Time to say: BJP-CPM Bhai-bhai

It’s incredible but true. In their hour of defeat sworn enemies BJP and CPM act like identical twins. Both make much noise about introspection and analysis. Yet both refuse to face the facts that stare them in the face. They play with self-serving justifications which fool no one but themselves.

The overwhelming difference between this election and every previous election is the change in the character of the electorate. Times have changed and people have changed for a variety of reasons – economic liberalisation, the emergence of an affluent middle class, the spread of internet and the civilisational shifts in attitudes it has brought about, the rise of youth power, popular disgust with political corruption, a growing tendency to hold rulers accountable. Yes, the India of 2009 is very different from the India of even 2004, not to mention the India of Indira Gandhi, Narasimha Rao and A.B. Vajpayee.

But the BJP and the CPM either didn’t see the change or, more likely, did not have the leadership to know what to do about it. The first thing the BJP should have realised was that strident communal posturing would not sit well with the temper of the changed times. Using religion for political ends does nothing to help a country compete in this competitive world or to raise the quality of life which is what the vast majority of even god-fearing people want.

If the BJP leadership had grasped this truth, they would have instantly taken action against that badly brought-up brat, Varun Gandhi, for speaking in the fundamentalist idiom of the Taliban. In retrospect, that speech should be seen as the single most ruinous blow the BJP suffered during the election run-up. Consider also that wherever Narendra Modi campaigned, the BJP did not do well. It is clear that India is moving forward and the BJP is standing still.

The CPM is actually moving backward. A party whose leaders and cadres were known for simple living today accepts luxury as a norm at the top. From P.C.Joshi to Harkishensingh Surjeet, not one Communist leader was considered corrupt. Today the supreme leader of the party in Kerala is an accused in a major corruption case the CBI is pursuing. In West Bengal anti-communist politicians have succeeded in turning the state into a war zone. For the first time in three decades the CPM-led Government is unsure of its survival.

Much of this could have been averted if the CPM’s central leadership were capable of feeling the pulse of the people. When the highhandedness of the party boss in Kerala alienated party cadres, coalition partners and large sections of the general pubic, the Karat-Yechury leadership did not intervene with corrective measures. In fact it sided with the errant state leader leading to suspicious about its own bonafides.

In Bengal the Singur agitation going out of control was clear indication that popular goodwill for the party was slipping. But the Politburo was unwilling and/or unable to check strong-arm tactics by the state leadership which alienated its own traditional supporters. It is reasonable to conclude that the Communist movement in India has never had a weaker leadership than today.
Perhaps it is not such a bad thing that two parties with extremist ideologies are in a fading phase. But it will indeed be a bad thing if that leaves India at the mercy of a dynastic party. The least our country deserves is a rightist party, a leftist party and a centrist party in perennial competition. The collapsing dreams of today should lead to such a triangular model tomorrow.

Our poverty + their wealth = India

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Sometimes it takes a foreign eye to see India in perspective. Known statistics, for example, have been humanised by The Economist to paint a telling picture of the Indian reality in its post-election glow. The juxtaposition of facts goes thus:

“About 27 million Indians will be born this year. Unless things improve, almost 2 million of them will die before the next general election. Of the children who survive, more than 40 percent will be physically stunted by malnutrition. Most will enroll in a school, but they cannot count on their teachers showing up. After five years of classes, less than 60 percent will be able to read a short story and more than 60 percent will be stumped by simple arithmetic”.

This is by no means a damn-India editorial. Far from it. The cover story is headlined “Good news from India”. True, The Economist often adopts a know-all attitude and gives lectures to all and sundry. This is no reason why we should shy away from facts that are known to us, too, as facts.

The underlying fact about India is that six decades after independence, it remains an extremely poor country. There is widespread poverty in China, but not of the pitiable levels of human degradation we see in the slums of India. Countries like Malaysia needed only two decades to virtually abolish poverty.

