Vijay Vikram

The crisis of the English-speaking politician in India (read: the firing of Shashi Tharoor and the spot of bother that Jairam Ramesh has found himself in) has led to a peculiar state of affairs - the name of Nandan Nilenkani has begun popping up as some sort of panacea to the ills faced by the urbane politician without a mass base. He is being posited as a model that Tharoor and Ramesh would be better off emulating seeing as he successfully made the transition from corporate life to public service and has been working away, quietly and efficiently – to implement a new layer of bureaucracy onto a State notorious for its world class public service delivery. This view would of course be unexceptionable in the drawing room chatter of Lutyens’ Delhi. However, I think this view – this argument is fallacious and represents a political discourse that is unthinking and venal.

What the champions of this view – Ms Sagarika Ghose and Mr Rajdeep Sardesai in particular – don’t seem to realise is that Nandan Nilenkani is a civil servant, not a politician. The two professions are of course complementary seeing as they are both committed to the furtherance of the national good but it might as well be like comparing apples and oranges. A politician creates political will, a civil servant implements it.

I have no intention of defending the Sinophilia of Jairam Ramesh or the misplaced gregariousness of Shashi Tharoor. But, it is the job of the political animal to be an active public figure whilst it is up to the civil servant to make himself as anonymous as possible and go about his mandate with a quiet efficiency.

All that the repeated invocation of the Nilenkani example shows is that Indian politics is being reduced to a managerial profession. The highest peak that Indian politics can climb is that of managerial achievement. There is no doubt that Indian governmental structures could do with some of the incentivisation that the private sector is famous for. However, Politics is not economics. Politics is not management. Politics is not administration. Politics is, well, politics. It demands a will to power and a sense of overarching national vision. More than anything, it demands a complete emotional bond with the national community. But if Nandan Nilenkani – with all his managerial/administrative virtues - is being posited as the ideal-type of the savvy politician of 21st Century India then there is something wrong with how we imagine our politics.