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Thursday, Nov 10, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Politics of accusation, culture of suspicion

Harish Khare

The Volcker storm goes beyond Natwar Singh's travails. The cumulative consequence is that attention gets diverted from serious issues of policies and programmes.

IN A remarkably thoughtful essay, entitled Gravitas and Style: Indira Gandhi, penned sometime in the early 1990s, Natwar Singh has recalled his last meeting with Indira Gandhi, a couple of days before her assassination: "I told her that I was shortly leaving for Bharatpur to start politicking. My first priority would be to acquire a new wardrobe — khadi kurta-pyjama, Jawahar jacket, the Congress livery. Her reaction was: Now that you are coming into politics, a thicker skin would be more useful."

Indira Gandhi's witty remark was not an invitation to a life of cynicism. It was only a reminder that those who choose to vie for a place in public life needed to balance the demands of decency, obligations of morality, and rites of integrity, on the one hand, with the hazards of misinformation, deliberate lies, plain falsehood or even worse. The balancing act is never easy and often tests the very core of a man's value system. Mr. Singh discovered this last one week how testing and tormenting this balancing act can become.

Mr. Singh's pain became more painful because of the larger culture that our political parties have nurtured for nearly three decades now: a working political style of accusation and suspicion. An undue premium is placed on motives and morals of those in power; any and every suggestion of wrongdoing, whether credible or not, whether substantiated or not, is ipso facto treated as correct and the onus is placed on the accused to prove his or her innocence. Over the years those in power have also learnt the art of using the state's resources to create a miasma of suspicion and doubt about their political rivals.

Take, for instance, the hullabaloo a few weeks ago on the so-called Mitrokhin papers. A defector, a professional intelligence officer, a life-long trained operative in the art of misinformation, published a book that sent a section of our political leadership into a tizzy. Even L.K. Advani, a man who was Home Minister of India for six years and should know a thing or two about the shadowy world of intelligence agencies, demanded a "White Paper." Mr. Mitrokin, a man who betrayed his own country, was prima facie judged to be telling the truth about our leaders.

Perhaps the origin of this culture of accusation can be traced to the early 1970s when an omnipotent Indira Gandhi and equally omnipresent Congress Party induced a sense of total political and electoral helplessness among the Opposition parties. Without a hope of ever having to discharge the responsibilities of power, the Opposition leaders freely and recklessly levelled allegations against Indira Gandhi and her aides. This was truer of the north Indian politicians and political parties.

It was perhaps a coincidence that this politics of accusation jelled very well with the Sangh Parivar's penchant for whispering, rumour-mongering, and other tools of character assassination. This was a time when the inner cities in north India were still the sites of political activity and word of mouth travelled fast within the communities; the only medium of expression was the wall-poster.

This creeping recklessness was in sharp contrast to the Nehru era when the Opposition, though miniscule, did its homework and often got the better of the government. For instance, there was Ram Manohar Lohia's famous argument with Jawaharlal Nehru on the daily income of an Indian wage-earner; that was an argument that Lohia was seen to have won. On its part, the Government was sensitive to the Opposition's criticism.

An eminent Finance Minister, T.T. Krishnamachari, had to go after the Chagla Commission found a lapse of judgment by the Finance Ministry in the so-called Mundra affair. Then, there was the S.R. Das Commission against Pratap Singh Kairon, then Chief Minister of Punjab, and the intrepid maker of modern Punjab had to go. It was still a world of responsible opposition and civilised government.

After the 1971 Bangladesh War, when The Economist anointed Indira Gandhi as "the empress" and Atal Bihari Vajpayee hailed her as "Durga," the Opposition began wallowing in a political style of accusation rather than debate. Correspondingly, the Congress developed the habit of outright denial and rubbishing of the Opposition allegations. The outcome was stalemate in the polity. Be it the "Gujarat Movement" or the "Bihar Movement" or the "JP Movement," the spark came from accusations and suspicions that this Chief Minister or that Cabinet Minister was engaging in "corrupt" practices.

The Emergency experience injected such an abiding doze of partisanship in our body politic that rivals could do nothing right and each and every accusation was deemed to merit only a full-throated denial.

The Bofors episode, the Harshad Mehta scam, the Hawala business, the UTI scandal, and the Tehelka exposé all became milestones in this politics of abuse and accusation. The Volcker Report fitted eminently in the prevailing political ambience. This politics of abuse and accusation finds an easy partner in the new media, game for any kind of sensationalism.

Leaders and families

The Volcker storm goes beyond Mr. Singh's travails. This culture of abuse, accusation, denial, and stonewalling distracts from the larger issue of keeping private lives separate from the public domain. Our political leaders have developed such thick skins that they are no longer sensitive to the requirement of keeping their families out of the sphere of their official and public roles. Unfortunately, politics is becoming a family enterprise; sons, daughters, sons-in law, fostered or otherwise, all get enmeshed in the rent-seeking activities of the political leaders.

In fact, in most cases it is the leader's this or that "chamcha" who entices a son or a daughter or a son-in-law to take an "interest" in his father's activities; what begins as an innocuous intervention in getting some petty official transferred becomes a heady engagement, with the excitement of easy money and easier commissions. Soon the son or the daughter seeks "protection" with an appointment in the father's party's youth wing; in case of the smaller, leader-centric parties, the son right away gets the party's nomination.

This all-round invasion of the family in the party system invariably results in personality-centric politics, within the party as well as in the inter-party disputes. This distracts attention from issues and ideologies. Charges, suspicions, allegations, and accusations become the staple diet of political discourse. Much against their inclination party activists and managers find themselves having to put up a stout defence against rivals' allegations. Any suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of the son or the daughter is immediately seen as an attack on the "leader."

The cumulative consequence is that attention gets diverted from serious issues of policies and programmes. For instance, the National Democratic Alliance has been content to raise issues of "taint," while it has been left to the Left Parties to talk of serious issues of direction of economic policies and autonomy in foreign policy.

The quality of policy debate is much poorer today than it was two decades ago, resulting in an accent on boycotts and disruption of Parliament. Worse, the media too finds itself sucked into this game of name-calling; rather than doing serious evaluation of evidence or attempting a competent evaluation of charges, the tendency has become to accept at face value any allegation against anybody.

Unless political parties learn to extricate their organisations from the leaders' families, we will continue to get sucked deeper and deeper into the politics of accusation. The politics of accusation induces a culture of permissiveness within the parties. Any reasonably well-informed political reporter, covering the AICC or the BJP, can smell the presence of "wheeler-dealers," the buccaneers and the dubious entrepreneurs who are inexplicably deemed to be "useful."

Only political leaders seem to be unaware of what goes on within their bailiwicks. This, of course, is a charitable assessment. The crux of the problem is that most political parties permit individual party leaders to "collect" funds for the organisation; as the culture of permissiveness has got more and more entrenched, the party system has lost the will to institute any kind of in-house vigilance regime.

Above all, the Volcker storm has once again exposed the Indian polity to the dangers of manipulation from the outside. Given our politicians' and the media's willingness to lap up any accusation, and given the increasing integration of the Indian economy with a global business environment, it is child's play to produce damning "evidence" against any public figure.

As a society and as a polity we have to demonstrate an intellectual maturity, a degree of self-assurance, and a capacity for self-criticism to deal with the foreigner and his indictment or praise. Political leaders, cutting across party lines, have to summon a new morality and invent a new style of conducting their rivalry; otherwise, the Indian state will become more and more vulnerable to professional manipulators.

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