“At the same time, you need a lot of skill to play that game and honestly I don’t have that skill. If someone does you a favour — a senior bureaucrat gives you a desirable posting for instance — how will you repay it? My boss called me and said, ‘I’m taking my family on a trip to a resort in your district. I need a place to stay, transport, etc.’ I didn’t even realise what he was asking. I just said, ‘Thank you for telling me.’ But he expected me to organise free tickets and hotels for him. Later on, he punished me by transferring me five times in rapid succession and making my life hell. But the thing is that even if I had realised what he wanted, I wouldn’t have known how to do it. He expected me to have a whole network of relationships with small businesspeople in the state — travel agents, hotel people — from whom I could ask favours. But it’s a very complicated thing to maintain. Once you accept favours from those people, you’re vulnerable to anything they ask.”
“There was a businessman who was constantly offering to send me on luxurious trips,” says Amit. “He would call me and say, ‘Let me sponsor a trip to Goa for your family. Or would you prefer to go to Italy?’ If I had accepted, he would have held it over my head for ever. He wanted me to push through a scheme for a new railway to Assam.”
“This is a constant problem for bureaucrats. The ideal bureaucrat is able to avoid getting to close to any particular businessman, because if he does, it means he is unable to offer favours to others and he appears to be exclusive.”
I ask them why they think things work like this. Amit says, “Politicians have become more invulnerable in these years of fragile coalition governments. The government needs its coalition partners so much, it will protect them from anything. They may be pathetic ministers but they are too important to the ruling coalition to be allowed to fail.”
Meenu continues, “I blame it on the business class, which is always willing to pay for advancement. Everybody wants to be in the fast lane. If you go to the parties that the income tax people hold, it is as if the entire business class of Delhi is out to please them. They take these guys out and give them whatever they want.”
“Party culture is very important,” says Amit. “Networking is crucial to business and politics in Delhi, and these parties give you a heady feeling. Golf: who you play golf with is very important. Do you play with this secretary from this ministry or just someone lowly? That establishes your position. These days a bureaucrat can’t just sit around, do his work and pull rank like in the old days. You have to go to the parties and network. Then you get to do favours for powerful people, which is where it all leads. It’s such a buzz that many people don’t even do it for money. They just want to be at the centre of the network.”
At times one can feel, it is true, that this city’s motto is: I network, therefore I am. People carry their networks with them everywhere, cite them, name-drop them, as if without them they would cease to exist. Facebook has slotted in perfectly into the life of the city, being only a technological representation of what already existed. Sometimes when you go to Delhi society parties you feel you are in a kind of Facebook reality game. People come up to you that you hardly know, they seem strangely, even excessively happy to see you again and greet you sentimentally. You didn’t even realise you were friends, but after such a display you feel the need to show some curiosity. “How have you been?” you ask. But by then they have moved on, and they look at you in surprise, as if to say, “You? You’re still here?” They are already scanning for the next encounter, and you realise that what has just happened is not something that belongs to the real world of bodies mingling and conversing in a space, but something that belongs to online. You have been ‘poked’.
“Delhi is being taken over,” says Meenu, “by contractors who know how to manipulate these systems. Bureaucrats are willing to sell themselves, partly because they come, increasingly, from deprived backgrounds. They have genuine problems, they feel they’ve suffered in the past, and they think it’s their right to get something back from everyone else. If you talk to them, they’re never doing it for themselves; they want to improve the lot of their whole community. And such people place a lot of significance on markers of status — chauffeurs, networks, contacts, invitations.”
“Does no one fear getting caught?” I ask.
“Of course. They’re very concerned about getting caught. It’s very embarrassing to be caught. But what I’ve noticed recently is that this has stopped being a deterrent. Getting caught is increasingly unrelated to anything you have actually done. There’s a kind of fatalism about it. Recently a senior bureaucrat came to give a training session and he asked attendees what might lead to them getting caught. ‘Accepting bribes,’ suggested the students. ‘No.’ ‘Breaking procedure.’ ‘No.’ ‘Accepting favours.’ ‘No,’ said the instructor. ‘You will get caught when your destiny turns bad.’ You hear that more and more often. Somebody else said recently, ‘Being caught doing something wrong is like being hit by a car. It could have happened to anyone, but it happened to you. It’s entirely random. There’s no way you can predict it.’
“There is no longer any constraint except bad fate. Which you can’t do anything about anyway. So you might as well carry on.”
• • •
Indira Gandhi’s cult of the self inevitably provoked resentment and consternation, and in 1975 she went to the Allahabad High Court to answer allegations of malpractice in the 1971 elections. The court decided against her on two counts, which thus rendered the election result void. An appeal was registered with the Supreme Court. Before any verdict could be reached, however, Mrs Gandhi declared a national state of emergency. Explaining this extreme measure on national radio, she said, “This is nothing to panic about. I am sure you are all conscious of the deep and widespread conspiracy, which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India.”
A dictator by personality, Indira Gandhi flourished under the autocratic conditions of the Emergency. She jailed her opponents, including two future prime ministers and one future deputy prime minister — Morarji Desai, Atul Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishanchand Advani respectively — and the remarkable Jayaprakash Narayan, who had long been campaigning for a wholesale renewal of Indian political and social life through what he called a non-violent total revolution. Narayan’s imprisonment provoked especial outrage, including in the international press, since he was a powerfully principled leader who had at one point been very close to the Nehru family — it was as if Mrs Gandhi were imprisoning an uncle — but the prime minister’s rampage had hardly begun. She had always disliked the dispersal of powers inherent to India’s federal structure: when state government terms ended in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat she cancelled elections and administered the states directly from Delhi. Freedom of the press was cancelled, and sweeping changes were made to the constitution to remove curbs on prime ministerial power. Amnesty International estimated that 140,000 people were imprisoned without trial and, in many cases, tortured, during the twenty months of the Emergency. The Emergency traumatised universities, many of which were vocal in their opposition; it also gave great moral standing to the Sikh parties and radical Hindu groups, many of which maintained principled criticism in the face of Indira Gandhi’s onslaught.
For some, the Emergency did not seem so bad. There was a new-found, nervous order to social life, which stood in marked contrast to the political disruptions of the previous years. Business enjoyed the comparative regularity of labour and supplies, and the unusual efficiency of the bureaucracy in issuing licenses. It seemed to many that the experiment of Indian democracy was over, and some — such as that punning courtier who supplied the refrain, “Indira is India, and India is Indira” — began to sing the praises of the new dictatorship.