Delhi Gymkhana controversy: Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre makes a trenchant observation which is very apposite to the controversy around the decision of the government to take over the property leased out to the Delhi Gymkhana Club. “The European elite,” he says, “undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western culture... After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers.”

When it came to branding their slaves, no one has done it better than the British. They seem to have inscribed the colonial codes into the very genes of the colonised in a manner that the branding has far outlived their dominance and subjugation. Colonialism achieves its ultimate triumph not merely when the colonised obey the master, but when they begin instinctively to reproduce the cultural predilections, social reflexes and institutional forms for which they had originally been designed. The irony of the situation should not be lost on anyone: the issue of dispensing with a colonial relic is being conducted in the words given to us by our masters.

Conscious of this legacy, most of us Indians make conscious efforts to disremember our colonial past, not merely its violence but its lasting effect in altering our perception of ourselves, eroding our self-belief and depriving our self-assurance that should naturally belong to an independent nation conscious of an illustrious past. But there also remains a section for whom the word colonial is invariably yoked with charm and nostalgia.

Gymkhana Clubs and such other enclaves of exclusivity ensured segregation and seclusion which were necessary to create a mystique of British racial superiority and an aura of untouchable authority. The natives were meant to encounter the ruler only in formal settings, courtrooms, military parades, offices and ceremonies, never relaxed, ordinary or familiar surroundings. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Even when select members of the native elite were eventually admitted, after they had diligently mastered the dress codes, table manners, ballroom etiquette, billiards and the manners of the ruling race, equality did not follow. Admission did not abolish hierarchy; it merely created graded assimilation. For quite some time, the Indian members of the ICS were made to sit on the lawns while the white sat inside. Those who readily sloughed off their cultural skins and sought to impersonate the white race were never quite allowed to forget that they were impersonators, poor copies, after all.

The masters departed in 1947. With them disappeared, or should have disappeared, the very raison d’être for the elaborate trappings of imperial aloofness. But the local elite just stepped into the shoes of the departed masters and gladly retained the institutions and, in many cases, the outlook as well. The sense of being orphaned voiced by the crème de la crème – officers of the IAS and IPS, retired army generals, judges, diplomats and renowned media personalities – at the mere thought of the proposed takeover of the Delhi Gymkhana is therefore not entirely unintelligible. They may well be able to make us understand their pain and anguish. What they perhaps cannot make us understand is why we should share it. Their brothers are mystified over their misery: after all, it is only access to a bit of real estate.

This reminds me of Benjy, the idiot child in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. His carer Caddy is gone. Benjy, instinctively, recognised love and tenderness though he could not have named them. He only knew that something was wrong, that a vacuum had opened within him. He found reassurance and solace by clutching on to Caddy’s slippers.

There is of course merit in the fact that the Gymkhana is not the only preserve of privilege in India; it is not. There is justice in asking why other entrenched privileges continue undisturbed. That merely places an onus on the government to dismantle other such enclaves of privilege and patronage; it does not invalidate the move to begin with the Gymkhana Club. Delhi Gymkhana is indeed a heritage property, but heritage status protects buildings; it does not, by itself, decide who gets to enjoy them.

The Cockroach Party

The professional army of dissenters, nay-sayers, and revolutionaries have latched their hopes of renewal and revival around the Cockroach Janta Party formed in cyberspace by an unknown reformer and followed by invisible millions. Old banners have been dusted and repainted; new slogans have been coined to reflect the changed realities of the situation. The young are being exhorted  to take to the streets. 

We are overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu;  we have an uncanny feeling that  we  have travelled this road before. Trusting the instinct and judgement of these gentlemen , we marched behind an army havildar, a certain Anna Hazare, to rid society of corruption. The regiment that set out on this noble mission discovered a saviour in the Aam Aadmi Party instead. The AAP played its games of mates and slays for many years, and one by one the pawns and knights, in the BJP closet, lay. Those old enough will remember the turbulence of “Total Revolution.” For all its moral thunder and revolutionary fervour, all it did was unseat Indira Gandhi, who returned barely two years later with an even larger majority. The products of that great churn have since steered Bihar according to their own lights. History alone will decide on which side of its ledger that upheaval will finally be entered. 

Corruption and power make a pretty pair and,  and though slayed over and over again, corruption never dies. What is new, however, is that it is no longer whispered behind ears; it announces itself as an inalienable privilege of the powerful. Those responsible for the leakage of NEET examination papers, the trigger for the current crisis, despite the damage that it caused to millions of our youth, despite national outrage, have not been called to account, leaving the youth feeling aggrieved, bewildered, shortchanged, cheated and hugely angry. There is the growing despair on account of shrinking opportunities, dog-eat-dog competition and the growing feeling that public life and the system do not reward patience, merit or restraint. Unfortunate as it may be, even the most sacrosanct of our institutions no longer enjoy the implicit trust of the people. 

The result is for us to see. An off-the-cuff courtroom remark, which perhaps arose merely out of irritation -“there are youngsters like cockroaches… some become media, some social media, some RTI activists” - led to the formation, in a spirit of facetiousness The Cockroach Janata  Party. It   started  gathering momentum by the minute, and soon acquired an independent political life of its own and  regime change agents , ever alert to the  possibility of  political advantage, lined up behind imaginary and real supporters in cyberspace. 

We are living in strange times : threat to democratic balance no longer appears to come only from the standard villains -demagogues, mobs, reckless politicians. Increasingly, instability seems to emanate from within institutions once trusted to preserve restraint, continuity and constitutional propriety. 

Politics, which once occupied a corner of the social turf, has metastasised to occupy the whole turf, and society now lives by the values and vulgarities of politics.   All of us, even the poor, to whom tradition assigned the burden of remaining honest, are in some measure, ‘half victims and half accomplices’. and that makes ameliorative action-looking inward - that much more difficult. It brews a lethal cocktail of anger and helplessness.

Borrowing from the insights of  Antonio Gramsci, transformative movement requires a systematic and coherent account of one’s own situation. I am quite aware that people may well be very capable of seeing the little valley they inhabit very clearly. But it is important that they also have an understanding of how their world fits into the larger economic, political, or cultural realities of their time . 

So, to me, the real question is not whether the youth in whom every age reposes its faith, are ready for revolution, but whether they know where they wish to go. As Gramsci understood, societies do not renew themselves through anger alone. Without clear goals , all such emancipatory movements drift into noise, agitation, and fragmentation “all sail and no anchor.” That is where  the role “organic intellectuals” - individuals capable of articulating and systematising their conception of the world, interpreting social anxieties honestly, disciplining public emotion, and raising political consciousness beyond mere reaction  become important.

One of the founding spirits of the AAP, himself long expelled from the movement he helped birth, now says in an insta message that electorally regime change is no longer possible. One must take to streets.  Perhaps he is right. The moment is certainly propitious what with millions of mutinies raging within ,  people  angry, institutions distrusted. The whole nation has been prepared like a huge altar awaiting burnt offerings. So where will it all end? There will of course be political winners, but the choice is  “between the heron and the wren, / Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.” Like the Chinese in Charles Lamb’s story, we may well end up burning down the house merely to roast the pig.