Devangshu Datta: Democracy is alive & well

VIEWPOINT

In 1683, a battle that defined the map and ethnicity of Europe occurred at the gates of Vienna. The Ottoman Turks surged out of the Balkans, driving the Hapsburg army back to its heartland. Kara Mustafa Pasha laid siege to the Austrian capital with an army of approximately 150,000.

The only hope for the besieged Austrians was a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukranian army, led by Polish King-Elector and Lithuanian Grand Duke Jan III Sobieski. Sobieski was a brilliant military commander and certainly, nominally Christian, as were his men.

But although he prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary, his true allegiance was to Mammon and the army he led consisted of committed mercenaries. Before they agreed to fight the Muslim Turks at all, the Christian Poles negotiated for weeks with their starving but wealthy co-religionists, the Austrians.

Once he had secured compensation, Sobieski crossed the Danube and won a famous victory against odds of around 2:1. The Battle of Vienna marked the furthest expansion of the Ottomans into Europe. After that, the Austrians, Poles, etc. gradually reoccupied large portions of the Balkans. The areas that remained under Turkish occupation are still predominantly Muslim while the areas that came under Mittel-European influence are predominantly Christian.

Chesterton wrote about Sobieski and his boys: "They stood in the hour when Earth's foundation swayed/They pursued their mercenary calling and saved the sum of things/For pay". Indeed, one could argue that the Poles were the key factor in ensuring 21st century Europe is majority Christian in descent even if few Europeans are church-goers and the borders have been redrawn many times over the centuries.

Whenever I look back at the early days of India's liberalisation, I cannot help but think of Sobieski. Napoleon, Talleyrand, Richelieu, Bismarck, Lenin are variously cited as the architects of modern Europe. But Sobieski and his Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian forces could well be described as the cornerstone. They played a crucial role in creating Europe's ethnic identity. If Sobieski had not won at Vienna, Turkey would have shared a border with Germany.

In the same fashion, Shibu Soren and his Jharkhand Mukti Morcha were the keystones of India's economic liberalisation. Manmohan Singh may have provided the intellectual impetus; Rao may have given the go-ahead. But if the JMM had refused to support Narasimha Rao's coalition in 1993, the liberalisation process would have stalled""perhaps, forever.

That show of support from a gang of four (one of whom was too inebriated to really function) offered three vital years for the concept of de-licensing to be internalised and become a "fact on the ground" for the Indian economy. After that, despite the lunacies that have occurred over the next 13 years, there hasn't been a rollback.

The other parallel between Sobieski and Soren is, of course, that neither cared two hoots for the pros and cons of the polities they respectively created and defended. They did it for monetary compensation. The motives hardly matter. If neither had put up his hands when he did, we would have lived in a very different world.

Of course, the JMM and its "Guruji" have created history all over again. No Indian Cabinet Minister had ever been convicted of murder until the axe fell on Shibu-dada. Again, this makes Guruji an important footnote in history. Jha's murder occurred many years ago. The tangled tale of blackmail that arose out of the disposal of the slush funds JMM received in 1993 is murky even by the standards of Indian politics.

But the conviction of Guruji does send a message. It says that people in positions of power and privilege do not always get away with committing murder. They do quite often. But not always. And it warms the cockles of the heart to know that the Winter Session will be short of two (former) MPs serving jail sentences. It means democracy is still alive and well.