There’s a peculiar armour-plate quality about India’s politicians whose lust for power is in inverse proportion to their capability to use it for the public good. No shame or scandal can disturb their determination to cling to seats of power, come hell or high water.

In the Congress party’s 1946 election for the post of president, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel got 16 of the 20 votes of provincial Congress committee chiefs, and should have rightly been elected party president and would have automatically become the first prime minister of free India. But Jawaharlal Nehru who didn’t get a single vote, protested to Mahatma Gandhi who inexplicably persuaded Patel to stand down, and Nehru had no compunctions about assuming that office. Likewise his daughter Indira Gandhi didn’t step down from the PMO (prime minister’s office) when she was adjudged guilty of electoral malpractice in 1975. Instead, she declared a national Emergency and locked up opposition members of Parliament.

This utter lack of embarrassment of the political class benignly presiding over the periodic floods, famines, mass suicides and immiserisation of the population without any acceptance of responsibility, continues to the present day. On October 11, the World Bank released its first ever Human Capital Index which measures the extent to which children who survive childbirth and live until age 60 will realise their potential. India is awarded a score of 44 percent, which means most citizens because of deficient nutrition and education don’t utilise 56 percent of their capability in their lifetime. This mean score is lower than of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and on a par with the sub-Sahara countries and Pakistan. And a few days earlier, the World Child Hunger Index published by Welthungerhilfe (Germany) and Concern Worldwide, ranked India #103 of 119 countries assessed.

On October 4, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) released a list of 1,400 new words included in its latest edition. Among them is ‘idiocracy’, defined as “a society consisting of or governed by people characterised as idiots, or a government formed of people considered stupid, ignorant or idiotic”. No prizes for guessing which country OED editors had in mind.