One of the great challenges facing public discourse is how it rises above the partisanship of political parties to focus more consistently on issues of legality and institutional propriety. To use Auden%u2019s incomparable words, %u201CThe rival sergeants run about/ But more to squabble than to find out.%u201D But this only underscores the enormity of the stakes. One of the most suffocating aspects of the current discourse is how openly brazen all parties have become about individuals taking the law into their own hands. The week the fake encounter story broke, Nandigram experienced more violence. This time the government did not send the police in, fearing that this would be a trap. But again just think of what our state was saying: cadres of men, allegedly from the CPM, can come and fire on villagers, hold their lives hostage, but the police will not step in to protect innocent citizens. And now imagine what tribals in Naxal-dominated areas have to face daily. Consider what this means: allowing people to take the law into their own hands is not even considered at best a regrettable necessity; at worst, a harbinger of the unravelling of the state. It is now openly considered an instrument of governance. It is not even an ugly secret that embarrasses the state; it is now its very foundation. We will slide to become a vigilante society. No wonder every two-bit group, with the help of the state, can engage in moral policing, and decide what people may or may not see. India rightly prides itself on being a centrist democracy, but these ugly edges are increasingly revealing the character of that centre. It may also be true that an overwhelming number of Indians would baulk at the kind of moral obtuseness our political parties are displaying. But societies are seldom destroyed by their majorities; they are destroyed when the majority harbours the illusion that lunacy at the margin does not have corrosive effects. And all the signs are that the lunacy is about to descend again. The answer the BJP is giving to what comes after Hindutva is plain and simple: a brazenness and encouragement of thuggishness, pure and simple. Think of the pattern: the BJP has openly declared war on every institution %u2014 from the judiciary to the Election Commission. Its hate rhetoric is subtly being heightened (after all, Kausar Bi was associated with one of %u201Cthem%u201D), and the public culture in states it governs is being destroyed. Now it does not even have the minimal elements of an ideology to fill the vacuum. Its stance on OBC reservations for instance is, given its ideological commitments, inexplicable. But this confusion is symptomatic of a deeper malaise: all lines between right and might have now been blurred. But why blame the BJP alone? We may be moving towards a political system where there are few checks on brazenness. India has a lot going for it, despite, not because, of the state. But still there is great unease. Again Auden, %u201CThe situation of our time/ surrounds us like a baffling crime.%u201D It is provocative to ask this. But will we look back upon Manmohan Singh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and remark, decent men all, but they frittered the good times away? Their abdication of leadership allowed their party%u2019s minions to gnaw away at the Republic.
