Of Vadra, Gadkari and Godel

Now that Arvind the Axeman has gone after Mukesh Mouse, Churchill might well have said “Never have so many been entertained so much by so few”. Gone are the days when cricket, soaps, quizzes and films ruled prime time television. News has become the default option now. From 8 pm to 11 pm you can surf the news channels endlessly and they will rarely fail to entertain.

Allegations, counter-allegations, indignation, pomposity, low cunning, sly digs, sycophancy, sanctimony, faked hurt, shouting matches, questions parading as news, and oh, the occasional fact, are all there in embarrassingly and offensively large proportions to help you get through tedious evenings. It is a measure of the masochism in all of us that we watch this inglorious parade without squirming too much.

For more than two years now, I have been trying to find an explanation for this voyeuristic phenomenon and, finally — and I think largely because of Kejriwal’s charge that Mukesh Ambani is the real prime minister of India — I may have stumbled on the explanation: Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

Neither prove nor disprove

Kurt Godel, to give him his full name, was a 20th century mathematician who, in 1931, proved — to the satisfaction of his very formidable peer group — that in any axiomatic system there would always be one proposition that could neither be proved nor disproved. In short, he said, beyond logical truth lies faith.

Some mischief makers tried to wind up the Vatican saying that this was a direct challenge to idea of God in the sense that religions are axiomatic systems based on Gods whose existence could neither be proved nor disproved. But nothing much came of it.

So what, asked the Vatican and rolled on inexorably. In any case, it later turned out that Godel was not challenging the existence of God at all, and according to his wife, read the Bible regularly.

Be that as it may, see how similar the Vatican’s response was to that of the Congress party, where Robert the Reticent is concerned, and of the BJP, where Nitin the Noble is concerned. So what, asks the Congress party, Robert is a private citizen. So what, asks the BJP too, go ahead and probe our party president.

This in-your-face attitude has incensed many Indians but they should control their anger. The problem, as I see it, is explained by Godel’s Theorem.

Thus, Vadra the Victim may well have used his in-laws to get ahead in life — who doesn’t, yaar ? But this can neither be proved nor disproved because the papers are in order. Likewise, Godly Gadkari may perhaps have used some shell companies for this or that unexplained purpose. But this also can neither be proved nor disproved.

The mere existence of shell companies, if that is what they are, is not enough to prove dirty work at the crossroads.

Godel called this sort of thing the problem of completeness. This meant that a system of propositions could not be complete and consistent at the same time, at least not entirely.

As a result, there would always be that one thing — big or small — that had to be taken on faith like, say, Arvind the Adamant’s proposition about who the real prime minister of India is.

This, by the way, is the equivalent of the 11th century Christian proposition that “God exists in the understanding of God”. In Urdu, they say the same thing that Akalmand ko ishara kaafi hota hai .

India’s Godel problem

This is the key problem with corruption in India. You have to understand that it exists, or as Michael Polanyi, the many-faceted intellectual, showed, there is something called tacit knowledge which is distinct from explicit knowledge.

This is knowledge that you have but cannot prove it or transfer it to someone else. It is, if you will, the way Sachin Tendulkar used to bat or Amitabh Bachchan can act, even on ‘Crorepati’.

Kejriwal’s problem is precisely this. We know what he is saying is true but no one can actually prove it. And the tragedy is that all political parties know this, which explains their arrogance and insouciance. Whence, indeed, their smugness when they say, prove it or beat it.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say (while tipping a wink at Voltaire) that in large democracies with periodic elections, if corruption did not exist, it would have to be invented because fighting an election is a very expensive affair and maintaining political machines to fight them is even more so. And the larger the democracy — India has 750 million voters — the greater the corruption is bound to be.

In short, like all other democracies, India is stuck. It wants honest politicians, the equivalent of Godel’s completeness and consistency. But that’s not going to happen.

What’s the way out? I don’t know.

Postscript : What do Arvind Kejriwal, Robert Vadra and Nitin Gadkari have in common? Almost identical moustaches.

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