Why have the many governments of India allowed the poverty of India to continue as a humiliating spectacle? The main reason must be that our politicians were busy with other things. When they did talk of poverty, it was only for purposes of gimmickry. Indira Gandhi sold the slogan “Garibi hatao”, won elections – and that was that. In his otherwise insubstantial book After Nehru, Who?, American author Welles Hangen wrote in 1963 what is true to this day. “The tragedy of India”, he said, “is not poverty, but the mentality that accepts, even condones, poverty”.

That mentality persists. When a film depicting the horrors of Indian poverty wins Oscars in Hollywood, we protest against foreigners looking only at the negative side of India. We don’t do anything about eliminating the negative side. In fact, we, too, try to profit from it by starting “slum tourism” in Dharavi.

Today we have a new union cabinet of mostly capable men and women, headed by one of the world’s most respected economists. Predictably, we hear of 8 percent and 10 percent growth. Spectacular growth has taken place since Nehru’s Socialist days. A nouveau riche class has arisen. But more than half of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. The very poor remain very miserably poor.

There are vital problems that do not depend on growth rates for a solution. The highly influential ministers from Tamil Nadu, for example, will need only a fraction of their influence to put an end to the shameful two-glass system in the teashops of the deep south. The powerful ministers from Punjab and Haryana can take effective steps to stop the practice of female infanticide. The high-calibre ministers from Kerala can help save their state’s rivers from being killed by sand mafias.

Of course none of them will do any of this. Our politicians are primarily self-centred. We will see poverty and misery continuing while the wealth of the ruling class increases. Organisations like the National Election Watch have computed that the average assets of MPs increased from 2004 to 2009 by 103 percent for Congress, by 155 percent for the BJP, by 463 percent for the DMK and by a breath-taking 831 percent for the JDS.
Poverty? What poverty?

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Watch out: The country is churning

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Two factors have led to the enviable position the Congress is in today – and its popularity is not one of them. The real factors are that (a) the BJP has lost its acceptability in the imagination of the general public and (b) the Left has collapsed as an ideological platform. The prominence the Congress has achieved as a consequence is sure to be a passing phase. India is in the midst of a vast churning process. Uncertainties, shifting alignments and ad hoc patchups are part of such a transition. Two or three more game-changing elections like this and we will have moved from a dynastic system closer to a mature democracy.

That BJP’s sun was setting was clear towards the end of Vajpayee’s term. With hindsight even his critics would now agree that it was Vajpayee who made BJP acceptable to people outside the Hindutva core. He was politically moderate besides being personally popular as writer and poet. By contrast Advani was inextricably identified with hardline Hindutva. He was perhaps the first to recognise this as a liability. Hence his attempt to soften his image with stratagems like the Jinnah-was-secular speech. But it boomeranged.

The spectre raised during this campaign, that Narendra Modi is the one to follow Advani, will have scared more people away from the BJP. The fundamental reality remains that India, which of course is a Hindu-majority country, has not given the BJP blanket victory at any time other than during the Vajpayee interlude. This is because the majority of the people the BJP claims to represent obviously do not subscribe to the Hindutva brand of intolerance. That is the best guarantee of India’s future as a democracy.

For the BJP to regain public confidence, it will have to re-invent itself. This will require visionary leaders of the kind the BJP is not currently blessed with. Those it has are unable to think beyond the likes of Modi. Unfortunately this proclivity prevents the BJP from developing into a balanced right-of-centre party for which a need exists in India.

The need exists for a truly left-of-centre party as well. It is one of the tragedies of India that from the time of the Congress Socialist Party, the leftwing in the country has always lacked coherent, farsighted leadership. With the 1948 Communist Party policy of “armed revolution now”, the Left lost ground across the country. The base it retained in Bengal and Kerala have been steadily eroded. In three decades of unchallenged power, the Left Front Government in Bengal was unable to address basic issues like poverty and infrastructure. When it finally made an effort towards industrial progress, it was so heavy-handed that it only took an eccentrically led formulation like Trinamool Congress to prick its balloon.

