Cabbages & Kings; Insaaf and safai

“Birds twitter, cackle and coo
They don’t ‘sing’.
Melody strikes me as a uniquely human thing!
Have pity on Bachchoo, has he misunderstood ‘song’?
All those famous poets surely can’t be wrong!”
From The Maharajah’s New Clothes by Bachchoo

I was once invited by the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to 10, Downing Street to a sort of gathering. Though there were drinks and food and though both Tony and Cherie Blair circulated among the guests, it wasn’t exactly a party. It was a gathering, a form of idle reassurance and perhaps a publicity stunt which called together people who were regarded as significant in the cultural and political dimensions of multicultural or multi-ethnic Britain. There were writers, TV hosts, prominent black actors, heads of government-sponsored “race equality” organisations etc.

There were significant omissions. I don’t know, for instance, if V.S. Naipaul was invited. He may have been and may have binned the invitation without responding S’il vous plait (that’s Vidia!).

It was a pleasant enough, meaningless evening — but then who expects a party to be portentous or meaningful? I went out of conceit and the certainty that I would never be invited again and I may as well take advantage of their misapprehension as to my sympathies. Besides the wine would be free.
British Prime Ministers regularly sponsor such gatherings. Blair invited pop singers and TV celebrities to Downing Street and his publicists sought to broadcast the event as “Cool Britain”.

Last week David Cameron attempted to replicate the publicity gesture. It was attended by celebrities who may be considered slightly long in the tooth and not attended by celebrities who may have made the headlines and every TV news programme. I suppose they were all away in Brazil watching the World Cup football games. Or perhaps they didn’t want to be known as guests of David and Samantha Cameron.

The party got me wondering whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi has advisers who will tell him to pull such publicity stunts. I am aware that he was very generous in inviting Congresswallas and the leaders of neighbouring countries to his inauguration and in allowing the defeated leaders to have prominent positions in the swearing-in ceremony in Parliament. And yes, I know he has appointed a famous TV actress to be India’s minister of education (a masterstroke, as was giving the  strange Uma Bharati the ministerial responsibility for cleaning up the Ganga).

These gestures and appointments seem to indicate that Prime Minister Modi has a forward-looking team of publicity-wallas. (Are you looking for a job, you bum! — Ed. Nahin yaar, freedom of speech yaar —fd!) Will their imaginations and advice stretch to getting together a gathering which can be publicised as “Cool India?” or “Absolute-Free-Speech-Unlike-Some-Countries-Which-we-Politely Won’t-Identify India?”

My feeling is that such gatherings are useful and do generate coverage. Before, gentle reader, you begin to think that my normally brilliant disposition has turned to the cheap pursuit of publicity stunts worthy of advertising-world rabble, let me assure you I am getting to the serious stuff.

Apart from publicity stunts, Mr Cameron has this week taken on a tricky problem that besets these islands. He has publicly waved the nettle rather than grasped it. There have been questions asked by MPs about a dossier that went missing which may or may not have exposed a paedophile ring operating within the very heart of British government. In other words, some Lords and some members of Parliament, in the ’80s when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, were in an organised and clandestine conspiracy subjecting vulnerable children to sexual assault.

It’s not the sort of scandal that will die down naturally — a national disgrace, but not quite the same as Brazil being humiliated at football by Germany. No. Mr Cameron has set up an enquiry under Lady Butler-Sloss, a veteran of such enquiries, into child sexual abuse in Westminster — Lords, ladies and Commons — in the BBC, the Church and in the National Health Service. The enquiry will presumably have the brief and the powers to question anyone, beginning with those who allege that they were victims of such abuse and progressing to question the alleged perpetrators.

Lord Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet and inner circle, when questioned on television about the possibility of a cover-up of such activity, said he was sure that “the Establishment” of the time when he was a minister considered shielding the reputation of the powerful more important than the rights of children not to be abused. He conceded that this was wrong and that perpetrators of sexual crimes against children, however powerful or famous, should be brought to book.

The enquiry will possibly criminalise some of Tebbit’s closest colleagues in the Thatcher government, but his attitude seemed to be “so be it, thy deeds have cast thee in a hole!”
Mr Cameron couldn’t have done otherwise. Even if the enquiry doesn’t names names in its published report, but merely outlines the occurrence and incidence of abuse, the evidence it gathers will certainly be accessible to the police and the Crown Prosecution Authority who will be obliged to bring the paedophiles to book.

Enquiries of this sort can be very expensive and lumber on for a long time. Nevertheless they are part of the paraphernalia of democracy though quite clearly not all democracies and not all issues are likely to be examined in this way.

Will Mr Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer institute an enquiry into the tax avoidance or downright tax-dodging of multinationals operating and making billions of pounds of profit in Britain? Unlikely.

Closer to home, will the Modi government institute an enquiry with the brief and powers to be swift and certain into the alleged criminal activities of legislators at the Centre and in the states? The country knows that cases of corruption and even of murder have been pending against an unconscionable number of MPs, MLAs and even a minister or two. Shouldn’t achche din” include “insaaf and safai”?