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There are considerable strains that the (Indian) polity is under. These strains have meant that political, as well as daily life in India is becoming volatile, violent, and precarious. The political volatility and fragmentation as well as the tensions in the federation can be seen dialectically. On the one hand, they are a decline from the stable days of the Nehru decade when parliamentary democracy functioned along the laid down Constitutional grooves. They can also be seen positively as evidence of democracy becoming more inclusive with the leadership no longer monopolised by the upper caste, wealthy, or university educated elite. There is an explosion of political democratic activity in India. People may dislike politicians but they have faith in politics. Need for new politics
The time has come for India to reconsider the nature of its politics. India has made an outstanding success of being a democracy. No theory of democracy should be seriously entertained which does not explain the success of Indian democracy. Yet India has disappointed the hopes raised when it gained Independence. India has slipped in the league of industrial countries from the seventh place it had in 1947 (in volume terms) to somewhere below twenty. Half the children are malnourished and despite some progress, 35 per cent of the population is still classified as poor. India’s Human Development Index (HDI) ranking is very low and so is its Gender Development Index (GDI). India is on the other hand, a nuclear power in all but name and can deploy missiles. Despite high aspirations, India’s international standing in Asia and in the United Nations (UN) is not high. When they speak of Asia, people round the world exclude South Asia. The reasons for this under performance in some aspects and outstanding achievements in others are three-fold. First is that Indians are, confused about their national identity. The question posed by the colonisers, ‘Is India a nation and if so why?’, is still one which raises a lot of controversy. I shall argue that it is the confusion about our identity which has been one of the root causes of the uneven performance. The second aspect is related to the first. India has never had a clear response to modernity. The current contradictory response to globalisation to the world at large and to rationality and secularisation arise, in my opinion, from this lack of clarity about modernity. The connection of these two reasons with politics is that India now has arrived at a point where it can be much bolder and clearer about these two issues but to do that also requires adopting a new style politics. **** Citizen groups will have to undertake the agitation of cleansing of political parties — all political parties. Voter groups should be formed monitoring parties behaviour — their democratic credentials, their record of fulfilling promises that they made while in opposition, their record in choosing criminals while in office as their legislators — and compile a register of corrupt cases. The radical change of economic policy inaugurated by Manmohan Singh in 1991 was seen to be an emergency package. Without any change in personnel, the planners of yesteryear became the liberalisers of tomorrow. India became a reluctant liberaliser. Liberalisation is the only way left for India to gear its economy up to a high growth path at 7 to 8 per cent per annum. Gujarat and its Bhasmita Gujarat has redefined itself from a peace-loving tolerant place full of civility into an aggressive assertive Hindu domain. This has been the result of a steady and assiduous Kulturkampf fought by the Jan Sangh/BJP through the 1980s and the 1990s. On my periodic visits to India during those days, I found good, gentle, middle class Gujaratis, prosperous, not poor, steadily turning anti-Muslim. One of my great nieces shocked me when she said, apropos of Dilip Kumar, ‘He is a Muslim; he should not get any film roles’. I had never ever thought of Dilip Kumar as anything but Dilip Kumar and while everyone knew he was Yusuf Khan, no one thought of him as other than an Indian till the poison began to spread in the 1980s. **** Democracy, which we much celebrate, has not been good for communal relations. This is because competitive politics has crystallised communities by treating them as vote banks.**** Readings of the Bhagvad Gita or the Ramayana have become festivals of conspicuous consumption. Instead of Vaishnavite pacifism we have Bajrang aggression.Thus Gujaratis have turned from being meek and mild and proverbially passive to being macho and aggressive. |
In this incisive and provocative collection of essays, Development and Nationhood: Essays in the Political Economy of South Asia (OUP, Rs 650), Meghnad Desai charts India’s politico-economic evolution by juxtaposing it with the condition from the stable Nehruvian era to when “far from becoming a republic of citizens, India has become an archipelago of communities.”
