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Rajni is deeply disappointed with
the "nemesis" of Congress starting with Indira Gandhi
and ending in corruption-ridden rule of Narasimha Rao. Indira’s
slogan of "garibi hatao" resulted in a highly
centralised bureaucratic system devoid of democratic values in
the absence of any alternative institution building. She also
played the aggressive communal card. Rajiv Gandhi’s ineptness
and Rao’s corruption completed the fall of the Congress and
the Congress system. Sonia Gandhi is unable to revive either.
The experience of the post-Nehru period has shown the
effectiveness of representative democracy in providing
legitimacy to the rule, but its failure in being accountable to
the people and in meeting their aspirations. The result is the
mushrooming of personal parties, absence of a national party and
a national agenda, growth of all sorts of alliances and morchas
and breakdown of the party system. Anguished, Rajni is searching
for alternatives.
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Rajni Kothari with his grandchildren
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Democracy for
Rajni is not form but a society informed by ethical values of
equality, freedom and digility, i.e., emancipatory.
Historically, it has grown with the development of capitalism
and nation state. Increasing inequality created the crisis of
capitalism, which was sought to be met by a welfare state.
However, there is retreat of welfare with the rise of
globalisation. American hegemony can be met only by a democratic
nation state. A nation state has to meet the twin challenges of
globalisation and bureaucratic centralisation. Rajni, however,
has no faith in decentralisation.
He is aware of the
limits of experiments carried out in India officially so far for
democratic decentralisation and their large failures. However,
his faith remains in the movements of a Medha Patker or
Shankerguha Neogy or a Rajendra Singh or SEWA or Mrs Roy. Since
the party system has broken down, the only alternative is of
participatory democracy rather than of representative democracy.
This will also be a defence against the capitalist argument of
democracy being the necessary global system and the western
attempt to wage an international coalition, even an armed one,
for the defence and propagation of the democratic system in the
world. They want a representative system, which will be easy to
manipulate. He, therefore, argues for a direct participatory
system at various levels. This will require people being made
conscious of the issues at stake. This will mean civil society
movements, thousands in number, working at various levels. Rajni
feels that these movements will have to be holistic in nature
and argues for a composite nature of the values. Democratic
values, for Rajni, cannot be established in isolation of one
value receiving precedence over the other.
He also feels that
all members of civil society have to move towards emancipation
together. One remaining a slave means all are slaves. He has
lost faith in established alternatives, Gandhian, Marxist,
Capitalist or Spiritual. He is looking for the possibilities of
democracy leading to emancipation from the shackles of both
modernity and tradition and self-rule by the people.
It is obvious that
Rajni is moving away from any kid of dialectics when he talks of
simultaneous emancipation of all. Limits of self-governance will
limit the possibilities of economies of scale. Its essential is
self-denial and service. It is possible to think of reduced
bureaucracy, but not of its extinction. It implies suppression
of ego, a desire to be distinct, a desire to be recognised. It
can make Rajni easily subject to the charge of utopia. All in
all, one gets the impression that Rajni is moving quite close to
Gandhi.
Rajni chose to be
an activist political thinker, rejecting his family calling as
the only son of a well-to-do Jain trader, who was married into
an equally well-off family of traders. Maybe it had something to
do with the early death of his mother and his father bringing in
a stepmother from whom he was alienated. The death of his wife
in the evening of his life seem to make him look for his roots
in his Jainism-Vaishnavism and its principal value of ahimsa,
i.e., absence of oppression, or non-exploitation, or equality
and self-denial. The choice of a term like emancipation confirms
this. The failure of communism and end of Hegelian history will
bring many back to their roots as they did India’s foremost
political thinker.
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NO
study of Indian polity for the past half century can be
complete without a reading of Rajni Kothari, a pioneer in
empirical studies in this field and the founder of the CSDS.
His "Politics in India" is a must reading for under-
and post-graduate courses in Indian politics all over the
world. He gave the term "Congress system" to the
political lexicon to describe the party system in India,
attuned to highly effective consensus-building process within
the party, providing its own opposition, keeping certain core
values of democracy intact.
