It is certainly a great idea for professionals, entrepreneurs and activists to enter mainstream politics. But for that they have to first understand and respect politics and also to accept the heat and dust, the hard work, the take-no-prisoners competitive spirit that go with it. As the track record of the two prime ministerial aspirants (Manmohan Singh and Advani) shows you, politics surely has place for honest people. But it needs charisma, ambition, diligence, wisdom and experience of a very high order before you can make your mark, even save your deposit. Because people who come out and vote, defying the heat and cynicism, poverty, frustration, hunger and even the lure of a four-day weekend, understand what is good for them better than many of us in our ivory towers. Partisan politics sounds awful on 24-hour TV, but it keeps us together as a nation, giving different sections of our society, the minorities, Dalits, tribals, even the corporates and journalists a voice. If more than 90 per cent of distant Nagaland’s people come out to vote when less than half as many do in South Bombay it shows how parts of the country where real democracy was denied for long are so much more enthusiastic about it.

Party politics is the most meritocratic profession of all in democracies. It is only politics that enables an Obama to defeat a Hillary Clinton for the leadership of the Democratic Party and its vote banks and then employ her as his secretary of state, or enables a Mayawati to build a party and rise from nowhere to give crores of Dalits a sense of participation and empowerment. Party politics does not prohibit the educated upper crust, but you cannot take it for granted and demand a lateral entry at the top by right, just because you are better educated or better “bred”. Most of our politicians have been at it for years, learning their ropes in college, panchayat or labour union politics. Most of them, as one look at the latest book published by this newspaper group (India’s Elected) would tell you, are also very well-educated, contrary to the Omkara stereotype. These new entrants will fail because they seem driven by a divine right to come and clean up our politics and governance, sullied for 60 years by illiterate, venal politicians and stupid voters. In a small way, they will remind you of the Swatantra Party of the erstwhile princes. They were swept away in no time by their own former subjects. And whether their governance of their feudal kingdoms was much better than our current candidates’ corporations is a question we shall overlook for the moment.

... contd.