To crave for a reputation for rectitude and austerity at all costs is unusual among politicians, and not merely among Congressmen. To be really worthy of it by being steadfastly austere and correct is almost impossible. What is impossible is for ordinary and extraordinary partymen to rally round such a leader. That is precisely what has happened to Antony. A whole lot of corrupt and ostentatious Congress workers and leaders find it as useful to pay tributes to his austerity and rectitude as do those who have not had occasion to be socorrupt.

Considering how Antony's ethical posture has won acclaim from partymen who are not quite encumbered by such lofty thoughts and ideals, it is easy for the devil not only to quote the scripture but even to lay it down.

Congressmen have come to be known as more corrupt than all others. If khadi kurta was once intended to be a symbol of simplicity, it has long been known as a cover for corruption. Younger Congressmen, who go by the galling name of youth Congress leaders, have given khadi no more dignity than their obese elders by being clad in it.

For all of them to sing Antony's praise for his Fransiscan approach to life and politics is strange. Most of them enjoy, unlike Antony, what are generally regarded as good things of life. It must be said in parenthesis that Antony has lately agreed that it is not entirely unethical to eat meat and fish, perhaps as a great concession to lesser mortals among his partymen. Most of them, again unlike him, do not mind owning or earning those good things bymeans that are not entirely fair. Their acceptance of Antony as a role model is, at one level, amusing; at another level, austerity and rectitude still retain a measure of their potency as great ideals.

Thus it is necessary to examine whether austerity should be projected as an ideal at all in a community which has for long been living in enforced austerity.

When Gandhi prescribed a dress for Congressmen, he was experimenting with a way to redeem the village economy.

More importantly, he was evolving an object and a ritual, which could form the basis of a new consciousness, around which a national movement for freedom could revolve.

As an object and as a ritual, if not also as an instrument of economic growth, khadi's relevance has ebbed after Gandhi.

New cloth material that is more acceptable and perhaps more easily available has been developed. Khadi no longer inspires in the wearer the same excitement as it did five decades ago. In the observer, it usually inspires only distrust andcontempt. Why then prescribe it as a political uniform for reluctant Congressmen? That is one of the major points of the code of conduct for Congressmen drafted by a committee under Antony's leadership.

This should be criticised for three reasons. First, India's economy is not likely to get a great fillip at its present level from khadi. The paradigm of growth India has adopted does not, on the one hand, give a pre-eminent role to khadi and, on the other, seems to be irreversible. Secondly, most people who are asked to don khadi are not quite happy about it. In any case, it has long lost its politico-moral lustre.

Thirdly, wearing khadi is just a ritual and most people are not enamoured by it. In evolving a code of conduct for Congressmen, Antony has given primacy to wearing khadi, probably not as an ethical assertion but as an act of binding a disparate political group by an old ritual.

The problem with the Congress is that it has become a prisoner of rituals, moreor less like Hinduism. For instance, that discredited cap. The Congress lives by rituals, just as it lives by corruption. It is all very well to formulate an ethical code of conduct, even if it is not scrupulously followed by everyone. That will at least help get the party's sights clear. But it will hardly help anyone if a moralistic approach is mistaken for a sagacious political movement. After a century of assumed austerity and rural serenity, it is time someone told Congressmen about the virtues of affluence and the illusory importance of such odd things like khadi. It is good to look forward, rather than backward, at least in matters that concern the marginal man.

The decline began when it started forgetting the basic concerns of the marginal man in its pathological preoccupation with power politics. Instead of the marginal man, a single individual, drawn from a single family, was always seen to be the driving force of the party. The disease became deadly when octogenarians who have worked uptheir way from the grassroots over a period of six decades or more came to the conclusion that the atrophy of the party's political faculties could be corrected only by surrendering all authority to someone much younger, to whom the Indian ambience is still rather unfamiliar, and whose relationship with the poor illiterate man is one of a distant observer. No party can save itself from moral and intellectual atrophy once it has such a syndrome of sycophancy. No code of conduct will suffice. It needs character.