On Tuesday, just around the time Anna went on fast again at the MMRDA ground in Mumbai, and the Lok Sabha took to debating the stillborn watchdog bill that was eventually strangulated at yearend by the elders of the upper house of Parliament, my wife bribed the keeper at Delhi Zoo with a crisp hundred-rupee note to walk her and my daughter through the feeding enclosure of the lions. By the time I got that bit of “(heart)breaking news”, I didn’t know whom to turn to for counsel. Would Anna take to eating again if he heard of this latest in the long established line of business best (mal)practices that have come to beset our public life, or would the lions take to fasting in protest?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And yet, if you delve deeper into the subject, the zookeeper reminds us that, after all, one man’s corruption could well be another’s enterprise. And you can still go to bed without fear of retribution. You can see that as much in small town India as in Delhi’s dark corridors of power during these long, cold nights of betrayal of citizens as became evident at midnight in Rajya Sabha this Thursday. The “spirit of free enterprise” is possibly the single biggest factor that has bailed out the Indian economy through three years of nerve-wracking global financial meltdown. And it shows.

Small wonder then, we are still building the biggest houses, wearing the finest clothes, gorging on the most sumptuous meals, driving the glitziest cars, and liberally donating to Anna’s fast(idious) campaign for clean public life, as if there was no tomorrow.

Inflation and slowdown be damned.

For, while the government may desist from hazarding a guess, India’s parallel economy, fuelled as much by cheap Chinese imports as by you and I enriching ourselves on the sly, may well have surpassed the economy’s officially certified health parameters last measured at three trillion dollars and growing on the strength of our purchasing power parity. Who knows?

Our collective memory as a people reminds us that corruption, as much as religion, has enjoyed institutionalised sanctity in India. In fact, each has legitimised the other, which is why our pantheon of gods demand oblations and sacrifices as much as our politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen do to help us navigate our ordinary everyday lives. And unlike the biblical traditions where man, born in sin — and Eve be damned for the original corruption of stealing the forbidden fruit — must necessarily await redemption at the hands of god, the Indic tradition allows man to prosper by washing his dirty linen in a muck-flushed river.

That’s how we sold our soul through history, re-enacting time and again through centuries of unsentimental political upheavals, since the invasion of Alexander, yet retaining our amoral fabric intact as a nation. A more recent history of the subcontinent by John Keay in his The Honourable Company: A History Of The English East India Company captivatingly recounts the lure of ill-gotten wealth in Moghul fiefdoms in the reign of Jehangir when the first English merchant ships anchored at Surat, and its subsequent institutionalisation at the hands of English factors, one of whom, a certain gentleman named Elihu Yale so enriched himself as governor of Madras that he went on to erect the hallowed portals Yale University in 17th century America, where we now send our children to learn at the feet of some of the world’s most distinguished minds in ethics, and morals, and business, and politics.

This “entrepreneurship” story is not unique to India’s millennia-old history. It’s part of our collective legacy of a global civilisation shaped by man ever since he climbed down from the trees in Africa. Which is why pimping remains the world’s oldest profession, followed by prostitution. And when you wake up to that, you wonder aloud, in our present-day idiom: Why this kolaveri, kolaveri, kolaveri di?

That’s a comprehensive question to which even Anna doesn’t have a credible answer or he would not have packed off his bags and called off his fast in the face of dwindling crowd turnout on the sunny shores of Mumbai. And that’s where the debate on corruption enters a dangerous territory, distant from the halls of Parliament that it seeks to engage. In seeking to dictate the terms of who should mind the nation’s scruples, Anna and his team may well be seeking to impose the rule of mob on a people sworn to democracy. What else explains the mob’s insistence that the parliamentary system be changed and the mob alone should change it to reflect the will of the people.

Ochlocracy is democracy spoiled by demagoguery that Anna has come to represent in today’s India, a rudderless civil society intoxicated on its demographic virility. For just as oligarchy is aristocracy spoiled by corruption, tyranny of the mob is necessarily the rule of passion over reason that cannot to endorsed by a forward looking society. There are dangerous precedents to that.

Anna’s obsession with ridding the polity of corruption borders dangerously on the belief that the underdog can rid the system of corrupt people and their so-called evil aspirations by bringing in Nietzsche’s ubermensch, or overman, a concept so finely corrupted by a gentleman in jackboots in his bid to exterminate the so-called evil-doers of German society almost 80 years ago. In portraying himself as a lone, outnumbered hero, battling for his innately superior identity in a world of branded scoundrels, Anna is treading a forbidden path. Nothing could be more corrupt than that.

Way back in the 18th century, a middle-aged London physician of Dutch descent, Bernard Mandeville, defined a social thesis that held contemporary society as an aggregation of self-interested individuals necessarily bound to one another neither by their shared civic commitments nor their moral rectitude, but paradoxically, by the tenuous bonds of envy, competition and exploitation. In his lifetime, Mandeville, was reviled by a chorus of clergymen, journalists and philosophers, yet became a national celebrity, and influenced much of subsequent enlightenment thinkers of Europe, including Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Diderot and Voltaire, among others. Mandeville’s work has come down to us as The Fable of the Bees, first articulated in 1723. A 2,747-word poem titled The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves Turn’d Honest, is too long to reproduce on this page.

Yet, it would do well be reminded about ourselves in the opening stanzas that define Mandeville’s exposition on civil society. It is as much relevant to us today, this New Year’s eve:

A Spacious Hive well stock'd with Bees,

That lived in Luxury and Ease;

And yet as fam'd for Laws and Arms,

As yielding large and early Swarms;

Was counted the great Nursery

Of Sciences and Industry.

No Bees had better Government,

More Fickleness, or less Content.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,

Nor ruled by wild Democracy;

But Kings, that could not wrong, because

Their Power was circumscrib'd by Laws.

These Insects lived like Men, and all

Our Actions they perform'd in small:

They did whatever's done in Town,

And what belongs to Sword, or Gown:

Tho' th'Artful Works, by nible Slight;

Of minute Limbs, 'scaped Human Sight

Yet we've no Engines; Labourers,

Ships, Castles, Arms, Artificers,

Craft, Science, Shop, or Instrument,

But they had an Equivalent:

Which, since their Language is unknown,

Must be call'd, as we do our own.

As grant, that among other Things

They wanted Dice, yet they had Kings;

And those had Guards; from whence we may

Justly conclude, they had some Play;

Unless a Regiment be shewn

Of Soldiers, that make use of none.

Vast Numbers thronged the fruitful Hive;

Yet those vast Numbers made 'em thrive;

Millions endeavouring to supply

Each other's Lust and Vanity;

Whilst other Millions were employ'd,

To see their Handy-works destroy'd;

They furnish'd half the Universe;

Yet had more Work than Labourers.

Some with vast Stocks, and little Pains

Jump'd into Business of great Gains;

And some were damn'd to Sythes and Spades,

And all those hard laborious Trades;

Where willing Wretches daily sweat,

And wear out Strength and Limbs to eat:

Whilst others follow'd Mysteries,

To which few Folks bind ’Prentices;

That want no Stock, but that of Brass,

And may set up without a Cross;

As Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players,

Pick-Pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers,

And all those, that, in Enmity

With down-right Working, cunningly

Convert to their own Use the Labour

Of their good-natur'd heedless Neighbour:

These were called Knaves; but, bar the Name,

The grave Industrious were the Same.

All Trades and Places knew some Cheat,

No Calling was without Deceit.

Here’s wishing you A Happy New Year!

shubhrangshuroy@mydigitalfc.com