Irony of the Indian Polity

B. S. Murthy

Winston Churchill felt that the Indian polity was not ripe for independence but Mahatma Gandhi pressed nevertheless. Some fifty-five years after Atlee granted it, what is the bottom line of the world’s largest democracy? Barring the brief aberration that was the internal emergency of Indira Gandhi, India nonetheless cruised on the path of democracy to enter its fourteenth Lok Sabha in the just concluded electoral exercise. Of course, all that was about the physicality of the Indian democracy of going through the motions. Well what about the cerebral quality of the Indian electoral output? The cheerleaders of the Indian democracy cite the shining examples of its electoral maturity in avenging Indira for her emergency and dumping the Janata for its ineptitude. Besides, did the electorate fail to respond to the emotive issues as one vote, be it Indira Gandhi’s assassination or the victory of Kargil? Oh, how the Indian routinely dumps the haughty in the dustbins of anti incumbency! Where else on earth does democracy shine ever so bright, after all?

Was Winston wrong then? Oh, the answer is he was doubly right! The first real test our democracy faced was when PV Narasimha Rao sought mandate from us for a second term in office. In an amazing turnaround, he retrieved the country from its political debris and laid a new economic keel to carry the country forward in the international waters ably assisted by Dr. Manmohan Singh. In addition, with the view to be seen as the crusader against corruption in the public life, he went all the way to prosecute the accursed politician across the board albeit at the directive of the judiciary. How did the Indian electorate that cries hoarse against the corruption in the high places respond to his willingness to tackle it? Simply put, it paid him a deaf ear. It was another matter that Rao’s failed gambit earned him a lot of bad blood in his own party for which he paid for running around the courts. That was about the rank ingratitude of the Indian voter to their leader who held the reins of the country competently for five years under testing times. What by their mindless rejection of a known performer, the Indians gave themselves and their country in return? The ineffective rule of Deve Gowda on the one hand and on the other the ugly phenomenon of Sitaram Kesari that inevitably led to the takeover of the Congress again by its First Family. Of Course, it was another story that after Rao was ousted, many an unsavory skeleton came tumbling down his family cupboard!

The results of the second test the Indian democracy was asked to take are just out. Though the question was repeated, ironically, the answer remained the same. Vajpayee not only stemmed the tide of the political instability at the Center that the earlier electoral exercises occasioned but also broke the barriers in the hitherto neglected infrastructure development in the country. If in Narasimha Rao the country perchance found the right man for the right job at the right time, Vajpayee, patiently cultivated the political sagacity required to handle the daunting job that is the India’s PM. Yet, the electorate thought it fit to cold-shoulder him.

What is the non-secular truth, really? Does not the past testify to the fact that the Indian voter is more of an emotional kind than the thinking type? Take away the anger of an emergency, the jingoism of a victory, the sympathy of an assassination or the apathy of incumbency and one gets to see what governs the Indian voters’ ballot mind. In the final analysis, it can be said that the Indian voter has the ability to identify himself only with the kitchen, caste and religion and thus has no idea of his nation as such. Jawaharlal Nehru seems to have had the foresight to see what befalls the Indian democracy by such narrow voter mindset and thus tried to inculcate a sense of Indianness in our polity to ensure electoral responsibility. Though he lived long and ruled enough, yet he failed to catalyze the pan Indian electoral chemistry to the good of the Indian democracy. The Nehruvian idealism to make the Indian electorate mature had no vision to tackle the entrenched casteism in the majority community. In fact, in the arena of electoral politics, Nehruvian secular formula went off at a tangent to the circle of sectarian ethos of our society, exemplified by caste, creed and faith. It is thus that the unsophisticated Indian voter fails to unhinge his franchise from communal and casteist calculus.

Nonetheless, Nehru did succeed in inculcating a semblance of a secular feeling in the educated upper crusts of our society, nursed by the leftist leanings in vogue then. However, the intellectual growth of the society as a whole would only be possible when its intelligentsia works on the biases of the masses and not by any ideological imposition on the prejudiced social ground. On the other hand, our country’s intelligentsia tends to plough its lonely furrow not on the ground zero but in the thin air. This at once is the cause of the continuing backwardness in our society in spite of the remarkable strides it made in science and technology. It was Nehru’s failure to appreciate this reality that led him to impose Hindi on the country instead of letting it evolve as a language of the nation under the pressure of the language fanatics. This was a godsend to the Dravidian politician to take the Tamilian out of the national electoral mainstream and it remains that way, even today and perhaps forever. It was thus Nehru’s ideology, lofty though in conception, that proved counterproductive in implementation.

