The changing dynamics of power in Madhya Pradesh
While all other state governments are preoccupied with the coronavirus, Madhya Pradesh continues to battle with its home-made political crisis. There is a chief minister, but he has no cabinet to assist him. The administrative machinery is used to working under a command structure. Even seasoned bureaucrats feel better if they know they have political backing. That is why many of them develop a partisan reputation. After every political change, officers are shunted around. Believe it or not, the corona-anxiety has not stopped that in MP.
The beginnings
The transfer season had started when the outgoing government heard the forebodings of its own demise. Bringing loyal civil servants to the politically uncertain districts was seen as useful. Now that the old regime has been toppled, reverse loyalties are in demand, hence new transfers. The only saving grace is that the transferred will be relieved later.
From outside, MP looks like a stable two-party state. The recent upheaval shows that the two-party system does not necessarily mean stability. And this is not the first time that venal volatility has hit MP. Historically speaking, MP is still evolving as a cohesive unit. A legendary journalist of Indore, the late Rahul Barpute had explained to me that MP is only space with a geographical name, i.e. ‘madhya’, indicating its location. Don’t take the two-party polity of MP seriously, he said because many can be on either side! He also said that a third party is unlikely to emerge for a long time.
What we call MP is essentially an administrative unit, which was created nearly a decade after independence to cover the central region of India. British-ruled Central Provinces and the territories held by nearly one hundred princely states were merged into MP. Some of them, like Gwalior, was huge and wealthy; others were small. Their merger took place in 1956. Then, four and a half decades later, in 2000, its south-eastern belt was taken out to create the state of Chhatisgarh.
In the old princely states, people’s loyalty to the ex-rulers survived election after election. It mutated into an arrangement in order to accommodate the novel demands democracy made, such as reserved seats for the lower castes and the tribes. With each successive election, diversity of faces increased, but the structures of loyalty to small monarchs remained.
Privilege wins
You began to feel as if democracy had triumphed and kingship had ended. This was, of course, an illusion. In every sphere of civic life, the ex-royals continue to be important and their influence has not diminished much. No group or class of people has emerged to create a strong enough cultural alternative to the royals. Nor had any effort been made, through education, to enable the general population to move beyond the old feudal loyalties and sensibilities.
And politically too, the idea of inherited glory and status did not lose traction. Blue blood remained blue; it retained the old networks and developed new ones as some of the royal progeny used their expensive education to occupy professional and bureaucratic positions. All that education could do was to force blue blood to compete with ordinary blood before claiming the high chairs. Within education i.e. what it taught, there was no new message that might stir the mind, including the royal mind, to wonder why inherited status and democracy don’t go together.
It shocks but doesn’t surprise me that while the rest of the country was occupied with the massive preparation needed to face the coronavirus, MP was getting a makeover. A government formed over a year ago was toppled and a new one formed. The force that accomplished this feat came from a considerable king who was feeling slighted by his party. Educated, popular and sub-regionally powerful as he is, he engineered the defection of his dependents from the ruling party to the opposition, making the latter the new ruling party. It had ruled MP for fifteen years before losing the election last year. Now it can rule again. The intervening period will soon be forgotten. Civil servants will be shifted around, that’s all.
Royalty remains
How kings think is not a well-studied subject in the social sciences. Had even a handful of historians worked with psychologists, they might have thrown some light on royal mental processes and how they adjust to democracy. One inherited quality that helps many ex-kings to stay afloat in a democratic system is flexibility.
Numerous stories from the British period of history offer testimony to their nimble minds. The descendent of one of the smaller kings told me a story about the Delhi Durbar held in 1911 at Kingsway Camp to mark the coronation of King George the Fifth.
The assembled Indian royals were acquainting each other about their ‘kuldevis’ or house deities. Some mentioned one or the other manifestations of the goddess Durga while others mentioned a local deity. When it was the turn of my narrator’s ancestor, he said: ‘Our kuldevi is Queen Victoria! Isn’t she yours too?’
(Courtesy of Mail Today)
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