Anti-politics

In this winter of our discontent, our cup runneth over with many maladies: Air we cannot breathe, water we cannot drink without getting sick, doctors and hospitals we cannot trust to heal, vegetables we cannot afford even in the supposedly flush season, an economy we cannot trust to grow rapidly. Our daily news diet feeds us ghastly tales of lynch mobs running unchecked and children being both victims and perpetrators of foulest of deeds. Even that perennial diversion, the political theatre of elections, is reduced to such low drama as to fully deserve Mani Shankar Aiyar’s dreadful N-word. Gujarat votes warily, awaiting results with resignation, not enthusiasm. That indefatigable campaigner, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sounds jaded. India has rarely faced the festive season at the end of a calendar year in as sombre a mood as it does now.

Yet it would be incorrect to interpret the present anguish merely as cries for greater economic comfort or safety of women, children, minorities or any other vulnerable group. It is also not merely about mounting insensitivity and intolerance numerous persons or groups, including political parties, wear as badges of honour.  The collective angst would still remain even if some magic were to bring the wrongdoers to book and to make the environment safer for all. Nor would our discomfort diminish significantly if we all paused to think before we talk.

For want of a better term, I call the malaise that pervades across India anti-politics.  That might sound strange, because politics has dominated the year like it seldom has in the recent past. The Gujarat election is being covered and its results analysed even before they are announced as if it decided the nation’s fate (it just might, at that). Earlier in the year, consequences of the Uttar Pradesh election for the social fabric similarly engaged our collective attention.

Nonetheless, every national party today elicits loathing from a significant portion of the population — as do regional outfits, even within their own bailiwicks. No politician attracts anything remotely resembling universal adoration, not Narendra Modi, not Rahul Gandhi, not Mamata Banerjee. Political will is a hollow term devoid of any meaning. Consider that memorable remark the newly anointed heir to the country’s oldest party made some time ago: Power is poison. That is sheer hypocrisy because there can be no politics without power. It also presumes that people are gullible enough not to see through this. 

Under these conditions, with no dialogue, or any respect for the electorate among those who claim to represent it, democracy is reduced to a periodic exercise of punching buttons in voting machines with no expectations. Any outfit which even remotely seems to address issues that bother people gets instant attention, no matter how ragtag it is or if it is an outfit at all. That explains why people with no belief in democracy or politics – read sundry proponents of quota politics, past, present and future – command not just media attention, but also strike a popular chord. 

We have been here before. Toward the end of 1973, students in the L D Engineering College hostels in Ahmedabad were outraged by rising mess bills, which they blamed on the nexus between the new state government of Chimanbhai Patel and traders.  Demonstrators gathered in their tens of thousands in the cities and towns in the cold nights in January 1974. They were mostly young, educated and seemingly without leaders, which appeared to bother them not at all.  They defied the night curfews without fear. They had but one demand: The state government must go. They carried the defaced pictures of the chief minister and hurled abuse at him, which, of course he did not hear, ensconced almost hermitically away from the crowds. That became the Nav Nirman agitation.

It succeeded in not just booting out the government, but also led to the Jayaprakash Narayan movement, the Emergency of 1975 and its aftermath: The 1977 defeat of the Congress and Indira Gandhi. The irony was that what started as an apolitical movement fighting a perceived injustice quickly got co-opted into the political mainstream. The chief student leader of Gujarat, Manishi Jani, eventually drifted to the Congress.  Some others led the anti-reservation agitations of the early 1980s. At the national level, many student activists of that period – Arun Jaitley, Lalu Prasad, Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav, among others – have gone on to national leadership positions.

This has both positive and negative connotations. The good arises from the formalisation of a dialogue and channelling of the energy and anger of youth into a political process. Unfortunately, this assimilation also signifies that the sense of injustice and outrage that spawned such young leadership in the first place has been pacified with fishes and loaves of office.

If the seductive charm of the political establishment is undesirable because it corrupts any potential for change, so is the nihilistic “down-with-all-politics” cry for instant justice of the kangaroo-court variety. That negates all political processes, good and bad, and sows the seeds of anarchy or fascism.  We know where Donald Trump is leading the United States.

The general disaffection of masses arises from a widely shared perception that those in power have stopped listening to them and are content to pursue solely their own interests.  Even small incidents are enough to convince people that their understanding is valid.  Internet, mobile phones and social media disseminate the word instantly in today’s India, but in Gujarat of 1975 and North India of 1977, even print media did not reach most people or were muzzled (electronic media were two decades away).  Just the word of mouth sufficed and spread quickly.  Every story of leaders’ greed or excesses of the Emergency found ready acceptance without any documented proof or oratorical brilliance.

The leaderless, inchoate anti-political anger could succeed in bringing down the ancien regime, as it did in post-Tahrir Square Egypt or post-Emergency India.  But can we honestly say that what followed, with rapid return to status quo, was necessarily a change for the better?  That is the question we need to ponder as we get into yet another ritualistic incantation of our glorious Republic and its all-too-frequent electoral rituals.
 

The writer is an economist