The political formula of one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards

The political formula of one million evil men, ten million stupid men, and a hundred million cowards is Abdul Ghani’s explanation of how political power operates through a ruling elite, its enforcers, and the officials who let its decisions pass. Delivered to Lin in Abdel Khader Khan’s home, it rejects a purely class-based account of politics and makes complicity, as well as command, central to the workings of power.

The argument in the courtyard

Abdul Ghani presents the formula during a conversation in a courtyard garden at the heart of Abdel Khader Khan’s house. Monsoon rain falls around the veranda, where the men sit under cover with sweet tea. Abdul Ghani eats honey cake as he develops his argument, giving a sweeping theory of empire and political violence the setting of an informal conversation rather than a formal speech. His genial manner and sudden changes of subject are part of the scene; the argument nevertheless arrives as a deliberately ordered set of claims.

The three numbers are not offered as a detailed census of political institutions. They work as a compressed model: one million people have decisive power, ten million enforce their decisions, and a hundred million administer or tolerate them. Abdul Ghani then sets those groups against the much larger remainder of humanity, whom he describes as largely doing what they are told. The scale makes a pointed contrast between the few whose choices shape events and the many whose participation or inaction allows those choices to take effect.

The three positions in the model

The first group consists of the powerful and wealthy, including politicians and religious fanatics, whose decisions set the world on a course of greed and destruction. In Abdul Ghani’s account, their defining position is not simply membership in a social class; it is their ability to make choices that carry political consequence. They form the small center of command around which the rest of the formula is organized.

The second group is made up of soldiers and police. Abdul Ghani calls them stupid not because he denies their courage, but because they give their lives for governments and causes that use them as expendable pieces and may later betray, neglect, or abandon them. The label is deliberately severe: these people possess the means to enforce power, yet do not control the purposes for which that power is used. His reference to nations’ treatment of war heroes sharpens the gap between the value governments extract from their service and the care they give them afterward.

The third group consists of bureaucrats and other officeholders: department heads, committee secretaries, association presidents, managers, officials, mayors, and court officers. Abdul Ghani identifies their characteristic role as permitting decisions to proceed while claiming that they are merely following orders, doing their jobs, or replaceable by someone else. In his examples, the papers they sign can consign an individual to execution or leave populations to famine. Their cowardice is thus political rather than simply personal: they know what is happening, yet use procedure and routine to avoid responsibility for it.

A challenge to class explanations

Abdul Ghani explicitly contrasts his model with Marx’s account, arguing that the decisive issue is not class because every class remains in the hands of the small group with real power. The formula redirects attention from broad social categories to a chain of authority: decision, enforcement, and administrative acquiescence. It also refuses to treat political harm as the work of rulers alone. The enforcer and the paper-shuffling official occupy different positions, but both help turn the powerful group’s decisions into consequences for others.

He extends the model far beyond the immediate political conversation, presenting it as a recurring cause of empire and rebellion and as a force that has shaped civilizations across ten thousand years. He invokes the pyramids, the Crusades, and the making of war, then adds that the same formula can impose peace. That last claim gives the theory a reach beyond condemnation: the arrangement that produces political order can also determine the terms on which conflict stops. The argument presents the pattern as recurrent and adaptable, not as a description of one government or a single historical episode.

The formula alongside the novel’s social worlds

Elsewhere, the novel gives the formula’s large categories concrete social surroundings without presenting them as direct illustrations of Abdul Ghani’s theory. At a clandestine people-market, Prabaker tells Lin that children displaced by calamities in several Indian states have been brought to Bombay and that purchasers and agents are negotiating over them. The scene makes visible a system in which vulnerable people have little power while intermediaries and buyers act on their circumstances. It resonates with Abdul Ghani’s concern with who decides and who enables, though the conversation does not explicitly apply his numerical scheme to the market.

The Cuffe Parade slum offers a different contrast. It contains twenty-five thousand residents on ten acres, beside a modern World Trade Centre, yet lacks electricity, running water, and toilets, and its residents have no certainty that officials will allow their homes to remain. Within that exposed community, Qasim Ali Hussein describes justice as both fair and forgiving, and as an effort not only to punish wrongdoing but to save the person who has done it. In a separate crisis, residents first hesitate to intervene in domestic violence, then gather to stop it; afterward, they wash and comfort the offender and offer the possibility of forgiveness and help. These episodes complicate any simple division between powerful actors and passive masses: institutional neglect and hesitation coexist with collective action, responsibility, and attempts at repair.

Meaning and limits

The formula is Abdul Ghani’s political diagnosis, not a neutral inventory of every person’s character. Its labels compress distinctions among people into memorable moral categories, and its enormous round numbers give the speech the force of a maxim rather than an empirical demonstration. Its central insight is more specific than the labels: power depends not only on those who make decisions, but also on the people who enforce them and the officials who knowingly permit their consequences.

The conversation’s movement from political theory to ordinary life helps preserve that distinction. Abdul Ghani speaks with warmth and humor, and Lin laughs with him, but the argument concerns grave outcomes: betrayal of soldiers, execution, famine, empire, and rebellion. By dividing responsibility across a hierarchy instead of locating it solely at the top, the formula makes political obedience and administrative silence visible as actions with consequences. The novel’s scenes of precarious lives and community justice give that concern a human scale, while leaving the formula itself as a sharp, contestable framework rather than a complete explanation of every social world.