The CPM in Kerala for its part turned into an unabashed corporate enterprise with mafia squads to enforce its power over others, including other leftwing groups. The infighting between the party leader and the party’s chief minister had reached obscene proportions. The party’s arrogant and dictatorial ways were causing perceptible disgust among the people. But the Politburo had no eyes to see what all others could see. The result is that Prakash Karat can no longer save India from the clutches of America.

Can Manmohan Singh? The Congress is in danger of getting entrenched in its dynastic ways and the dealmaking for which its managers are famous. This time it will be directly accountable for its commissions and omissions. To that extent it is on the firing line. By giving a fairly clear mandate to one party, the people have won this election. Whether that party will win remains to be seen.

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Film stars: Please keep off politics

Film stars caused their two-paise worth of nuisance in this election. A couple of them may win but it is clear that their appeal as netas is declining steadily. MGR and NTR meant something in politics. Hemamalini and Jaya Bacchan meant nothing.

Star MPs in the last Parliament in fact disgraced the parliamentary system itself. Govinda’s failure to attend even one session showed an attitude of contempt towards Parliament. Vinod Khanna, once trumpeted by the BJP, attended only 5.5 percent of the sittings. Dharmendra’s score was 1.5 percent. If these guys are so high and mighty, why did they become MPs in the first place? The parties who sponsored them must be held accountable by the people who elected them.

In the south things are somewhat better. Actually, film stars turning to politics is a South Indian phenomenon, more specifically a Tamil phenomenon. The reasons are historical. Cinema became an integral part of the Dravida movement and therefore a serious player in politics. It was not a case of roping in pretty faces to get votes.

The anti-Brahmin movement had started earlier in Maharashtra under Jyotiba Phule. But it was Periyar Ramaswamy Naicker who gave it an ideological sweep and a cultural (Aryan-Dravidian) dimension. The revolution he wrought was turned by C.N. Annadurai into a solid political platform. Because Annadurai was the most brilliant film writer of his time, Tamil cinema became a political instrument.

Fascinating details of this union between politics and cinema are marshalled in “History Through the Lens”, a new book by the greatest living authority on Tamil cinema, S.Theodore Baskaran. From the 1920s, he tells us, drama artistes were involved in the freedom struggle. In 1958 the legendary K.B. Sundrambal became India’s first film artiste to enter the legislature. After independence “film actors as a community, who had earlier been backing the cause of the Congress, moved on to support the Dravidian movement”. The Congress never recovered from that.

Dravidian assertion over Brahmins did not develop in other South Indian states as intensively as it did in Tamilnadu. Something else happened in Andhra when that amateur Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, publicly humiliated the then chief minister of the state, T. Anjiah. It was an insult to Telugu pride, but neither Anjiah nor the Congress party was in a position to do anything about it. N.T Rama Rao rose to the occasion and rode to power on the plank of Telugu atmagauravam.

That was a spontaneous response to a moment of challenge. NTR did not have the intellectual resources to turn it into an ideological platform. Even in Tamilnadu the inspirational pull of the Dravidian movement has lately been diluted by caste and sub-caste politics. Hence the ambivalence of wannabe netas like Rajnikant and the uncertainties of fresh entrants like “Black MGR” Vijaykant. In Andhra, Chiranjeevi has serious handicaps – dissensions in his personal circle, the absence of an ideological agenda. Whether he can do an NTR will depend on whether the people see him as a credible agent of change.

In Karnataka even a god-like figure like Rajkumar kept out of politics. The most glamorous Kannada heroine of all time, Jayanti, was defeated by the most unglamorous opponent of all time, Ananthkumar, in 2004. Ambarish is an exception that proves the rule that stars don’t shine in the politics of Karnataka. He is a strange exception – the only minister in the Union Cabinet who never attended office. That beats even Govinda.

Ruin or wisdom? The choice is ours

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Picture Courtesy: teamnirvana.com

A mature society brings out its best at election time – the best candidates, the best arguments, the best issues for debate and, usually, the best results. We should pause to ponder why elections bring out the worst in India, from candidates to tactics. Even civilised men turn quarrelsome, irresponsible and inexcusably negative in the mad rush for votes.

