Those in government will know long words

The assertion by Mani Shankar Aiyar that recondite and polysyllabic — or, for those who prefer less letters, abstruse and long — words are the preserve of the privileged may have an element of truth, though not quite in the collegiate context he insinuated. Aiyar’s ire was probably stoked by the terrifying realisation that what convention and geography had deemed to be streets apart — St Stephen’s and Hansraj College — has been ultimately united by the common taint of governmentalese.

Anyone who has served in government — in this case, both Aiyar and his target Ajay Maken — cannot possibly resist using lengthy words like hereinafter, expedite, emoluments, etc. But that preference for pedantic prose is not dictated by individual educational qualifications or peer group predilections; it is the result of relentless indoctrination of all new recruits, mantri or mandarin, by generations of sarkari hardliners about the need to sound ponderous in order to be taken seriously. And it is par for the course if ministers appropriate the credit for tortuous linguistic constructions, though their secretariat may have done the requisite dictionary trawling, as Aiyar well knows.

Besides, any Indian minister or bureaucrat — and particularly those who have been both — who resorts to plain English risks being accused of violating the Official Secrets Act at the very least, if not lèse majesté. It would not do for the aam aadmi to think that anything about the government is simple or common, after all.

It is not surprising then that a logical, if subversive, corollary to the Right to Information Act — the right to plain language — was cleverly never considered or even broached. That may now become the unintended, if welcome, consequence of the digressive war of words between Aiyar and Maken.