Marie Antoinette’s exhortation to hungry French peasants to “eat cake” as there was no bread is too trite to be brought up again. But it is a tempting cliché, as urging people to eat cake caused the monarchical cookie to crumble and was, in part, responsible for ushering in the Revolution. The Palace of Versailles outside Paris is still a shining example of how rulers should not live. And certainly not elected ones.

It is perhaps an indicator of how far removed our leaders in India today are from the aam citizen that Austerity is threatening to become a bit of a farce. A historical recap should put the current debate in a better perspective.

Several people still wonder why a well-dressed Bar-at-Law like Mahatma Gandhi shed his western togs for a loincloth and acquired an obsession with khadi? In fact Shashi Tharoor, in his excellent book Nehru, The Invention of India, displays a very lucid understanding of the Mahatma’s magic when he writes of how, “to put his principles into practice, the Mahatma lived a simple life of near-absolute poverty in an ashram and travelled across the land in third-class railway compartments, campaigning against untouchability, poorer sanitation and child marriage... that he was an eccentric seemed beyond doubt; that he had touched a chord amongst the masses was equally apparent; that he was a potent political force, soon became clear.”

Being seen to be someone who lives by what he preached, even behind closed doors, is what established how trustworthy any leader was. Later, it became a uniform, indeed the de rigueur white kurta-pyjama grew to be a symbol of much-detested neta-dom in unsympathetic movies. As Rajmohan Gandhi also writes in his portrait of his grandfather, Gandhi’s choice of simple, self-woven khadi at a time when the ruling class was seen to be an alien elite was a master-stroke — it evoked a sense of camaraderie with poor Indians (an overwhelming majority then) and brought him closer to the image of Indian icons “like Kabir and even popular weaver-poets like Thiruvalluvar”.

... contd.