Rahul Jacob: Our rights, whose responsibility?

A couple of days after the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)'s decision to slash power tariffs in Delhi, especially for those whose usage of electricity was below 400 units a month, a colleague recounted a tale that reflects the breathtaking cynicism of the city, even in the Age of Arvind. His wealthy neighbour had installed five separate electricity meters in the house, most of these in the name of his household help, to qualify for the lowest consumption slab.

Like many of us, I became a Kejriwal fan months ago. Watching him calmly confront the more than occasionally abrasive Rajat Sharma on Aap ki Adalat, he seemed exactly the sort of politician India needs. I felt that again listening to his first speech to the Delhi Assembly.

A couple of weeks in Indian politics, however, is an eternity. Frenetic populism by AAP in the form of giveaways of electricity and, much more damagingly, of free water to a middle class that can afford to pay for it in a city where the water table is dropping precipitously, have made many of us in the media reverse our collective suspension of disbelief.

Watching a replay of his Delhi Assembly speech on YouTube recently, I was struck by how well Kejriwal serves as an echo chamber of the Delhi chattering classes. Hackneyed complaints that you hear in living rooms across the city are articulated, albeit much more intelligently, by Kejriwal. For instance, the bit about how he was happy to wait at red lights like the rest of us - unlike our politicians with their red beacons. Less predictably, he sounded empathetic and practical when he said that slums could not be broken down arbitrarily because the inhabitants have to live somewhere and would simply move elsewhere.

But the line that we are all aam aadmi now so long as we are honest (even if we live in Greater Kailash) smacks of an orator's flourish, of someone telling us exactly what we want to hear. Mahatma Gandhi, by stark contrast, challenged us to be better people - to disregard caste hierarchies, to be more secular-minded and even not to spit on the street. Kejriwal's speech featured very little talk about our responsibilities as citizens of Delhi and far too much about our rights. There is a wonderful anecdote recounted by Walter Crocker, a former Australian diplomat, in his memoir about Jawaharlal Nehru. He describes the prime minister quietly picking up the banana peels thrown on the floor by his fellow Congressmen at a tea hosted for them. Very rarely in Kejriwal's speeches does he ask us to be better citizens - even not to litter. Not all our problems are created by politicians.

In a country as deeply unequal as ours, socially and economically, very few of those living in upper middle-class neighbourhoods in the capital can claim to be the common man. In one of the most corrupt capitals in the world, we are all complicit for not demanding a proper receipt every time we buy something or for selling real estate in part black-part white transactions. I recently passed on the name of a good plumber to a friendly acquaintance who lives in prime property at the edge of Lutyens' Delhi. Two weeks later, this impeccably courteous gentleman complained that the plumber's bill had been inflated because the company he worked for had added VAT. I was dumbfounded before I recovered to mumble that the company was merely following the law.

Our poorer politicians are corrupt in part because they are levelling a very unequal playing field that the better off and better connected among us created. Katherine Boo pungently observes in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, that among wealthy Indians "the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade."

Of all the populism on display in the first couple of weeks of the AAP administration, the most troubling has been the promise of free water without any means testing for the recipients of this handout as well as without cleaning up the corruption in the Delhi Jal Board, which results in large losses. Writing in the Indian Express, Asit Biswas, contrasts AAP's largesse with the wealthier Johannesburg. AAP is offering three times as much free water - 670 litres daily - per household as Johannesburg does. Biswas, a professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, estimates that in Delhi, water losses are about 50 per cent compared with Phnom Penh's losses of just 6.5 per cent.

Think about that - our poor management of infrastructure puts us behind countries such as Cambodia today. NASA data show that the water table in states such as Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab is declining at an alarming 30 to 40 cm per year because we waste so much water already on our farms but also in cities. Nevertheless, in Delhi we can now turn on the taps in our gardens and hose our cars down daily with impunity. The path AAP has led us down will likely mean we will see riots over water scarcity within a decade. A more responsible leader would have used his charisma to urge us to pay more for water and conserve a precious resource better, but that sort of straight talk really has gone out of fashion.