If there is a lesson—and in my judgement there is only one— it is that right across the spectrum there exists in India a latent streak of ‘sycophancy’ capable of surfacing at the behest of the likes of Indira, Sanjay and God knows who else. The police constable and the senior civil servant shed with extraordinary ease not philosophical concepts like integrity or ‘dictates of conscience’ but the everyday dos and donts of their profession. I know—as I am so often reminded—that these people had families to support, daughters to marry, sons
