The Hindu : Winners and losers

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 04, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Winners and losers

By Harish Khare

The equations, political and economic, have been worked out to the disadvantage of the largest slice of the Indian population.

WHO WILL emerge the strongest after the next Lok Sabha election? Which group or groups and their interests will stand strengthened and further legitimised and which group(s)' claims and demands will probably get weakened and subsequently ignored? The question goes beyond the obvious interest in the fate of this or that alliance, or this or that prime ministerial contender. The question will still need to be raised, irrespective of the political colour of the next government, because the two principal political parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, as well as the third largest presence, the Samajwadi Party, can all be said to be in a state of happy communion with the same set of corporate players. So then will it make any difference whether we are nominally governed by an Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led regime or by a Sonia Gandhi-led coalition or by a Mulayam Singh Yadav-supported "third front" hotchpotch? Whichever way, the shots will continue to be called by the same business houses that have hijacked the growth agenda these last few years.

Political scientists and media analysts subscribe to the view that in a general election, the citizens are presented with an honest choice of different sets of ideas and programmes advocated by contending political parties. This is deemed to be the idea of democracy, with a capital `I' and a capital `D'. As a theoretical proposition, this cannot be challenged. But that is about it because as a working theorem an electoral democracy boils down to a contest between two or more political contenders each backed by different interests and groups; and the contender backed by the most resourceful of organised groups emerges the "winner." And this is particularly true in a fragmented polity like ours. With a very meagre investment in the fortunes of this or that potential political "winner", the organised interests reap a disproportionately high harvest of policy breaks and tax concessions.

This per se need not be a cause for dismay. After all, politics has intrinsically to do with the unending struggle over allocation of collective resources and the crux of politics has always been defined as "who gains what at whose expense." It is a different matter that political leaders argue that they are there to uphold the "public interest," thereby undertaking to ensure fairness in the allocation of collective resources. In our country, this pretence has been the primary source of generating legitimacy for the political system that was put in place after we chose to become a republic. In fact, the Indian state could become the most successful post-colonial state only because its post-Independence leaders sought power for themselves in the name of the welfare of the masses. It was the egalitarian promise of a welfare state that garnered popular support and acceptability for the post-Independence leadership as it sought to do away with the vestiges of feudalism as well as with an inherently unequal social order. Only a political leadership armed with this egalitarian promise and popular credibility could beat back the rear-guard assault of the Swatantra Party, the unapologetic political front of the princely classes and the capitalist crowd in the late 1950s and the early 1960s.

That somewhere on the way this promise got botched should not make us lose sight of democracy's bottom line: the legitimacy and acceptability of the political order depends upon its continued honest and sincere willingness to work for the welfare of the largest number of citizens. Lest we should get confused what the Indian democracy is all about, the Mahatma's talisman about "the poorest and the weakest man" has been inscribed in stone at the Rajghat. Even when a paradigm shift was undertaken in 1991, the rationale was that this switchover was needed to serve better the interests of the masses.

Now, as the polity steams into a new national election, the so-called India Inc. stands as the most organised group out to have a dominant say in the allocation of collective resources. Corporate India knows what it wants out of the next Lok Sabha election: a "stable" but not a very strong ruling arrangement at the Centre. In fact, it would be quite happy to see Atal Bihari Vajpayee back as the principal author of the new political grammar of development. After all, Mr. Vajpayee has presided over the most business-friendly government since Independence.

But business houses by themselves cannot fetch votes for any political party. It is at this point that the middle classes come in as the junior partner in the great development show. Articulate members of the middle classes tend to appropriate the civil society sites and use their perch in the information sector to promote the market mantra. This middle class has been told that it is no more a tiny minority but a healthy 300-million strong and that it should stand up for "consumers' rights" which are perennially in danger from "populist" political leaders. It is a different matter that these consumers, like mobile-users, do not know whom to turn to when they get fixed by the cellular cartel. We are witnessing how a voice has been ceded to another organised group, the non-resident Indians. And not to be easily overlooked is the almost institutionalised respect we have conceded to the so-called "international community" in our internal matters, be it the Colin Powell-initiated "breakthrough" in Islamabad or the Baghdad puppet regime's insinuation of Saddam Hussein's gift of "oil" for a political party. Only the most numerically dominant group — the lower classes/the lower castes/the poor/the landless — remains fragmented and can be organised/mobilised only as a region-specific force; in other words, practically the most numerical group of voters has no say in national policy-making. The equations, political and economic, have been worked out to the disadvantage of the largest slice of the Indian population.

As if this reworking of equations was not enough, the NDA regime has instigated a new discourse. This dominant discourse now seeks to equate the prosperity of a few corporate houses with the ultimate collective goal. The Congress slogan of "garib ke saath" is fashionably dismissed as unacceptable populism, partly because of the erosion in the party's credibility and partly because the discourse-mongers are no longer prepared to concede any intellectual merit in the welfare of the masses as a legitimate national goal. On the other hand, the pink press and its fellow-travellers are merrily going along with the fiction that in our Shining India the problems of inequity, poverty, joblessness, rural indebtedness, malnutrition, illiteracy, etc., stand taken care of.

Five years ago, L.K. Advani could say this to the annual gathering of the Confederation of the Indian Industry: "Why have Indian businessmen and politicians fallen in the esteem of the Indian people? Why are most Indian businessmen considered greedy, unscrupulous, and uncaring, in the same way as most Indian politicians are considered corrupt, power-hungry, and unprincipled? Is this public image good for Indian business as it readies to face the challenges and opportunities of the future? Isn't it a fact that bad business practices and bad political conduct have vitiated our social life and weakened the moral fabric of our great nation? If influential people in business and politics can break the law and flout the rules and get away with it, it is futile to expect the common citizens to have a respect for the law."

Today the ministerial rhetoric is a far cry from such indictments of corporate giants breaking the law. The NDA crowd is so mesmerised by its own capacity to sell politically its flip-flop that it has lost sight of larger ethical concerns. For years the Government maintained that oil was a strategic sector. Suddenly, one fine morning "oil" was no longer deemed a strategic sector just because a couple of corporate houses wanted a piece of the action.

The danger is not that the two principal political parties in the country are beholden to the same set of corporate players for funds to mount increasingly expensive election campaigns. The real danger is in the argument that the next Lok Sabha election would produce a "new mandate" for preparing India for a "globalised market economy." Implicit in this presumed "new mandate" would be a surrender of the political class' claim and moral stature to be the arbiter of national interests.

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