I have never forgotten the college's annual “Games Dinner” of 1974–75, which I, never proficient at games of any sort, was invited to attend as the elected president of the College Students’ Union. Our guest speaker that night was a distinguished Stephanian of royal descent, an Additional Secretary to the government of India and a civil servant known to be well connected to the ruling family. He surveyed us, seventeen- to twenty-two-year-olds with bright eyes and scrubbed faces, and chose to express a candor none of us was accustomed to from Indian officialdom. “I look at you all,” he said bluntly, “the best and the brightest of our fair land, smart, honest, and able, and my heart sinks. Because I know that most of you will do what I did and take the civil service examinations, little realizing that if you succeed, your fate will be to take orders from the dregs of our society — the politicians.” He could see the shock on the faces of his audience as he went on: “Don't make the mistake I did. Do something else with your lives.”
I have never forgotten the speech, thinking about which kept me awake most of that night — and helped change my own career plans. If someone as successful and important in the bureaucracy as he could feel this way, I wondered, what satisfaction could ordinary people without his rank or connections derive from government service?
Nor have I forgotten the speaker, whom I have had the privilege of meeting many times since. He was Kanwar Natwar Singh, star of the IFS, who went on to put his money where his mouth was: he resigned from the government before he could attain the foreign secretaryship that most of his peers considered inevitable, and entered politics instead. This gave him a stint as minister of state for external affairs, where he could give orders to the foreign secretary of the day; and for two years he was India's foreign minister.
This transformation from diplomacy to politics — from pin-stripes to khadi—was extremely unusual even when Mani Shankar Aiyar followed in Natwar Singh's footsteps. But it became possible because of the unexpected ascent of Rajiv Gandhi to the prime ministry in 1984, which brought to power the kind of Indian almost completely unrepresented in Indian politics. The Stephanian kind.
How can one describe them? There are many of us, but, among India's multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national rather than local identity, which we express in English better than in any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part; we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. We see the poverty, suffering, and conflict in which a majority of our fellow citizens are mired, and we clamor for new solutions to these old problems, solutions we believe can come from the skills and efficiency of the modern world. We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.
And, in Indian politics, we used to be pretty much irrelevant.
Usually, we don't get a look in. We don't enter the fray because we can't win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don't have the votes: there are too few of us, and we don't speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learned to talk about political issues without the expectation that we would be able to do anything about them.
Rajiv Gandhi epitomized the breed, dismissed by so many as the baba-log (pampered children). When he came to office he was unlike any Indian political figure I had ever met. He had nothing in common with the professional politicians we had taught ourselves to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing private wealth through the manipulation of political favors. And at a time when casteists and religious fanatics were attempting to redefine India and Indianness on their own terms, I was proud to have an Indian leader who belonged to no single region, caste, or community, but to the all-embracing India I called my own. By simply being Rajiv Gandhi, he represented a choice it was vital for India to have.
It didn't last. He failed at his first attempt in office, and I was not alone in regretting that he did not more effectively act upon the convictions of his upbringing. At the second attempt, a suicide bomber deprived India of that choice. With Rajiv Gandhi's passing, there was no longer any Indian political leader of whom it could be said that his appeal was truly national, and in the spectrum of alternatives available to Indians, that loss was disenfranchisement indeed.
All that is now changing. Twelve Stephanians in Parliament, with more (the likes of Salman Khurshid, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, and Sheila Dikshit) behind the throne! And, to paraphrase Macaulay, others in politics who may not have earned the Stephanian label but are “Stephanian in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (like ministers P. Chidambaram, Praful Patel, and Jairam Ramesh and parliamentarians like Milind Deora). The political landscape may not have been irretrievably transformed, but we at last have a breed of politicians who have a chance to prove they can do better than “the dregs of society.”
Of course, as that very phrase suggests, there is a danger here, too. The very name St. Stephen's conjures up in the minds of some critics three overlapping concepts, none of which is meant to be flattering: elitism, Anglophilia, and deracination.
Whether it is a good thing that so many Stephanians are in Parliament, there is certainly a spirit that can be called Stephanian: I spent three years (1972–75) living and celebrating it. Stephania was both an ethos and a condition to which we aspired. Elitism was part of it, but by no means the whole. In any case, the college's elitism was still elitism in an Indian context, albeit one shaped, like so many Indian institutions, by a colonial legacy. There is no denying that the aim of the Cambridge Brotherhood in founding St. Stephen's in 1881 was to produce more obedient subjects to serve Her Britannic Majesty; their idea of constructive missionary activity was to bring the intellectual and social atmosphere of Camside to the dry dust plains of Delhi. Improbably enough, they succeeded, and the resultant hybrid outlasted the Raj. St. Stephen's in the early 1970s was an institution whose students sustained a Shakespeare Society and a Criterion Club, staged avant-garde plays and wrote execrable poetry, ran India's only faculty-sanctioned practical joke competition (in memory of P. G. Wodehouse's irrepressible Lord Ickenham), invented the “Winter Festival” of collegiate cultural competition, which was imitated at universities across the country, invariably reached the annual intercollegiate cricket final (and turned up in large numbers to cheer the Stephanian cricketers on to their accustomed victory), maintained a careful distinction between the Junior Common Room and the Senior Combination Room, and allowed the world's only non-Cantabrigian “gyps” to serve their meals and make their beds. And if the punts never came to the Jamuna, the puns flowed on the pages of Kooler Talk and the cyclostyled Spice (whose typing mistakes, under the impish editorship of Ramu Damodaran, were deliberate, and deliberately hilarious). And Stephanians wryly acknowledged the charge of disconnection from the masses by organizing union debates on such subjects as “In the opinion of this House, the opinion of this House does not matter.”