The Hindu : The vision deficiency syndrome

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 03, 2004

Opinion

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The vision deficiency syndrome

By Harish Khare

A national election should be able to renew the polity's democratic capital and deepen the Indian state's legitimacy. Instead, we are content to be limited in our vision.

IF THE D.P. Yadav episode brought us uncomfortably face-to-face with the disdain for moral concerns among many of the nation's political managers, the ongoing Najma Heptullah show is a reminder of the total disregard of principles of political loyalty, intellectual integrity or organisational discipline. It is just coincidental that the Bharatiya Janata Party operatives happen to have instigated the two events; other political parties too would not have had qualms in such matters. Individuals apart, the two events draw our attention to the new working religion: winning is the only thing. Political parties and leaders are prepared to go to any length — ridiculous or amoral or vacuous — to win a few Lok Sabha seats. As the country braces itself for a democracy's most noble and ennobling rite — a free and fair exercise of mass franchise — the absence of collective vision is pointed and disturbing.

Let us be clear about what vision is not all about. Vision is not a sum total of slogans. Nor a few catch-phrases borrowed from the advertiser's repertoire. Nor is it the "vision 2004" that the BJP president, Venkaiah Naidu, keeps tirelessly talking about. Nor is it the kind of clever thinking that the BJP is threatening to unveil in its "vision document," a manifesto separate from the National Democratic Alliance agenda, at best a sleight of hand intended to assure the Hindutva constituency that the party remains committed to the cause while permitting the NDA partners to pretend that they are not co-conspirators in the advancement of the RSS blueprint. And, certainly, vision is not something that accrues to a yatri like Lal Krishna Advani who for the last two years has insisted that the traffic on Delhi roads be closed for him, a la the Prime Minister's "security route," and, now, the same Mr. Advani wants us to believe that his "yatra" is something nobler than an election stunt. The Deputy Prime Minister is making a last ditch effort to market himself for a post-Vajpayee situation by showing that he too can draw crowds. And, of course, the same calculus had prompted Sonia Gandhi to stage her "road shows," out to prove that the Nehru-Gandhi family retains its much-touted charisma. But then, vote-mongering is not to be confused with the vision thing.

It is tempting to assume that there is already a vision at work and this vision can be de-constructed from the recent "India Shining" advertisement blitz. The Prime Minister's supporters are already claiming for him the mantle of a visionary; true, but then, numerous advertisements — all funded by the taxpayer's money — have also made similar claims for Mamata Banerjee, Shatrughan Sinha, C.P. Thakur and other Central Cabinet Ministers. Suddenly, we seem to have been blessed with too many visionaries. But again, vision is not to be confused with partisan propaganda or political rhetoric.

This search for vision is not a romantic quest. No nation has been able to become a great nation without a collective vision, a set of inspirations and sentiments that invites a society as a whole to rise above its narrow — internal and distracting — preoccupations and to create a holistic synergy. A vision has to necessarily consist of morally defensible ideas, attitudes and values. This cannot, by definition, be a sectarian enterprise. Vision has to be a civilisational pursuit. Can the upcoming electoral exercise create conditions for a new India to take its rightful place in the comity of nations in a dramatically changed — and, changing — global environment?

A nation's vision does not necessarily have to depend upon the outcome of an election, though a morally-deficient regime can certainly deplete a polity's capacity to discover its wholesome impulses and traditional resilience. In 1998, too, we were witness to the triumph of pragmatism, as we are witnessing today; then, as now, the favourite strain was: let us be aggressively pragmatic and win the elections, put honourable and good men in command who in turn would usher in a new order. That has not happened and could not happen because it was a flawed venture from the very beginning; and, it was flawed because it was not anchored in any kind of vision. The 1999 vote was won around the Kargil "Vijay" and the pageantry of martyrdom camouflaged the pronounced vision-deficiency. How insincere the quest for su-raaj (good governance) was became obvious in the D.P. Yadav episode. Those who preoccupy themselves with petty calculations cannot claim any progress on the su-raaj delivery.

The Vajpayee years have remained just another era of coping, without any conscious effort to excise the polity of its institutional infirmities. The reason is simple: a well-diagnosed vision deficiency. If gross abuse of authority did not take place, it was because the NDA did not have the kind of parliamentary majority for that. But also remember how George Fernandes was re-inducted into the Union Cabinet much before a judicial inquiry would absolve him in the Tehelka controversy. Or, take the recent attempts to bend the institutions for narrow party gains. There was this ill-advised move to induct a "friendly" outsider as the Chief Election Commissioner. Then, an equally ill-advised claim was presented to the Election Commission that the Deputy Prime Minister be allowed the use of Indian Air Force aircraft for campaigning in the Lok Sabha elections. Because the Prime Minister and his deputy were only too willing to accommodate all demands of the allies — all in the name of coalition dharma — they now find themselves having to give in to the outright partisan demands made by the BJP's so-called younger leaders, the Venkaiah Naidus, the Pramod Mahajans and the Arun Jaitleys.

It is not that in these six years Mr. Vajpayee has not changed the way the country has come to think about itself and about the rest of the world. As a country we seem more self-assured of ourselves than before, primarily because the saffron crowd itself has discovered that its fears about others' capacity to influence us against our will were exaggerated. Whether it is a case of discovery of a new self-assured India or a matter of political convenience, the BJP leadership has remorselessly cast aside the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch's politics and economics. The real reason is even simpler: those economic forces that in 1998 propelled Mr. Vajpayee to the centre-stage have grown larger than the BJP establishment and these forces would not permit any romantic recourse to economic nationalism. And if the Vajpayee crowd has simply fallen in line with the interests of its corporate sponsors, it is because there was never a well-defined vision to enable it to make moral choices.

The much-talked-about accent on "development" in this campaign, again, is devoid of any promise of collective joy and prosperity. But this vision-deficiency is not confined to matters economic; it has handicapped our capacity to deal with a world that stands dramatically re-configured. All these years Pakistan was the enemy; our domestic discourse, blessed by the RSS high priests, insisted that Pakistan was perennially inimical to us; Pervez Musharraf was the prime manufacturer of that intractable hostility. Now suddenly we seem to have developed great faith in the good General's intentions and usefulness. Suddenly, every single "intelligence" agency is ready with the "infiltration is down" reports.

What is worse, no political party has given a good enough reason to the electorate to vote out the incumbent government. Sonia Gandhi is simply happy to be herself, a mascot of a political dynasty. No political party or leader has the moral courage to talk about great issues confronting the nation. Nor is any party willing to make an election issue of the collapse of the rule of law in Gujarat. It would have been wonderful if Mr. Vajpayee were to use his newly-manufactured personality cult to seek a mandate to drain the swamp of official lawlessness in "Modiland." A national election should be able to renew the polity's democratic capital and enhance and deepen the Indian state's authority and legitimacy. Instead, we are content to be limited in our vision. Silence, please: small minds at work.

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