When this government came to power three years ago, people across the media, whether in a sociable sort of way or clearly triumphant, said, “This will bring economic development.” We were to forget all the other stuff — the Hindutva was soft then, some people found it cuddly, even I recall it with nostalgia — and we were to focus our energies on imagining how wonderful life would be when all that “economic development” came to be.

To all this glad punditry I wasn’t obliged, of course, nor invited, to make a response, but then people said to me, personally, “This is the time to invest” — and I got my chance. “I don’t trust this government,” I said, with all my pent-up indignation, “and anyway, why should I give them my money?” It seemed wrong to rail against a State and then profit from its effects on the Sensex. Also, if the world really was going to crumble around me, I’d rather have my money in my mattress, thank you, than vanishing in a flurry of financial jugglery, civic anarchy and whatever else they mean by ‘market risk’.

A year or so later, having embarked on a career of freelance ‘writing’, I had a dystopian vision of another kind: I saw myself alone amid cobwebs and peeling plaster, in impecunious old age, horribly obliged to drink Old Monk again.

I bought a couple of mutual funds.

But then… I am liberal elite, and we’re duplicitous like that. How else, after all, except by virtue of our two faces (not to mention our glad eyes, lily livers and bleeding hearts) could we possibly have been found guilty of such a vast plethora of wrongs, as would put the evil genius of Moriarty to shame? The professor, after all, only pushed Sherlock Holmes down a waterfall, but the liberal elite? We’ve patronised the Hindus, appeased the Muslims, and harboured secret communal tendencies all along. We’re in thrall of globalisation, yet we encourage caste mobilisation, and we’re just looking for opportunities to belittle our army, guarding our borders, probably because we’d like to hop across and live in sin with Pakistanis, or at least give them Kashmir, but to do either would mean leaving our elite bubbles — within which we’ve already declared autonomy.

But I digress, another liberal elite tactic, to speak in riddles at far too much length, such being the nature of anti-national rhetoric as taught at anti-national universities… for the purposes of this article, I need only have said this: liberal elites don’t lack for money.

And I cannot disparage it. Money has bought me many things. Potable whiskey, for one, to drown my sorrows in. Cigarettes (and thus, despite astronomical prices, the freedom to not be the one kind of scum worse than my own —the person who pretends he doesn’t smoke and bums half your packet). The freedom, also, to declare myself a ‘writer’ and potter about in my pyjamas, or into the hills, the calm days, clean air, and general quality of life that all of this brings. However, since even liberal elites have some orthodoxies, I won’t contradict The Beatles. Money cannot buy me love, no; but it has brought me the liberty to love whom I please, without worrying about being dragged out of my house and paraded on the streets by self-righteous goons. Yet.

Money of the kind that isn’t even my own, and is therefore called privilege, has bought me the kind of education you can only get when you have books in the house and the casual knowledge that you will, of course, hold a graduate degree one day. At the very least.

And money has given me the wherewithal to scoff at it, to give it away, to shrug, ‘It’s only money after all’.

A friend of mine says you can tell how rich someone is by how stingy they are — she means, of course, the business elite. Those are fine upstanding people. Nationalists. Forever offering to rehabilitate our adivasis and applauding political visionaries, in power. If they do make minute calculations of who’s eaten what, you can’t blame them — they must be saving up the money to create jobs. Liberal elites, on the other hand, eat blindly, drink wildly, and make merry while our soldiers suffer, and it’s probably one of them who inflated the “maid’s” salaries in your colony.

In fact, claiming all money’s advantages without treating it with the slightest respect is possibly the greatest failing of the liberal elite, and somebody should really do something about it before they sabotage our economic miracles as they have already jeopardised our national sovereignty. Labour camps come to mind, even if only the liberal elite, being staunchly (and rather ingeniously) communal, casteist and communist at heart, will appreciate the irony.

But forget about them. All they do, anyway, is lounge about in their tastefully furnished echo chambers, re-tweeting each others’ worst fears, and conspiring to keep the right from developing its own discourse. Forget about me, for that matter; money’s bought me all I’ve got, and I only wish I had more of it, and everyone else, too.

Let’s talk about those who disdain the liberals. You find them everywhere, amidst bureaucrats and technocrats, lawyers, judges and white-collar criminals, economists, columnists and lapsed feminists, contrarians, RWA presidents, and excitable young men who issue death threats on Twitter with an aplomb the Queen of Hearts would envy. Not all are conservative; in fact, most are only… not-liberal, in the mystical way that such not-being is possible, these days; shying away from the label in nervous embarrassment as they have, before, from that other terribly disconcerting term, ‘feminist’, or as they may, soon, from the mortification of being called ‘secular’.

The ones who thought Lalu Yadav was a bumbling fraud, made endless fun of Mayawati for having the temerity to carry handbags, but don’t see why we shouldn’t give Yogi Adityanath’s saffron robes a chance. The ones who, having dozed through at least one history class, like the idea of ‘strong’ leaders, and have the breadth of vision to understand that sometimes you can’t really help it if poor people die. The ones who long felt, but were long unable to say, that yes, Muslims are a little funny smelling, aren’t they? (It’s the meat they eat, they sweat it out). The ones who would never decline an expensive steak when abroad, for fear of appearing ‘backward’ in front of white people; who don’t really have time to be bothered about Indian farmers beaten to death for buying cows; and would promptly adopt vegetarianism, for health reasons, should loud voices tell them to.

The ones who like the comforts of a majority, the ease of not having to stand out, but think the word ‘majoritarianism’ reeks of pretentious Leftist intellectual cant. The ones who think it’s cutting edge to investigate the wonders of ancient Hindu tradition, argue that caste is a highly unfair colonial construct, and don’t see why gaumutra shouldn’t be marketed as pills — it’ll be good for science and the economy.

Let’s talk about the people who, always, have troubles enough of their own. Who would never, ever speak out of turn, never rock a boat, never challenge authority, because that would hamper their careers and their club memberships.

The people who, while they may well be perfectly satisfactory at heart, have long lost the ability to analyse, criticise, or feel at all deeply about anything that doesn’t directly affect them… and their money.

(As a liberal elite, I’m proscribed by my league from criticising the poor, even if they do often commit the actual lynching, rape and riot that frightens the rich and keeps them in line. This is typical and slippery of me, of course, and shows that I am patronising, disconnected, and incapable of rational argument without resorting to hyperbolic sentimentality.)

Still, for all the money they have, all the money in the world won’t buy them this one thing: a new conscience. And the old one? It’s buried under so much muck, you’d need all of that Arabian perfume to wash it clean.

But the Germans have depleted that stock. And I’m not giving away any of the spirit alcohol I’ll be imbibing in my dotage.

Parvati Sharma is the author of the novel Close to Home

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