Pining for instability and creative disruption in polity -- N. Ram

As political India hobbles on towards the next big test, the sixteenth general election, the pity is that its condition cannot even claim the dignity of an authentic political crisis—which is to say an irremediable breakdown that presages an abrupt change, for better or for worse, in the ruling arrangements, and offers some chance, even if it turns out to be an illusion, of placing governance and policymaking on a new track. To diagnose and describe the present condition, we need to fall back on the old Greek political concept and term-of-art, stasis, and perhaps also invoke the modern medical connotation of the term, a stoppage of circulation of some body fluids, resulting in a severe degradation of vital functions.

Stasis applies to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, which is discredited, bloodied, delegitimised and demoralised, and also to the main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is equally culpable but may be in a slightly better position only because it is not in power at the Centre. It applies to the functioning of every instrument of state, with the arguable exception of the higher judiciary and the two constitutionally sanctioned bodies—the Election Commission of India and the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. It denotes an orgy of corruption, venality and official and corporate misconduct that has seriously damaged India’s image in the world. It mocks the very notion of democracy—‘the world’s largest democracy’—being a force for the good of the people. Some of the symptoms of this stasis are a non-functioning Parliament, grand-sounding Bills that may never become Acts, policy paralysis at a time the economy is deeply troubled and fresh burdens are being placed on the poor and the middle classes, new levels of political opportunism, and insecurity in the face of escalating violence by an assortment of thugs, rapists and other anti-social forces who have been set free, like some deadly virus, to prey on the innocent and the hapless in society. The conservative Whig Burke’s 1790 dictum fits India’s current political situation like a glove.

Herein lies the solution to the paradox of Manmohan Singh presiding over a regime that has seen the surfacing of a corruption scandal, a ‘scam’ in mediaspeak, practically every other week. It is the systemic transformation and the policy environment of which he is rightly regarded as the principal architect that enable this corruption beyond compare. The tragedy of this highly educated and urbane prime minister is that he will neither recognise this connection nor do anything to anticipate, prevent or counter the corruption, notwithstanding all the warning signals and the plethora of investigations and exposes by the CAG, the news media and others. His typical response once the government’s concealment and cover-up has failed is to rationalise the indefensible by pointing to coalition compulsions and to exhort the news media not to feed negativism, dampen morale or damage the image of rising India in the world.

There is reported to be a growing feeling in the Congress camp that the ‘split’ leadership between party president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is at the root of the present troubles and that the party can overcome the crisis only by collapsing the two roles and placing the responsibility, more or less permanently, in the hands of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The impression, sedulously promoted by the media and unconvincingly denied by Congress spokesmen, that the Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal scandals exposed and widened the rift between the two leaders, and that Sonia Gandhi had to force the hand of the prime minister who was out to protect the two ministers in his own interest has strengthened this feeling. But has the duality of leadership really contributed to the present plight? It is a relevant question and deserves a serious answer.

Was there any inevitability to what has happened to the UPA? The evidence does suggest it need not have come to this. After all, the UPA started with some natural advantages over the National Democratic Alliance regime it unexpectedly replaced in 2004. Its spearhead, the Congress, had a larger base and a better regional dispersion and organisational spread than the BJP. While there was nothing in it between the two coalitions when it came to constituent arithmetic, the UPA had more reserves, especially as it could count on potent, if unblushingly opportunist, external support from the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party when it came to the survival of the government. And until the Congress broke with the Left parties in 2008 on the nuclear deal, their external support and the interactions on policy issues resulted in the only really worthwhile, big-ticket achievements of the UPA—the enactment and operationalisation of the rural employment guarantee programme and the Right to Information Act.

The quest for political stability is understandable but then it must be remembered that it is longevity of the UPA kind—artificially contrived and manipulative, without vision, direction, focus or integrity—that has brought on this stasis. The lesson from UPA-II as it nears its end is that political stability is not worth having unless it can be premised on democratic, just, secular, efficient, transparent and clean governance, and policies that address the internal and external challenges of rising India in a progressive way. It is not worth having unless it is able to prioritise the basic needs and interests of the overwhelming majority of the population, the hundreds of millions of working people who suffer multiple deprivations in terms of income, livelihood, nutrition, education, health, shelter, environment and gender. Making a virtue of what seems like necessity, one almost wishes for instability following the 16th Lok Sabha election, an instability that brings creative disruption and carries within itself the potentialities of a new kind of progressive politics.

(N. Ram is the former editor-in-chief of The Hindu and its group publications.)