Year Of Living Immoderately

 "India '97" was the world's select flavour and its special destination; also the chosen year for showering it with literary awards and raking up lively front-page rows. It was the year when the English-speaking world sentimentally reappropriated India. Would victory have been so sweet if an Indian won the Booker in 1999? Or if Arundhati Roy turned out to be a withered, old trout from Asansol with greasy plaits? Would there have been as much of a rumpus if the Queen of England trudged barefoot round the Golden Temple any other year? Or as many court appeals to restrain a Greek from thumping out a few elevator-type tunes in front of the Taj Mahal?

But where were you at that crowning moment of anniversary glory? Were you at Rajpath on August 15 and was it bliss to be alive in that dusk? Perhaps, but it cannot have been heaven to be young and realise that the only gift the parade of old leaders were about to offer voters was an unwanted election. There is a saying that the children of any age acquire its worst faults. India at 50 showed the worst signs of middle age—flabby, thrombotic, desperately in need of bi-focals.

The country went looking for a prime minister and produced the two unlikeliest rabbits out of its hat, a Humble Farmer followed by an IIC socialist whose only common interest seemed to be to travel abroad as much as possible, taking large family or press parties with them. Never mind. At the start of the year India had a brilliant finance minister whose prescription for financial management received glowing raves. But within months he fell victim to his own hype—he was forced to dish vast hand-outs to government employees and farmers, foiled in his bid to push through the Insurance Bill and reduced to a mute spectator as one of the government's richest enterprises went to war with its foreign partner. The Maruti-Suzuki label, symbol of India's willingness to do business with the world, suddenly looked as shop-soiled as the year's other mantra of foreign cooperation, the "Gujral doctrine".

Hopelessly out of touch with voters and often themselves, the main affliction India's leaders seemed to suffer from was ADD (attention deficiency disorder). 1997 was the year when the Indian National Congress of 1947 became the Congress party of 10 Jan-path—and its outhouses such as the government bungalow handed to Priyanka on her wedding. Still, a persisting mystery of the Congress remained: no large body of the public had ever heard its Unspoken Leader speak, while the party's official leader, Sitaram Kesri, ran out of lines the moment he made the fatal mistake of delivering the same one twice—"I'll bring down the government".

Justice M.C. Jain, whose torrents of prose were the excuse for the government tumbling, proved to have stoked a media fire, not a public blaze. His report on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination seemed to leave stony-hearted voters largely unmoved.The only reward his hard work could possibly fetch him is the Xerox Prize for providing the best photocopying services in the land. By such a curious rigmarole was the party of India's Independence shot to pieces. Its epitaph can be written in two words—hype and hyper.

1997 helped to blow another piece of hype to bits—the notion of the new-rich, all-consuming Great Indian Middle Class with its aching desire for blue jeans and washing machines and limitless powers of purchase. The car market crashed and buyers began resisting the lure of hand-me-down goods from Sony, Panasonic and Whirlpool. It was not that the consumer boom was over, more likely that the numbers of the consuming class, as of the absolute poor, required strict redefinition. Their particular wants needed constant, specialised attention. Such a shake-out was visible on the country's TV screens. Only the most efficient, original, well-funded networks, with a fine-tuned mix of news and entertainment, could hope to survive and prosper. Prasar Bharati's independence, too recent a development, must stand up to a new regime to be fairly judged.

Individual successes of '97 were centred in two areas—beauty and books. There might be something to the idea that, swamped by chaotic realities, Indian voices are at their most resonant in works of fiction (Roy), futurist drama (Manjula Padmanabhan), historical biography (Sanjay Subrahmanyam) or political essays (Sunil Khilnani). If so, these are highly honourable forms of escape. But how about overkill by the Miss Whirls? Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai, now Diana Hayden. The phenomenon could perhaps be dismissed as a much of a muchness. Or more accurately described as an example of India's expanded role in the world.