Activists Take on India's Corrupt Pols

Back in the 1950s, the British scholar W. H. Morris-Jones identified three idioms of Indian politics. These were the modern, the traditional, and the saintly. Thus, he wrote, “the modern language of politics is the language of the Indian Constitution and the Courts; of parliamentary debate; of the higher administration … ” On the other hand, the traditional idiom was local and sectarian. It “knows little or nothing of the problems of anything as big as India.” Here, “caste (or subcaste or ‘community’) is the core of traditional politics.” Finally, there was the saintly idiom, illustrated at the time Morris-Jones was writing, by the land-donation movement of Acharya Vinoba Bhave, “the ‘Saint on the March,’ who toured India on foot preaching the path of self-sacrifice and love and polity without power.”