Large-scale political defection is a uniquely Indian institution. Other democracies see the occasional crossing of the floor; India has perfected the wholesale migration of legislators. But not all defections are the same. Some betray a party, some betray a leader. These are the ordinary sins of politics, as old as politics itself. The third kind is different. It betrays neither a party nor a leader but something far more fragile: the public’s trust. And that is the kind of defection that now defines our era.To understand what is at stake, remember Sudarshan’s immortal short story, ‘Haar Ki Jeet’. Baba Bharti, a saintly man, owns a magnificent horse, Sultan. The bandit Kharag Singh wants it desperately. So disguised as a crippled beggar, he pleads for a ride. But the moment Baba Bharti helps him onto the saddle, he gallops away, snatching the horse away. Baba Bharti runs after him. Not for horse, but with a request: take the horse, but tell no one how you took it. “If people hear of this,” he says, “they will stop trusting the poor and the helpless. No one will ever again stop to help a cripple by the roadside.”Sudarshan’s insight was profound. The real theft was not of the horse. The real theft would have been of trust, of the social instinct that makes a stranger stop to help a beggar. Baba Bharti could bear the loss of Sultan; he could not bear a world in which compassion itself becomes suspect. Even the bandit understood this and returns the horse in the night.But our political defectors have understood nothing of the sort. Consider the breed of defection represented by a Jyotiraditya Scindia or a Saayoni Ghosh. They were the most articulate defenders of secularism and constitutional values in public. And then they walked over to the other side, without a pause or a pang, into the very ideological formation they had spent a lifetime denouncing. No explanation is offered. No apology is tendered to the supporters, who reposed their faith in them, who argued for them in mohallas and drawing rooms, who fought elections in their name, who believed that their words about pluralism meant something. They are simply abandoned, left holding convictions their leaders have discarded in a nano second.Also read: From Mamata to Pawar: How Choice of Political Successors Led to the Decline of Regional SatrapsSuch defections do not merely desert a party or a leader. They confirm the most corrosive suspicion a citizen can hold. They confirm that political ideology is nothing but a costume, worn for convenience and changed for power. Every such defection makes the sincere ideologue less believable. The worker who genuinely sacrifices for a cause, who faces police lathis, loses livelihoods, spends years in thankless organisational work, suddenly looks like a fool, or worse, a fraud-in-waiting. The cynic feels vindicated, the idealist feels orphaned. And trust, once shattered, behaves exactly like Humpty Dumpty: it cannot put it together again.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.There is, if we are honest, a long civilisational pedigree to this opportunism. Iqbal’s famous line “kuchh baat hai ki hasti mitti nahin hamari” says something is there in us that our existence is never erased. But what is that “something”? Strip away the romance, and part of the answer is uncomfortable: our ruling classes survived every conquest because they rarely took a principled stand against any conqueror. They simply transferred their allegiance to whoever occupied the throne. The Indian and Hindu intelligentsia served, comfortably and continuously, in the courts of the Sultans, the Mughals, the British and dynasties further, drafting their revenue records, composing their accolades, administering their empires. Our ‘hasti’ or existence was never erased because our elites never staked it on anything. Survival through submission was dressed up as civilisational continuity.And the poor? The marginalised were never within the concerns of this ruling elite at all. They were always outcasted from power, from the court, down to the village well. So they distilled their exclusion into a philosophy of weary indifference: ‘koi nripa hoye, hamen ka hani’, that is, whoever becomes king, what loss is it to us? When no ruler ever ruled for you, the identity of the ruler ceases to matter. The elite’s opportunism at the top and the outcaste’s resignation at the bottom were two faces of the same broken compact. It was a polity in which power and principle had nothing to do with each other.Gandhian and Nehruvian idealism was, at its heart, a revolt against this entire ancient system. For the first time, it asked the elite to sacrifice, to rebel, rather than serve. And remarkably, they did. Barristers burnt their robes, Indian Civil Service (ICS) aspirants went to jail, elites rose against princely states, and the privileged marched against the British instead of petitioning them. And for the first time, it told the outcasted that the king’s identity was their business. It promised a swaraj where the poor and the marginalised could enter the ambit of power and decision-making. It deployed universal adult franchise as the instrument and the constitution as the guarantee. The freedom movement’s deepest achievement was not merely the transfer of power; it was the attempted repeal of the philosophy ‘koi nripa hoye, hamen ka hani’.Also read: Full Text | ‘Parties Splitting Is Unhealthy, It Keeps the Opposition From Doing Its Job’It is this idealism that has now been done away with. Cynicism now rules unabated. And it has been legitimised, paradoxically, by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ultimate self-professed champion of probity and idealism. The Sangh and the BJP built their entire claim to power on the promise of a moral political order. They claims to be “party with a difference,” disciplined, incorruptible, its cadres trained on the mantra of ‘chaal, charitra aur chehra’ conduct, character and face. What has RSS actually constructed? An order in which hypocrisy is an instrument of state. Leaders branded corrupt and criminals are welcomed, their files closing as their allegiance opens. The “washing machine” has become the hallmark euphemism of Indian politics: enter with charges, emerge with a ministry. A party that promised to purify public life has institutionalised the principle that no sin is unpardonable if the sinner is useful.Consider, too, the architecture of the order they have built. The Sangh dreamt of a “pure” Indian political dispensation, cleansed of alien accretions. It has erected, instead, a faithful replica of the Mughal architecture of governance it professes to despise. In Mughal system, the empire was held together not by shared conviction but by sworn allegiance: a subedar or jagirdar was free to run his estate as he pleased, tax as he liked, rule as he wished, as long as he presented himself at the durbar, bowed to the emperor, and remitted his tribute.Modi and Shah are the new Mughals. Pay them tribute, join the power. Do their bidding, hold on to your fiefdom. Swore allegiance to them, rule your state. Any turn court politicians and aligned bureaucrats have a space in their durbar. They just have to carry the command and then continue to enjoy unbridled power and corruption, with no questions asked. The party of cultural nationalism has revived the oldest Indian compact: allegiance without conviction.Narendra Modi will count this as triumph. He has shattered the trustworthiness of opposition politicians. He has shown that many of secularism’s most eloquent defenders had a price. But the wrecking ball swings both ways. In demolishing his opponents’ credibility, he has demolished the facade of his own parent organisation. The RSS stands exposed, naked, shorn of ‘chaal, charitra, chehra’. It is revealed as the restorer of the cynicism that Gandhi and Nehru had dared the nation to outgrow.Baba Bharti’s fear has come true on a national scale. The horse has been stolen, and the theft has been advertised. The danger is that citizens stop trusting politics itself. That the old fatalism returns: “koi nripa hoye, hamen ka hani”. Rebuilding that trust is the real task before Indian democracy. It will not be done by the king’s men. It can only be done by those who, like Baba Bharti, understand that some things matter more than the horse.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.