Opinion - Leader Page Articles

A new beginning is possible

By Harish Khare

A simple resolve to return to the rule of law and constitutional fundamentalism will be enough to start the process of re-energising our institutions.

AFTER A long time, the country finds itself in a particularly happy situation. In Manmohan Singh, we have a chief political executive who admittedly is not only a very honest man but who also does not carry any personal baggage of the kind that hobbled many a Prime Minister in recent years. In fact, it can be reasonably argued that almost all our Prime Ministers in the post-Indira Gandhi period failed to accomplish their historic potential because each one of them allowed his politics and priorities to get diluted by self-inflicted vulnerabilities. These induce compromises and compromises, especially of the small kind, are invariably the enemy of good governance. A baggage-less Dr. Singh has the potential to explore the possibilities of providing a genuine moral leadership, a task that was simply neglected for long.

Nothing encapsulates the entrenched spirit of compromise more than the confusion over the Rajya Sabha nominations in Uttar Pradesh. More or less a similar drama was enacted two years ago when a wealthy arms-dealer, Suresh Nanda, wanted a Rajya Sabha seat from Uttar Pradesh. At that time the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Congress leadership ganged up against him. His only crime was that he did not go through the party bosses. What we are witnessing in the Rajya Sabha imbroglio in Uttar Pradesh is the convergence of all unhealthy morally-deficient and morale-sapping trends — party bossism, big money-small politician nexus, sale and purchase of political preferment — that have come to pulverise the state's politics, its economics and social cohesion. Beyond Uttar Pradesh, it is disconcerting that the BJP, the Congress, the Samajwadi Party and the Janata Dal (S) have deemed it necessary to "accommodate" very, very rich individuals among the Rajya Sabha nominees.

So, on the one hand, we have these deeply ingrained habits and impulses of our political bosses who have nothing but disdain for public good or moral principles; on the other, we have the unexpected anointment as Prime Minister of a man who is personally without any moral and ethical handicap. It is rare that a democratic society gets to acquire a political leader who is not a prisoner of vested interests, big or small. Can this entirely fortuitous development be converted into a historic opportunity to bring about a basic paradigm shift in our polity, a shift that will render our political class less parasitic?

Critics can argue that Dr. Singh is not his own man and that he remains subservient to the party bosses, beginning with the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, and ending with the United Progressive Alliance brass. The argument is not without merit, but it ignores the enormous power and prestige of the office of Prime Minister and the difference that a single man at the very top can make to the manners and morals of the entire polity. A new beginning is very much possible. All that is needed is the requisite character, conviction and consistency.

The immediate need is to liberate the Centre, its managers and their work from the quagmire of a six-monthly referendum that the electoral process in this or that State has come to signify in this era of coalitional politics. Because a ruling alliance in this much-touted coalition era is ipso facto a precarious affair, every electoral verdict at the State level gets exaggerated as a barometer of approval or disapproval of the national Government. The BJP has contributed the most to this unimaginative construction. For example, it first extrapolated from its victories in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh a nationwide `feel good' mood and then made the mistake of calling the early elections; and now the party has collectively decided to treat the 2004 Lok Sabha vote as an aggregation of regional verdicts. In the process, the BJP is refusing to see that the vote is a total rejection of the anti-ideological, amoral "pragmatism" that was raised as the reigning principle of statecraft, all in the name of coalition dharma. And having talked itself into this corner, it now looks upon the next electoral round — in Maharashtra later this year — as an opportunity to upturn the national mood. The BJP is not the only party to get rattled or elated by defeat or victory in a single State; the entire party system has come to get preoccupied with electoral gains and losses as an end.

What is necessary is to change the way we conduct our discourse on governance. For better or for worse, a byte-culture has come to dominate almost all the forums of information dissemination; and the accent is on inflating emotions, inflaming passions, and generating controversies, rather than informing the public about the plus and minus of a policy initiative or political development. Sensationalism, trivialisation and dramatisation, centred on individuals and interests rather than ideas, have made reasonable and rational debate almost impossible. Public relations spectacles have substituted political interaction with civil society; the BJP and the Telugu Desam Party can be cited as classic examples of this disconnect-inducted politics. How total the toll this kind of discourse has taken on the élan and convictions of the political class can be judged from the fact that the president of a ruling national party reduces himself to a caricature of a rhyme-master. It would be ironic if the new Government and the new ruling alliance were to submit themselves to the working whims and organisational fancies of the same discourse-manufacturers who brought the downfall of the NDA dispensation. The polity can no longer afford to continue with its present ways of communicating with itself.

What is worse, this kind of discourse has promoted, exaggerated and even romanticised the role of those "leaders" who are essentially power brokers or back-room manipulators. This discourse allows them to strut around as role-models of "leaders" representing important "constituencies"; and this, in turn, spawns hundreds of leadership clones at the State level, depleting the political system of its efficacy and its legitimacy. The compromised and compromising political elites are only too happy to do business with the criminal, the crook and the corrupt.

The only way to get the better of this here-and-now mindset is for the new Prime Minister to define clearly what he stands for and equally importantly what he is against. In other words, what we need is a clear enunciation of our national purpose. Such a reformulation is way overdue. The country needs to understand once again for whom the Indian state toils in this age of globalisation.

Because of his training and temperament, the new Prime Minister may find himself reluctant to undertake the task of redefining our national purpose. But mere day-to-day incremental competence will not suffice; Dr. Singh has the historic opportunity to unleash forces of moral innovation and intellectual creativity.

A simple resolve to return to the rule of law and constitutional fundamentalism will be enough to start the process of re-energising our institutions. This is one simple lesson that the Sangh Parivar is wilfully refusing to understand in the matter of the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. "Gujarat" is not a case of the State Government being partial to Hindus; the issue is that the Modi Government simply did not fulfil its constitutional obligation under the law and this was disapproved as much by the minorities as by the majority. Hindus as the majority have a vested interest in the rule of law and it is the Hindu majority that rejected the BJP, not the minorities.

Anyone who rules over this vast land is expected to show some sensitivity and firmness in wanting to correct glaring inequalities in our society. Coalition politics does not mean a licence to deplete our governing institutions of their fairness. Only by re-discovering and re-affirming the larger national purpose can our polity be exorcised of the brokers masquerading as "leaders." Dr. Singh, by virtue of who he is and how he happened to become the Prime Minister, is eminently placed to make a new beginning.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu