The Ambassador is no more. The car that carried the powerful has drifted quietly down the road. It has been on ventilator for long with recurrent talk of its possible revival. The nation’s ‘official’ car actually died the day a Maruti-driving Manmohan Singh became our finance minister and brought to our plodding economy the agility of a hatchback. Decades later, when Hindustan Motors finally decided to consign the Nehruvian relic to the vault of history, the nation witnessed another rite of passage: The swearing-in of the Modi sarkar. Narendra Modi promises to drive our economy with the brute force of an SUV. Clearly, New India was no country for the old car.

Yet, so central is the Ambassador to our tryst with technology, our bureaucratic inertia, our VIP culture, our licence-permit raj and our venal politics that its history can well be the ghost history of our nation.

The Ambassador wasn’t just another colonial derivative, even though its design was borrowed from the British car Morris Oxford III. It was far sturdier and thus ideal for Indian roads. It was the symbol of India’s industrial and technological self-sufficiency. When its production started in the late ’50s, no one had imagined that this mascot of Indian industry would drive into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. For decades, it had little new to offer. The car that was supposed to revolutionise our sense of time and space turned out to be an example of status quo. No wonder then that it became such a favourite of our calcified bureaucracy and corrupt politicians.

The Ambassador so eloquently expressed how people perceived government and how government perceived itself, that it became the only unauthorised symbol of the Indian state. The Ambassador without a neta or a babu inside lost half its brand value, while a neta or a babu in any other car was sure to plunge into an identity crisis.

The Ambassador appealed to the pre-liberalisation Indian aesthetic when being plump and heavy was not all that undesirable in a starving nation dependent on foreign aid. Thin, emaciated looks and the weight-loss tamasha are cultural tropes of the post-liberalisation generation which has bigger salaries and more ways to spend them. The inequities were so pervasive that for many being plump was almost a guilty privilege. The ample Ambassador seemed to have the well-fed looks of a corrupt politician. Corpulent and white, it was the mechanical double of the roly-poly, khadi-clad neta in his conspiratorial black glasses. It was slow and deliberate, like the neta who could not be rushed or the babu with his red tape who would take his own sweet time. Its dignified poise on the potholed roads signified someone who was regally aloof from ground reality. Its grave, bulging exteriors announced the authority of its esteemed passenger. With its tinted glasses, curtained windows and spotless white colour, it had the mystique of sarkari power: It was a moving parlour where the high and mighty played their secret games.

Just as the vehicle of a Hindu god is part of its overall connotation, the Ambassador too was part of the iconography of the corrupt neta. The self-enclosed, smug abundance of the vehicle of this new god signified his occupation of the nation’s resources. Its white opacity and forbidding tinted windows suggested that he had retained something of the unreachable superiority of a royal. The Ambassador was the mount of the mai-baap sarkar.

With a revolving red beacon atop, the Ambassador was a bully on the road. It symbolised the State’s will to dominate the space where it daily engages with its people in most visible and dramatic ways, defying traffic signals and cutting through crowds like a knife. It became the overbearing State’s gesture to its people: Get aside. The VIP bully subverted the primary democratic site where the State enforces the law and creates consensus out of chaos.

In the pre-liberalised Indian State, where neither speed was a virtue nor acceleration a desirable administrative manoeuvre, the Ambassador was a perfect symbol of bureaucracy. The car was for the slow, deliberative babu for whom being sleek, fast and efficient was rather a mark of desperate inadequacy.

Though it was supposed to be an instrument of mobility, a propeller for the nation’s governing class, the Ambassador was really at the heart of the timeless stasis of pre-liberalised India. It is the new economy that has truly put India on wheels.

After the advent of the Maruti, it continued to be the vehicle of choice for the babu and the neta but it was increasingly becoming a misfit in a culture of speed ushered in by Manmohan Singh, first as a finance minister and later as the prime minister. The light and nimble Maruti signalled a power shift from the government to the new middle class and the burgeoning private enterprise. Now when Narendra Modi promises a small government and quick, unbridled expansion of the economy, the lumbering Ambassador could hardly have the right of way.

The narrative strands of the India story are coming together in startling ways. The last living relic from the Nehruvian age met its end just days before the 50th death anniversary of India’s first prime minister. And around the same time, a new order came to power in Delhi. The death of the Ambassador truly marks the passing of an era.

Dharminder Kumar is a freelance journalist in Delhi

Related Topics