Look at the way our netas have been exploiting (a) inflammatory religious provocations and (b) the brazen commercialisation of cricket. For a society that is described as “the largest democracy in the world”, these are life-threatening portends.

Sure, colonial Britain sowed the seeds of communal divisiveness in India. But that was all the more reason why, after the colonial exploiters’ departure, we should have gone out of our way to eliminate the dividing lines. Instead, we solidified and multiplied them. We developed religion as the shortest cut to political profiteering.

A candidate can of course take the position that he would, if elected, uphold the values of this religion or that. But to say that his hand is the hand of lotus that would cut off the heads of Muslims is to grant the right to other zealots to raise their hands to cut off the heads of Hindus and Sikhs and Christians and Buddhists. A state based on the rule of law would immediately take action against such public calls to violence.

Initially, the leaders of the BJP understood the validity of such action. Their instinctive reaction was to “disown and distance themselves” from the demagogue who violated the law so impudently. Later, however, the hardliners swung things their way and began justifying the unjustifiable for the sake of politics. Once again long-term national interests were sacrificed for short-term party gains.

The petty politicians of cricket have been equally damaging. Even by their own standards of putting money above everything else, their display of upside-down priorities has been astonishing this time. They virtually demanded that the security requirements of cricket be placed above those of the elections. When they found this wouldn’t work, they announced a grand “boycott” of India and went overseas.

Nothing better could be expected from a bunch of men who perverted even cricket for commercial gain. But the alacrity with which politicians turned it into an electoral side-game was the true eye-opener here. The Congress party was blamed for its inability to provide security for cricket and thereby damaging India’s reputation in the world. The Congress party can be blamed for dozens of unforgivable sins – from perpetuation of an undemocratic dynastic system to developing corruption to its present monstrous proportions. But it cannot be faulted for refusing to pull out border troops etc. to help BCCI make a few hundred crores more of profit. If the BJP were in power, its government would most likely have done the same. Power imposes on its wielders a logic of responsibility.

Yet we see an otherwise thinking man like Arun Jaitley bemoaning the Government’s incompetence on the security front. Narendra Modi of all people describes cricket going abroad as a national shame. The likes of Bal Thackeray and Praveen Togadia welcome Varun Gandhi as a hero.

The irresponsibility of religious fanatics is what brings shame to our great civilisation. Shame and the threat of disintegration. For states founded on religious hatreds collapse one way or another. This is an old lesson of history and its current exemplars are Pakistan and Israel. Is this the path ahead for India – or the path carved out by the great philosophers who wrote the Upanishads? It’s for us to choose.

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Hate politics: Its power, its limits

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In one respect this election season differs from previous ones: Incitement of religious hatred has become cruder and more reckless than before. Perhaps politicians see this as an easy way to win populist votes. It certainly helps some pygmies to appear like giants.

Remember, till yesterday Pramod Muthalik was an unknown frog in an unknown well. Today he is a national figure, his face gracing every front page and every channel. That is the power of vulgar religious politics.

Similar is the case of Varun Gandhi, the spoilt son of a spoilt father. (When the boy was enrolled in the Rishi Valley School in Madanapalli, he wouldn’t eat for three days because neither the food nor the atmosphere suited the privileges he was accustomed to. Only because the staff and fellow students ignored his tantrums – and because hunger has a logic of its own – the privileged Gandhi reconciled to the culture of Jiddu Krishnamurti).

Kids born with a proprietorial attitude to everything around them rarely shed their air of superiority. Even his mentors in the BJP found Varun Gandhi to be egoistic and lightweight; his only “merit” was his surname. Then he came up with this new message of venomous religious hatred. Suddenly the immature bambino was on every front page and every channel. Another Nobody turned into Somebody.

This is a political game where the players do not lose because they have protectors behind them. The citizen loses because he was no recourse when laws are broken at his cost. Muthalik’s thugs could beat up citizens and walk proudly away because those who were supposed to protect citizens were inclined to protect the thugs instead. The court has banned this illegal moralist from entering certain areas. What if the police does not stop him? The system collapses when the state is party to evil.

