Urvashi Butalia: Ashis da, your comments now on the ideas that have been discussed here: equality, the changeability, the need for change, the dreams of the founding fathers and mothers... and on utopia generally...
Ashis Nandy: ...In the context of our discussion, if I may point, the only country which I know is close to zero corruption is Singapore, and that's not part of my concept of utopia; it can be very much a part of my concept of dystopia. I do wish that there remains some degree of corruption in India because I would also suggest that it humanises our society. Indian society... has only four sectors where your true talents are recognised... In other words, no considerations of caste, religion, sect enter your considerations. And these four sectors are: spectator sport, which is a very small sector because sports heroes are not that many. Two, entertainment industry, which is a very slippery category because contrary to our belief, at least four-fifths of all Bombay films for example fail in the box office, so it's a very risky business... Third is crime; our criminal gangs are perfectly egalitarian. Do not forget that Dawood Ibrahim's gang had a lot of Hindus in it... Totally secular. And finally politics. You fight it out in politics and make it. All this talk of dynasty is an illusion created by the middle classes. Mrs Gandhi did not become prime minister when Nehru was living. There was a large and very noticeable gap between her ascent to the throne and Nehru's demise. She fought her way up. She was seen as a very meek, very unskilful, politically naïve woman. And therefore the syndicate chose her. She knew that in Indian politics you should not project yourself as either too intelligent or too shrewd or too clever or even too political, and that helped her. She clawed her way to power and so have each one of the names which have come up, whether it is Mulayam Singh Yadav or Lalu Prasad. In addition, in the case of Lalu Prasad and Mulayam Singh, and people like them, exactly because of the reasons you give, there is a sense of desperation, utter desperation and insecurity. Even if you make through corruption millions of rupees, you suspect that you will not be able to get away using the machinery of law or cleverly manipulating your investments in the right way with the right connections because you have none... To the best of my knowledge the only unrecognised billionaire in India today, in dollar terms, is Madhu Koda. He's a tribal and I can assure you that Mr Koda must have been a very insecure, unhappy, tense person. And in this kind of situation, the only people you can trust are your own relatives... And if you fit your experiences within this model, you will recognise why this insecurity is there, because politics looks a very impersonal, contractual work to a large part of Indians. They are new to politics. And your family members do not have the capacity to absorb the additional money in a more clever, intelligent way. If I do a good turn to Richard Sorabji, he can return the favour by accommodating my nephew at Oxford; if it were in the United States, it would be a substantial fellowship. Ms Mayawati doesn't have that privilege. She probably has only relatives whose ambition was to be a nurse or run a petrol pump. If she has to oblige somebody or have somebody in the family absorb the money, she will probably have to take the bribe of having 100 petrol pumps, and that is very conspicuous, very corrupt indeed. Our corruption doesn't look that corrupt, their corruption does.
Tarun Tejpal: Urvashi, can I add something to what Ashis da just said? You know on this corruption issue, I just want to put this corruption issue in a different kind of light along the lines of what Ashis da just said. I'm saying perhaps corruption in a country like India is also a great class equaliser... I'm saying suppose, in an extremely class-ridden society like India, where somebody who works in my house, my driver or my cook, what chance do his children have in the way India is constructed today versus my children where for the last 50 years, in many senses, the class that has ruled India, the elite, the privileged, my class of people, have built a set of rules that makes things easy for them and makes things lucrative for them?... In a situation like this if you come from the wrong side of the tracks of which roughly a billion people in this country would, what chance do you have of breaking through to get your hands on the spoils of life and on the spoils of a country? I'd say almost nothing. What do people like that do? People like that subvert the rules; these are not God's rules, these are man-made rules... I'll give you one the greatest examples of this which will easily strike a chord with most of you. There's a man called Dhirubhai Ambani. If he had not known how to subvert the rules — all the rules that he subverted today are now law, at that time they were not, at the time he was subverting them they were not — he would have still been filling petrol in a pump in Doha.
Ashis Nandy: Just a response to this part, very briefly, he's not saying the most important part of the story, which will shock you, and it will be a very undignified and — how should I put it — almost vulgar statement on my part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the scheduled castes and now increasingly scheduled tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian republic will survive. And I give an example, one of the states with the least amount of corruption is the state of West Bengal when the CPM was there. And I want to propose to you, draw your attention to the fact that in the last 100 years, nobody from the OBCs, the backward classes and the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes have come anywhere near power in West Bengal. It is an absolutely clean state.
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