Hegdewar’s vision of India, though pragmatic, was faulty in its advocacy. He saw Hindutva as the cement that could hold the Hindu social wall of deviant caste bricks. Unfortunately, this concept of the Hindu social reengineering was postulated as a means to counter the perceived Muslim communal threat. This flaw was exploited by India’s shortsighted intellectuals who went to town branding Hindutva a communal agenda of the Hindu right inimical to the country’s minorities. One would expect the matured intelligentsia to advocate suitable corrections to the aberration. However, the wooly Indian intelligentsia not known for its homework, badmouthed a good idea and sought to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It would have given them an idea how to go about it if they had only contemplated on what Swami Vivekananda advocated – the Hindu soul in an Islamic body. What else but Indianness could for the vast majority of the population otherwise hopelessly dividing on the fracturing lines of caste, region, ethnicity, language etc? On the other hand, neither Hegdewar nor those that subscribe to his ideology either by design or default, failed to dispel this notion from the minds of the minorities and the majority alike. On the political plane too, blinded by his own utopian vision, Nehru failed to foresee the true merit in Indianness to bring about political cohesiveness in the majority population to further the national good.

Needless to say, the national good would involve the minority welfare as well. A well-meaning Hindutva at the dawn of the independence itself would have benefited the country as a whole. Unfortunately, the opportunistic political class that sees electoral benefits in feeding upon the caste and communal susceptibilities of the polity pooh-poohs the very word Hindutva inspite of the Supreme court’s ruling. Why not, when Laloo in Bihar and Mulayam in UP can together own one tenth of the Lok Sabha by getting caste equations right in their areas of influence! What if should there sprout up more such characters to dominate sub-regions of our vast land by cast combinations! Would ever a national policy be possible with each satrap compelled to cater to the interests of the caste groups of his own narrow constituency? As if the politicians are not doing enough damage, the so-called spiritual leaders like Chinna Jeeyar are spreading sectarian sentiment amongst the Hindu polity with impunity! The British did divide India much less!

What then is the meaning of the verdict 2004 that is just out? The congress claim that it was a mandate for Sonia Gandhi is understandable though the media’s seconding the same is perplexing. In fact, the media’s dubbing of the Congress hold on 145 Lok Sabha seats as a mandate for her makes it amusing. And all is silent on the Kerala front now. The same media in the earlier times never got tired of heaping praise upon the literate Kerala voters! By giving zero to the Congress, what did the Kerala voter convey? Was it a nay to Sonia? Then what about the much-celebrated Karnataka voter who would differentiate an Assembly ballot from that of the Parliament unlike the others in the country? The Karnataka voter will not fit into the mandate for Sonia frame, as he did not sing the Congress tune this time. If the Tamil voters were asked to raise their hands for Sonia’s hand, how many hands would have risen? Yet, all their MPs are all set to help her garner the prime ministerial sweepstakes. One should see the gall of the Sonia backers - in the electoral battle, all were shy to project her as the candidate for the top post and now that the back door has been nudged open by a quirk of fate, all make bold to talk about the non-existing mandate for her to rule. And all this thanks to the Andhra anti-incumbency. The Andhra voters rightly or wrongly voted out the incumbent CM’s MLA hopefuls and that’s that. However, by turning the applecart of TDP MP’s did they want Sonia installed as the PM! One can be certain that while pressing the EVM’s Congress button in the Parliamentary booth, their ire would have been still on their CM. It’s in such hands that the great Indian mobocracy, sought to be glorified as the world’s largest democracy, is nursed! The lengths to which the media goes to build the myth of India’s electoral maturity is exemplified by the editorial in a national newspaper that tried to reconcile the victory of the Left and the drubbing of the Congress in Kerala as the verdict for the Secular arrangement at the centre!

In the final analysis, the very fact that Sonia Gandhi was able to reach the penultimate rung on the Indian political ladder during the last round itself speaks for our country’s democratic curry lacking electoral savvy. Then it was the BJPs weird political calculus that they could exploit her foreign origin coupled with the ‘leader of the opposition’ image at the 2004 hustings that put paid to any concrete move to bar an immigrant from becoming the country’s PM. Now it is the ideological pursuit of the left and the survival instinct of the rest that tried to catapult her to the summit. After all, for the Indian left that swears by Lenin and Mao, Sonia Gandhi in the gaddi is no abnormality. Besides it sees an opportunity for itself now for an ideological overkill on the Indian economic scene. Of course, the others have to guard their own backyards in the changed political equations. What if Mayawathi tied up with Sonia Gandhi? Will not Mulayam’s citadel come crashing, and how to prevent that from happening but by joining the bandwagon, never mind his principled opposition all the while for Sonia’s foreign origin. Analyze and see, and the compulsions of the eager become crystal clear.

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