle reads like an orgy of cannibalism: “It will not take a political scientist but a novelist of extraordinary psychological subtlety to explain how a ruling class came to internalise a shrill, self-destructive culture, where short-term interest triumphs over all norms, where personal goals override all processes, where a sense of entitlement overcomes judgement, where petty rivalries put all national interest at risk, and prejudgements and inchoate ambitions disable all reason and reasonableness.” To stem this slide into self-destruction, Mehta argues, the ruling class yearns for a “stout stick,” a saviour “from the inside” who will discipline them into self-preservation. But it is not just the political class that displays this “frenzy of rhetorical excess”. Loose and venomous talk is not exceptional,  but now typical in the public arena. We are in the grip of an epidemic of verbal diarrhea that afflicts even the “stout stick” who cannot resist a “sau-crore girlfriend” crack. And it is not just those in power, but also the layperson whose language and ideas have coarsened. In the absence of public dialogue, we all have fallen back on extra-loud rhetoric. The sheer volume of overheated trash-talking in the name of party loyalty highlights the glaring absence of genuine politics, the kind that requires engagement with ideas not mindless boosterism. As Mehta himself observed in a previous column , “It is not clear what is worse: the fact that politicians squabble over so many irrelevant issues or that we spend so much time squabbling over their squabbling. This may seem like a trivial issue, but nothing impedes the formation of collective social self-knowledge more than misdirected energy. We have never recognised the point that governance is a scarce resource and we need to allocate it wisely. The same is true of discourse.” The single-minded pursuit of lopsided liberalisation failed to cleanse the old rot of crony socialism, creating instead a hybrid Frankenstein that is now running amok. If the ruling class are experiencing a crisis of credibility, the ruled are in the midst of a crisis of clarity. We are unable to speak or think about our nation, our politics or our problems in constructive, creative and imaginative ways. For all the talk of the idea of India, we have no idea as to who we are, how we got here, and where we are headed. So we console ourselves with loud, incessant bickering. Shrillness is also compensation for uncertainty.