Why Politics?

BY SRI BASUDHA CHAKRAVARTY

It is not everybody that takes to politics; but there is not anybody that is not concerned with it. For politics determines the conditions of life. It is easy enough, when one is happy and settled, to pretend lack of interest in politics. That much snobbery can then be afforded. Then one professes not to believe in politics. As if there is any question of believing in it! You might as well believe in eating! But ordinarily one can adopt such a pose. For then other people are taking care of politics and we can reap the benefit. Not so, however, when things go astray; prices are high, famine appears, goods are not available. Then everybody is a politician and as superior one at that. Then everybody finds fault with politicians. Allied to this snobbishness is a feeling that politics is something dirty, something too vulgar for good, decent people. There are people in politics who make it dirty but they clearly are not those who have determined the world’s statecraft and socio-economic organisation. The view of politics as something vulgar betrays a colossal ignorance of the full scope and role of politics.

There is yet another sort of indifference to politics. It springs from an imagined insistence on abiding values. Politics is mundane, ephemeral. There are greater, more lasting things. But most often such abiding interests resolve themselves against the background of ordinary joys and sorrows of life, into matters of day-to-day existence. Nothing very serious or superior. It is only the deep current of life along which men’s thoughts and feelings tend to flow. Politics, it is thought does not enter into that current. It is something outside one’s private existence. It does not touch such intimate experience as the death of some one beloved.

The death of a beloved is the end of a world but it is not the end of the world. There is even after that a life to be lived, there are affairs to be looked after. And taken all together, politics has a relation to the permanent interests of life. The spy pries in to your private chamber, the dictator is in the way of your meeting your friend by the rippling rivulet. The values of life that sustain us and that we cherish lost are in danger. Einstein is in exile, Freud could just leave his country with his life; Feurtwanger’s manuscripts were burnt. Tagore had to leave his poetic seclusion. Jawaharlal goes to prison. It does not really seem politics leaves life alone. War is not the only occasion on which it draws every one within its net. There has been a famine and your baby died without food before your eyes. Quinine is not available for your brother suffering from malaria. There is no cloth for your sister. Alas, for abiding values! Politics affects them as it affects all else. It causes sorrow, it is capable of causing joy too. It is therefore not something apart from our personal lives. It touches our self-centered existence. And what of such experiences as the death of a beloved? Cannot they often be traced to economic causes having their root in political conditions? Perhaps, the darling has died because of lack of adequate treatment. Treatment easily available for the rich is outside the means of the poor. Abiding sorrow has here apparently a very practical cause. No amount of fatalism can obscure the relation of politics to life. There are desires which you cannot fulfil today but which you could have fulfilled were political conditions different. For politics determines the economic conditions on which family, social and personal lives very much depend. Because I am poor I cannot fulfil my desire for a trip abroad, cannot go in for higher education. It would not have been so were economic conditions different, and these are fixed by politics. One is then organically connected with politics. So long as one lives in human society there is no getting away from it.

That makes it both advisable and necessary for everybody to take an active interest in politics. Not that everybody will adopt politics as a career. But everybody should in his own interest think about political matters and make his voice felt. There are many ways of doing so. One can join in the demand for universal adult franchise and exercise the franchise; one can attend public meetings, join local committees on public affairs. It is about politics that people generally gossip because politics, of all things, apparently keeps life going. It is the reflex of the growing life of the community, and active interest in it would make one feel oneself an integral part of life. It would connote one’s conscious development along with and in relation to one’s environment. Politics touches in a real manner all aspects of life and a living interest in it is a pre-condition of life’s well-ordered development. One may imagine oneself living in terms of the eternal, but it is politics that gives reality to the social background of one’s existence.

