TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: Contempt as ideology

LINE & LENGTH

All Indian political parties have one thing in common: contempt for the people.

Recently, on a long flight, I re-read Arthur Hailey's 25-year-old novel, Strong Medicine. It is about the pharmaceuticals industry in the US and in a genre that was popular in the US until the 1980s. The technique consisted of mixing fact and fiction in equal proportion. Hailey wrote about the power industry, the hotel industry, the auto industry, airport industry, etc.

But this article is not about Hailey. It is about a point that he makes about the pharmaceuticals industry, namely, that from time to time the industry goes through what was called a "drug-lag". During this phase, for one reason or another""but usually because the scientists in the labs have struck a bad patch""no new products are discovered.

When competition and the pressure on managements to perform are intense, and market share must be maintained, drug companies simply put out old products in IMPROVED, NEW versions by making small and insignificant changes in the chemical composition. There is a lot of advertising hype. Sometimes the strategy works, usually it doesn't.

It occurred to me that Indian politics is going through what can be called an "issue lag". So everyone from Sonia Gandhi (renunciation) to L K Advani (yatras) to Arjun Singh (reservations) to Prakash Karat (talk economic nonsense) is putting out new and improved versions of old ideas. It may work, it may not. Chances are that, because of the law of diminishing marginal utility, these new and improved versions will fail.

Hailey also makes another point. He says the drug lag, or at least the stagnant market share of the company, persists for as long as the old managers are in charge. But, he says, that is not the most important thing. What is immeasurably more important is why and by what process change is catalysed.

I think this is the main question bothering millions of Indians, who are fed up with the dividends they are getting from the existing managements of the main political parties. They have clearly run out of ideas but refuse to go out on their own, preferring to wait to kick the bucket due to old age as the only means of exit.

India is not unique, of course, as far as this lag thing is concerned. Every democracy runs into the problem periodically. But they get rescued more quickly than us.

Thus, Britain first had Margaret Thatcher rescuing it from the tired trade union led socialism of 1945-78. Then Tony Blair rescued Britain from the Tory party. Now he too seems to have gone past his usefulness.

The US seems to do better than everyone in terms of the frequency with which new ideas come up. In the last 25 years there was first Ronald Reagan, bringing the market back as the new orthodoxy; then Bill Clinton, who carried this forward, and now George W Bush. Disagreements aside, all three came up with different ideas and not just improved versions of the old ones.

The result is that both countries have done far better than those that fail to generate new ideas. Thus, in sharp contrast, there is France, which refuses to change at all. And until last year's election, Germany was also stuck. But it is now beginning to change. Japan, too, was stagnant until Koizumi began to stir things up. I could go on, but there is no need to.

What is the crucial difference between the quick-to-change, slow-to-change and the no-change countries? I think mostly it is contempt for the people on the part of the leaders of the political parties. This is not the same as lack of responsiveness.

As a theorem it can be stated as follows: the pace of change and the degree of contempt are negatively correlated.

The most contemptuous of the people are the Communists. They simply don't care about them. Their method is to divide the world into two parts: the Party and the Rest.

The BJP is next in the contempt quotient. Its contempt consists of inciting Hindus against the minorities even though our national ethos is not inclined in that direction. Its world view is Hindus Vs the Rest.

The Congress comes a close third but is very different in the way it divides the world. For it, the division is 10 Janpath Vs the Rest, including Congressmen. Its contempt manifests itself in its veneration of the Gandhi family. Consider its record. It preaches democracy but is royalist. It preaches secularism but views politics through the communal prism. It says it is against casteism but its public policy is framed to deliver benefits based on caste criteria. And, most importantly, it derives legitimacy by invoking the All-knowing, Almighty 10, Janpath by using, essentially, a religious approach to authority. As a friend of mine in the civil service put it, the Congress is no longer a cult as it was in the days of Indira Gandhi; it has now become a religion where doubt and questioning are ruled out ab initio.

Defeat in elections ought to make these people less contemptuous. But as the BJP's yatra project and the Congress's caste and communal populism show, it doesn't.

Political scientists have a duty to tell us why.