Source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/306267729093
Many years ago, when I was still young enough to believe that books could change the world, my father gave me one by Alvin Toffler titled “Powershift”. This was sometime in the early nineties, when India was still shaking off the dust of its own old certainties, and Toffler’s thesis fascinated me. He wrote that all human power can be understood as three grades of purity. At the lowest level lies force, the kind of power that works only when someone holds a gun to your head. One grade above that lies money, the sort of power that works when someone slides a bribe across the table and purchases an outcome. And the highest, purest, most potent form of power is the power of knowledge, the kind that convinces you to do something you would not normally do, the kind that does not need violence or bribery because it wins your mind long before it reaches your hands. That framework lodged itself somewhere deep inside me. And in these past few days, watching events unfold, the memory of that book has returned with unsettling clarity.
Because when I put up my previous post about those 272 so-called eminent personalities who chose to direct their righteous fury at the Leader of the Opposition rather than at the Prime Minister, the government in power, or the Election Commission whose dignity they claimed to defend, the immediate reaction from the sane, liberal, progressive people I know was predictable. They commented almost in chorus that these men and women must have been paid off, that after a lifetime of public service they had bartered their conscience for a few coins of silver, that they had accepted some minor post or committee chair or ceremonial advisory title in exchange for their signatures, that they had sold the future of their own grandchildren for the comfort of one last favour from a regime that treats loyalty as a disposable commodity. And while that instinct is understandable, while the temptation to explain moral collapse through some transaction is strong, I think the truth is far more serious, far more dangerous, far more corrosive than the comforting idea of a simple quid pro quo.
Because the tragedy is not that they were bought. The tragedy is that they did not need to be. We are no longer in the domain of Toffler’s first two purities of power. Nobody needed to hold a gun to their head. Nobody needed to slip an envelope across the table. We have entered the third and most lethal domain, where inducement becomes irrelevant, where force becomes unnecessary, where people who once held high office, who once swore to uphold the Constitution, who once protected the very institutions they now undermine, are willing to say foolish, irrational, embarrassing things not because they have been compelled or purchased but because they have been convinced. Their judgement has been surrendered freely. Their worldview has been colonised willingly. They have swallowed the ideology whole, line and hook and sinker and rod and reel and perhaps the fishing boat too.
And if you look at them closely you will recognise them instantly. They are the chairmen of your housing societies, the secretaries of your association, the members of your local laughter club or trekking club who police dress codes, the WhatsApp uncles who dispense medical advice, romantic advice, religious advice, geopolitical advice, and national-security advice before breakfast, always with a “Good morning” message decorated with flowers picked from the garden of kitsch. They monitor what you eat, what you wear, whom you love, how loudly you celebrate, how gently you dissent, and construct entire moral universes out of forwarded messages where punctuation goes to die and prejudice multiplies in the cracks.
These are the people who insist that Maharana Pratap won the Battle of Haldighati, that Gandhi was a British agent, that Nehru was simultaneously a Muslim, a communist, a hedonist, a CIA plant, a KGB puppet, and a Vatican emissary, that every scientific discovery from nuclear fusion to gravitational waves to the Higgs boson was already explained in the Vedas but hidden by leftist conspirators, that demonetisation was visionary, that the economy is booming while their own children wander from interview to interview, that Umar Khalid is a terrorist and Pragya Thakur is a patriot, that mythology is history and history is mythology, that prejudice and hatred is patriotism, that loyalty and obedience is a substitute for intelligence and self-worth, that the caste system is about meritocracy, and that every criticism of the government is part of an anti-national conspiracy involving Soros, missionaries, Khalistanis, Urban Naxals, the Rothschilds, ISI, and perhaps even the neighbourhood bakery (or is it puncture-repair shop?).
And they genuinely believe, with astonishing conviction, that Rahul Gandhi, who holds an MPhil in Development Studies from Trinity College, Cambridge, who studied at Harvard, who completed his undergraduate degree at Rollins College, who is a licenced pilot, who is an avid motorcyclist who rode his KTM through Ladakh, who is a professionally trained martial artist with belts in jiu-jitsu and Aikido, who walks across India meeting citizens without choreography, who jumps into the sea or open waters with joy, abandon, and confidence, who unashamedly loves his mother, his sister, his nieces and nephews with the ease of a man comfortable in his skin, who does not tremble before questions or teleprompters or truth is ‘Pappu’, and Narendra Modi, who abandoned his wife, who used his mother for photo opportunities, who weaponised everything from terror attacks to a dead former Prime Minister for electoral politics, who has sidelined and humiliated the very person whose protégé he was, who wears imported clothes and expensive watches while calling himself a fakir (and American Presidents by their first names), who once wore a suit with his own name stitched into the fabric (yes, seriously), who fumbles without a teleprompter, who has never given a single press conference as the Prime Minister, who claims to have used a digital camera in the 1980s before such cameras existed, who speaks of being piss poor and seling tea at a non-existent railway station and playing with crocodiles (once again, yes, seriously) as a child and living off ‘bhiksha’ (alms), while, at the same time, travelling the world in his youth, who tells stories that shape shift depending on the season, the audience, and of course, election campaign, is the intellectual giant, the visionary, the masterstroker, the genius, the philosopher king!
And once such people succumb to resentment, once they marinate long enough in xenophobia and caste vanity and prejudice and unexamined privilege, reasoning becomes futile. They do not hold opinions. They inhabit them. They defend them as though protecting a civilisation that exists primarily in Instagram reels and WhatsApp forwards. To imagine that such people required monetary persuasion to sign an open letter of staged indignation is to misunderstand how thoroughly their inner world has been consumed. What drives them is belief, not benefit, conviction, not coercion, knowledge-power, not money-power or force-power. The dangerous Tofflerian third purity.
So no, they were not bought. They volunteered eagerly. And here lies the darker truth that should unsettle every one of us. Before you hollow out institutions, you hollow out citizens. Once the people themselves have been eaten from the inside, once their curiosity dries up and their empathy thins and their intelligence collapses under the weight of their own prejudices, the institutions they populate fall without resistance. You see, these structures are not abstract. Who do you think make them up? Who do you think populate, maintain, and run them? These very people! And this is why the tragedy of our era cannot be blamed on Narendra Modi alone. He did not create these hollowed-out souls. These hollowed-out souls created the demand for a Narendra Modi. And cometh the hour, cometh the man. He showed up.
When a society surrenders its inner life, everything else follows. The institutions fall. The cult leader rises. Public life decays. The republic shrinks. And a civilisation collapses under the weight of its own empty heart. It does not need a financial incentive.
You cannot bribe a civilisation to poison itself. But a civilisation that can be convinced that the poison is nectar will drink that poison. Willingly. Even enthusiastically.
Later edit: Interestingly, this article went viral (how, why, I cannot tell; and if you find out how something goes viral, tell me) and I received quite a few comments, most complimentary, some not, and one that was disguised as a compliment but did not pass the smell test. I have responded to that back-handed compliment (or “complement”, as the complimenter says) here.