Active connection with politics is thus inherently prescribed for all of us and its realisation in practice would evidently help mobilisation of mass opinion with a view to influence the course of public life. There is no doubt that the pretentious lack of interest in politics is responsible for much of formulation of policy and procedure in divorcement from public interest. For this the general indifference to politics is much to blame. Much of what we criticize is there because we have done nothing about it. It is an attitude of acute irresponsibility and self-inception combined. There is indeed nobody–be he the poet in his seclusion or the scientist in his laboratory, who is absolved from his elementary duty in the political sphere.

Political consciousness of membership of social organization helps disciplined development of one’s individuality as an active, successful unit of the nation’s entity. Its potentiality is less than only that of joyful integration of one’s self in political work which then shelters one’s outer and inner being as well. To say this is not to overlook the fed-up feeling that comes to all except confirmed revolutionaries whose whole selves have become merged in the objects they have in view. Even such, however, are perfectly susceptible to the call of other interests in life. For the capacity for appreciation of abiding things is not the monopoly of the non-political man. At a moment of sudden leisure the political man also feels a vacuum, longs for a final rest somewhere–for the spiritual sustenance of poetry and the arts. Indeed, the more one realizes the fundamental reality of political life, the more is one to be supposed to have a total sense of values. The politician that is a mere careerist has often an ominous, unnotified departure to danger and does only because he knows fundamentals are at stake. He will be found at the depth of night meditating under the starry sky.

History is witness to the people’s struggle for self-assertion. To the extent that they are able to assert themselves they influence the governance of their country and that determines their political consciousness. Thus, in the U. S. S. R., the only socialist state in the world, political consciousness of the people has, by all reports, reached the highest pitch. It stands to reason that only when the people’s realisation of a society and government of their own are complete and they have no longer to struggle in that regard they can afford to return to pursuits of a more personal and abiding sort. The unique defence that the Soviet people have put up against Nazi aggression is explicable by the fact that they consider all that are most near and dear to them at stake. It is the opportunity to seek the abiding things of life that they have saved and not counted the cost. Politics there is the pre-condition of abiding life. We in India are at the other end. We have not even political freedom–let alone the social and economic freedom that will enable us to seek what may roughly be called things of the spirit. Politics here is the pre-condition of the beginning of life. Only through it can we reach life abiding. To seek life away from it is for us escape from life. Life without it would not be real, would not be complete. That is the consciousness we badly need: the consciousness of the need for political consciousness. Even for the sake of our personal return ultimately to non-political life. We need to spread this consciousness. So we need to awaken the people to facts and movements. But it seems we do not notice the people at all. Certainly, we do not count them as having a place within the orbit of our existence. The people need to be aroused, to feel themselves in unison with the course of national life. They have to feel the pulse-beat of the world’s life to react to events. Politics then will mean a process of their conscious self-realization. They will not regard it as something outside them, some thing affecting them remotely, if at all. They will, for example, feel themselves enthused when the Kisan Sabha is meeting. They will wait to hear the news when the National Congress is in session. They will feel themselves a part of the process of events.

Such perception of oneself as part of the process of history inevitably adds zest to life, adds reality to it. That is easily the ultimate personal sanction for interest in politics. But it pre-supposes realization of one’s organic connection with the course of events in the world and the country. To this end the realization, which is now increasing, that life is dependent on one’s political and economic existence is a help. Even short of acceptance of Marx’s materialist interpretation of history, there is increasing recognition of the supreme importance of the politico-economic factor in life. No more is it considered something ephemeral, something secondary. It does no longer do to retire into a sort of other-worldliness. Science has made the world small; with growing closeness of relations international complexities grow. Air raids have become facts. War has entered even the remote villager’s house. Nobody is left alone. Membership of the world community has become a matter of everybody’s day-to-day perception, active understanding of such membership expands the meaning of life. Not that everybody would be a politician; only nobody can deny his or her relation to politics. To leave it as somebody else’s job is at one end dangerous; at the other it is taking undue advantage of others. On one hand it causes one injury; on the other it is shirking responsibility. For it is not possible in this age to live outside politics. What then is the place of politics in life? Is it not too late to ask?

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