Valson Thampu

Everybody is for morality these days. The Left is. The Right is. The Centre is. Even the media is (What is left then?). So, good days are here, at long last, for morality! All are in its favour. Poor immorality! Dumped. Left in the lurch. Abandoned by all.

The Congress-led UPA fights a dour battle to root out corruption from Kerala. They brave even COVIDE-19 to strike a body-blow at immorality. The Marxist-led LDA clamours for a compressive and coordinated investigation into the GOLD-20 moral epidemic. But this endemic epidemic persists and eats deeper into the vitals of this poor and pretty state. Since testing for the GOLD-20 epidemic is at its lowest level we do not know, except by surmise, how widespread the disease is. All we know is that this yellow fever is chronic in high places. One of the symptoms of this profitable pandemic is that smart women enjoy ready access to places where angels fear to tread.

But there’s a riddle. If all are for morality, and everyone is out to eradicate crime and corruption, why is our crime-corruption graph on the rise?

The beauty of Kerala politics is its symmetry. Five years ago there was a solar dame. Today there’s a golden dame. Keralites appreciate slight and subtle changes, not a dull re-appearance of past dramatis personae. At least, Chennithala has willed it to be so. Keralites are practical. They must have their daily fix of stimulation. Life is, for the most part, pretty boring for most of us. Remove the political shadow-boxing, what’s left in the vaudeville of our public life? Boredom was a pandemic with us, long before COVID-19 locked us down. So, bits and pieces of political farce are welcome; given especially that it is dished out to us in our living rooms. We don’t have to go in search and pay for the alleviation we avail. After the last episode in this tragi-comic serial four years ago, we have had to wait a long time. We had nearly forgotten the script.

Now UPA revives and regales us once again. Our evenings have become suddenly livelier. Thank goodness, this time around, the dramatis personae, costumes, and stage-effects technology are slightly different. Thank you! How smoothly and predictably heroes become villains, and vice versa!

But, there’s something somewhat depressing in this theatre of the absurd. Elections come and go. Governments change. But Saritas and Swapnas lurk in the greenroom of Kerala politics. They are to the tragedy of Kerala what the fates used to be to Greek tragedies. Truth to tell, we’re not against them and their generous patrons. Our fight is against corruption, not against the corrupt. So, we elect the corrupt and enjoy the fight against corruption.

My own experiences tell the same thing. Everybody likes corruption, if it is to their advantage. I learned a lot through being the principal of St. Stephen’s College. Some of the finest men and women you can imagine, used to come to me and give a tsunami of reasons, all very convincing, why I should break rules for the sake of their children or grandchildren. Of course, they would do so, surreptitiously. They didn’t want to undermine morality publicly; only wanted to adjust it coyly to their convenience.

I wonder if Keralites give a thought to what it means for a man in public life today to dare to be honest.

The truth lay buried. I decided to resurrect it. So I wrote my memoir titled On a Stormy Course, chronicling a handful of the events and the ordeal of truth they symptomised.

How many read my books does matter to me. But not as much as whether or not the writing of a book changes me from within. I believe that a book, the writing of which leaves the author unchanged, is not worth reading. What disappoints me is the crass indifference to truth, which becomes indifference to the duty to continually improve oneself. Not many realize, sadly, that a passionate commitment to truth is the catalyst for seeking perfection. Jesus, who said, ‘I am the truth’ also urged his disciples, ‘Be perfect.’

Given the epidemic indifference to truth in our midst, the professed enmity to the corruption of a political or religious outfit does not mean anything more than shifting between spells of turbulence. We become shuttlecocks between the corrupt and the enemies of their corruption, which we mistake for allergy to corruption per se. Even if we have enemies of corruption, we have hardly any friend of integrity and probity in public life. In such a situation, all we do is to use our votes punitively. Our option is reduced to punishing one political combine by voting in its adversary, which is a mere illusion of an alternative. We choose from two editions of the same infection –the Kerala Venal Infectious Disease- between KEVID-15 and KEVID-20.

The decline of the grand old party nationally, evidenced even by the ideological dementia of its Kerala wing, which is more kicking than alive, should matter to even those who are, like me, politically non-partisan. I am disappointed with the tragic decline of the Congress because I am a democrat at heart.

Whether legislative horses tend to be race horses, jades or donkeys depends, in the end, not on a political party, but on the stuff that a people are made of. This should concern and worry us. A people will get only the government they deserve; for, in democracy, they choose the stuff of which governments are formed. Morally wishy-washy people are eligible only to choose between the Left and the Right that are periodically superior to each other, but are doomed to be inferior to the Centre, which is, in principle, inferior to the Left and the Right. In this process, they get the proverbial ‘left and right’ from the people.
In the present political charade, all are superior to each other. Only the people are inferior. They end up terrible losers. They get alienated not only from their welfare but also from themselves. So, they fail to see how they collude and collaborate in cooking the hell-broth of misrule for themselves. As Matthew Arnold wrote –
Here we are on a darkling plane, Where ignorant armies clash by night.