Plantain Republic

Governance  | 17 February 2011  | print

Everything you wanted to know about psychofantus indicus but didn’t know whom to ask

Baba Siddique Birthday poster; from WhatToThink or WTT

At least 600 years old, the word “commonwealth” comes from the phrase “common weal”, and the first known use of the word ‘weal’ pre-dates the 12th century. From the Middle English wele, similar to the Old English ‘wel’, it connotes a general well-being and commonwealth now means a sound, healthy and prosperous state with a shared well-being. In many legal and historical texts, it is used interchangeably with the word ‘republic’, from the Latin res publica signifying public affairs. A republic is a government of laws, not men, one in which decisions are based on law, not on the whims of an individual or a small group, and are designed to serve the common good.

William Sydney Porter, better known to a certain generation of schoolchildren as the short story writer O. Henry, coined another phrase now familiar to us all. Porter’s stories all had unexpected twists (famously, ‘The Gift of the Magi’), though without the wickedness of Roald Dahl writing many years later, and this became his trademark. But Porter had other jobs, too: he worked in a bank, as a journalist and even in a pharmacy, and in one of those occupations he found himself on the wrong side of the law. Accused of embezzlement in connection with his job at a bank in Austin, Texas, he fled to Trujillo in the Honduras where he wrote Cabbages and Kings.¹ It is in this book that Porter/Henry first coined a phrase to describe an politically unstable, despotic tropical Central American nation “ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy and corrupt clique”: banana republic.²

From Two Recalls by O. Henry, in Cabbages and Kings:

“One of the directors had his steam yacht coaled and with steam up, ready for a trip; and he turned her over to me, cart blongsh. In four hours I was on board of her, and hot on the trail of the fruit tub. I had a pretty good idea where old Wahrfield—that was his name, J. Churchill Wahrfield—would head for. At that time we had a treaty with about every foreign country except Belgium and that banana republic, Anchuria. There wasn’t a photo of old Wahrfield to be had in New York—he had been foxy there—but I had his description. And besides, the lady with him would be a dead-give-away anywhere. She was one of the high-flyers in Society—not the kind that have their pictures in the Sunday papers—but the real sort that open chrysanthemum shows and christen battleships.

India’s cartwheeling approach to law and governance demands its own definition. It is increasingly a plutocracy, ruled by the wealthy (propelling India towards Ambanistan perhaps?); certainly an oligarchy, power being held by a small bunch distinguished only by their subservience to a single dynastic family; and often a combination of the two, a plutarchy.

There is a fourth form of government that might be used to describe a nation ruled by sycophants psychotic in varying degrees and all living in some gagaland where no amount of corruption or illegality exposed is the slightest cause of concern, accountability is entirely unknown and the law and the courts are merely irritants. This is a psychofantocracy, and the term deserves immediate inclusion in every dictionary.

Consider the psychofant.

Psychofantus Indicus: native to the Indian sub-continent, swarms of it are found in cities, usually clothed in white, evolving from the larval stage of grovelling political wannabes to still white but significantly more corpulent dimensions, acquiring along the way impenetrable hides of arrogance and indifference to law and the common weal. Infestations are pronounced in Delhi, Mumbai, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and pretty much everywhere else. Its behaviour ranges from the epic (the latest nG-scam, where n is any random number) to the banal (cops spitting and riding motorcycles without helmets).

A week ago, the Mumbai Mirror (in which a shorter version of this article appears) mounted a public campaign against the illegal banners and hoardings of politicians plastered across the city. A few days later, it named the biggest offenders. That very day, outside the walls of the city’s guardian minister’s splendid bungalow, appeared a rash of posters all bearing his unlovely visage. These, it was said, were put up by the Hon’ble Minister’s ‘followers’, a sub-species known as psychofantus indicus minimus. The Mumbai Mirror reported that, too. The day after, the posters miraculously vanished.

The hideousness of the posters should be reason enough to ban them. They are also illegal, and that is reason enough to ban them. Activists like Anahita Pandole fight long, lonely and dispiriting battles to save our city from them. Flora Fountain was transformed when, thanks to her, advertising hoardings disappeared off some buildings at Flora Fountain. The courts say political banners are illegal. Yet, like poisonous mushrooms, they keep coming up.

The Great Indian Tragedy is not in the constant re-appearance of these hoardings or their ugliness, but in that each one represents an emasculation of the law. These are put up by people who aim to be the leaders of tomorrow, in honour of the leaders of today — all people charged with the duty of upholding the law; and the law is apparently unable to help a citizen protect the boundaries of his own property. These hoardings are put up on or hooked to the property of citizens; people who have not allowed them and are not bound to allow them. No municipal commissioner can permit any politician to tie a poster of his face to our walls. Every such poster is illegal, possibly an act of trespass.

A system where the law does not work to allow a citizen to protect and defend what is his — whether it is land or software and copyright — is no government of law, no republic, no commonwealth, and we are too big to be a banana republic. Thanks to the likes of Mr Raja, what we are is a plantain republic — of pyschofants. And we will be that until one of our lawmaking lawbreakers gets his comeuppance.