The game, as played, is full of humbug and internal contradictions. Varun Gandhi announces that Pilibhit is a “violence-prone” constituency where Hindus are subjected to injustices. This is a serious charge against his mother, Maneka Gandhi, who has so far been representing Pilibhit in the Lok Sabha. Clearly the son is looking for what the original Gandhi, the Mahatma, called “the hasty applause of an unthinking public”.

He will not succeed, for never in history have hatemongers won the day. Three centuries of religious crusades by European Christianity gained nothing despite all the bloodletting, murders and cruelties. Hatred between Palestinians and Israelis continues to sacrifice generations without helping the cause of either. The mutual antipathies of Shias and Sunnis hold back the progress of all Arabs. Nazi Germany’s progrom against Jews eventually destroyed the Nazis, not the Jews. Even the bond of Islam could not unite the Sindhi-Punjabis of West Pakistan with the Bengalis of East Pakistan.

Those who spew venom in the name of Bharatiyata are unworthy to speak of India’s civilisational greatness, let alone defend it. They take Rama as their mascot without knowing that Ramayana begins with a call by Valmiki in defence of two love birds. When a hunter shot down one of the birds, the poet cried out “Ma nishada”. Brahma himself then appeared and urged the Adi Kavi to compose the story of Rama in the same poetic form.

Who represents Bharatiyata’s beauty and greatness – Valmiki who was outraged by the tragedy that struck two birds in love, or today’s petty men who hate love itself in the name of morality?

Ma nishada!

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Another election where voters will lose

Yediyurappa in Yoga, Kumaraswamy with wife Anita and Dewegowda in an Iftar.
Photo Credit : Kannada Prabha

Only fools and TV channels predict election results. And IPS-IAS opportunists. In 1977, after two years of Emergency repression, the Intelligence Bureau famously advised Indira Gandhi that she would easily win a general election. She infamously lost.

In the Karnataka election just announced, there is one prediction the wise will make. That is: The voters will lose. In fact, the voters have already lost with the impending end of Governor's Rule. It's true that the Governor was a faithful Congressman. It's also true that some Congress High Commanders from Delhi were able to pull important administrative strings from behind the scenes.

But that was a small minus compared to the big plus of politicians staying out of sight. The good bureaucrats were able to function, the bad ones stayed mute. Files moved. The corruption graph came down. People began to see what menace "elected representatives" had become and how blissful it was to have no "popular government".

Alas, all good things must come to an end. In a month's time the people will have democracy thrust upon them.

The silver lining is that all parties are in varying degrees of confusion and mess. Besides, all constituencies have been reconfigured this time. No one can now reap the benefit of caste and clan investments of the past. New investments will take time to show results.
Perhaps the one player with some degree of credibility is, incredibly, H.D.

Kumaraswamy. Somehow this young Chief Minister had managed to build a positive image. But he has to bear the cross of a father whom no one trusts. So where does that leave Kumaraswamy's JDS?

Where indeed does S.M.Krishna's return to politics leave the Congress? With experience and urbanity on his side, he should have been an advantage to the Congress. But some Congressmen objected to his return _ mostly tired leaders who live on their yesterdays and have no tomorrows ahead. While such objections can be ignored, caste pulls are a different matter.

Deve Gowda, the country's leading expert on caste arithmetic, carries the same Vokkaliga label that Krishna does. Does this mean a split in one of the major voter segments? Has the other major segment, the Lingayats, abandoned the Congress for good and gone over to the BJP?

The leadership vacuum in the BJP is so bad that a victory for that party may well mean disaster to it as much as to the state. It did nothing to endear itself to the people during the period of half-power it enjoyed. On the contrary, it gave indications that divide-and-rule would be its preferred route to power. Is Karnataka ready for such a restructuring of the basic parameters of life?

It's a pity that fifty years of electoral politics have not yielded a decent choice of parties. They all have the same programme - power. All depend on caste and sub-caste to achieve that end. Some add an extra touch here and there - like dynastic glamour and communal emotion.

None serves the people. That's why many voters, on their way to the booths, will ask themselves: When can we have five years of Governor's Rule?