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At 60, the political culture needs renewal statecraft

Exactly 60 years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru exhorted the nation to “forget our mutual wranglings and conflicts” and cautioned that “there is no time for quarrelling or overmuch play, unless we prove false to our country and our people.” It was counsel of the wise, valid then and valid even today 60 years later. The grand task then, as now, was how to proceed with the rites of democratic engagement and, if necessary, to keep in check excesses of public co mpetition.

A polity devises — through painful experiences, and sometimes through joyful energy — an operative work culture commensurate with the state’s objective interests and designed to deepen its legitimacy. The emergent political culture is a sum total of preferred habits, style, values, and predilections for dialogue, conversations, contestations through disputes, disagreements, and conflicts. And, now there are also memories spread over 60 years, keeping alive the fault-lines of bitterness and antagonism. The balance-sheet, however, is not all that deficient.

In 2007 we rightfully take for granted the democratic polity and its culture, but this was not all that obvious at the beginning. In the early 1950s, the nation-state was honing and defining its place in the sun, formulating the internal dynamics of a new democratic idiom, and stumbling upon ways to graft an inclusive social (if not socialistic) order in an inherently feudal society.

In the formative years, the founding class drew its legitimacy from its association with the freedom struggle, it renewed that legitimacy from the democratic promise, a promise that was at total and complete variance with the colonial state and the feudal order. An ancient society, traditionally at ease with inequalities, was nudged into experimenting with a new egalitarian order.

Fortunately, it fell to Nehru’s Congress to define the rules of the game. Since it was such a behemoth and its leaders the undisputed custodians of the new freedom, the slate was clean for the Nehru-led elite to write on. As yesterday’s agitators and revolutionaries tried to become administrators and rulers, they wrote the grammar of a new culture.

Fortuitously enough Nehru blessed a liberal style which ensured that the extreme fringes — the Telangana rebellion, the Hindu Mahasabha fanatics — did not sour up the genteel style of contestations and disputes. The idiom of violence, it seemed, stood firmly spurned, if not altogether rejected.

The feudal princely class gave in to the logic of the democratic order; it in fact added to the new political system legitimacy when the former rajas and maharajas entered Parliament’s portals — mostly through the Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh. At the other end of the spectrum, by 1959, the Communist Party of India, too, had accepted the parliamentary system of government (even though it had been participating in the elections from 1952 onwards). Within a decade of Independence, the constitutional order was definitely fulfilling two primary conditions, of popular acceptability and political representativeness. Simultaneously, the new nation-state was trying to prove its competence by undertaking a welfare agenda. The political culture was remarkably commensurate with the state’s self-assigned goals and objectives.

In particular, the opposition was not frowned upon; it was seen as a vital part of the arrangement. Within Parliament, the opposition was deemed to be entitled to have its say and the government was to have its way; rather effortlessly this Westminster model was accepted, imitated, and practised. In the process, a few rules of the game were formulated and finessed: political rivals were not to be treated as enemies; nor were the state’s coercive powers to be used to tame political opponents.

Above all, state power was to be exercised in the public domain: be it a policy difference, or an ideological dispute, or political disagreement, all were to be anchored in the public interest. As Nehru had noted on August 15, 1947: “It must be clearly understood that the interests of our long-suffering masses must come first and every entrenched interests that come in their way must yield to them.” Inherent was an expectation that the political parties and organisations would primarily devote themselves to “care for the public,” in the sense of philosopher Jurgen Habermas’ touchstone, of “providing for the common good of all legal consociates.”

At 60 years, there is a certain exhaustion, even impatience, with the democratic noise. The very vested interests (against whom Nehru had warned) and their ideologues have captured the commanding heights of public discourse, and this advantage has been used to deprive politics and its practitioners of popular legitimacy.

These assaults notwithstanding, democratic India has to its credit two outstanding achievements. First, a firm and unequivocal assertion of the supremacy of the democratic civilian domain over the armed forces. This may appear today a totally inconsequential achievement but one has only to remember the experiments by the uniformed officers in our neighbourhood. The much-maligned political parties have instigated enough popular sanctions and support for the democratic process that no General has ever been tempted to step in “to save the country.” Not even when Jayaprakash Narayan invited the Army not to obey the “illegal” orders of Indira Gandhi; and, not even when Indira Gandhi herself jettisoned the rites of a liberal political culture. If the Army and paramilitary forces move out of the barracks only in defence of the civilian authority, it is only because of a political culture that regards its primary task as one of mobilising democratic sentiment.

The second grand achievement of democratic India has to be the firmly established rules of succession, especially the rites of office. Change of governments, even under the most trying circumstances of 1977, has been a smooth affair; when the incumbent Prime Minister loses the popular vote, he or she has gracefully made way for the winner; equally important, the loser was not sent into exile but was billeted in a palatial bungalow in Edwin Lutyens’ Delhi. The only exception to this protocol was the zealous persecution of Indira Gandhi by the Morarji Desai-Charan Singh duo, which only helped her renew her popular engagement. The civilised rules of succession devised by democratic India not only negated the centuries old history of feudal vendettas and violence, the new rites of office also kept at bay the challenges to the authority of the nascent nation-state.

The political culture broke down in the mid-1970s, leading to the infamous Emergency. Though the experiment in constitutional dictatorship was short-lived, the political class has yet to recover the old rhythm. The pre-Emergency preoccupation with personalities remains, and has already resulted in two political assassinations, in 1984 and 1991. This preoccupation with personalities — to the exclusion of ideology, organisational élan, and institutional integrity — did not help when the state encountered a structural crisis, and the result was the 1991 makeover to a market economy.

This departure from the “care for the public” commandment to market magic instigated fundamental changes in the polity’s architecture: decline of a pan-Indian party, rise of the regional parties, the strong Centre making way for a cooperative federalism, the resuscitation of constitutional institutions — presidency, judiciary, media, election commission, etc. The rites of political competition are circumscribed by a different set of institutional restraints.

Those who find themselves having the responsibility of presiding over the Indian state find it difficult to mobilise democracy’s energy, emotions, ideas, imagination, and passions in pursuit of national goals. The prevailing political culture — with personal obsessions and resentments at its core — distracts attention from a coherent response to the exacting task of governance. The irony is that while the context of political competition has become noisily democratic, especially with the advent of the new media and civil society’s new insistence on transparency, the competition itself stands depleted of its moral superiority.

After the somewhat joyless and ritualistic celebration of 60 years of Independence, the governing classes owe it to themselves to attend to the task of re-energising the political culture. The task is urgent because of the polity’s grand paradox: on the one hand, mass democratic movements have run out of steam and stamina, and, on the other, those groups that believe in violence have placed themselves beyond the reach of the state in large parts of the country. Sixty years ago Nehru wanted “to put an end to all internal strife and violence, which disfigure and degrade us and injure the cause of freedom.” That exhortation remains valid even today. The democratic project itself will come to a grinding halt if the political leaders, especially those who belong to the so-called mainstream parties, did not discover the joys of give and take, the rites of accommodation, and the compulsion of consensus-building.

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