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Ethics of Indian politics
Worse than witches’ brew
by Inder Malhotra
ONLY the other day there was a whiff of fresh air in Delhi’s political ambience that is usually as polluted and oppressive as the capital’s physical environment, especially during the scorching heat. One morning the news came that the Union Minister for Small, Micro and Medium Industries (whatever that might mean) and former Chief Minister
of Himachal Pradesh, Virbhadra Singh, had resigned. What made this doubly welcome was that he had done so within 24 hours of a special court in Shimla having framed charges of corruption against him and his wife.All through the previous day the political class dominating the Delhi scene had acted strictly according to the established standards and script. Congress party stalwarts had gone on declaiming that there was no need for the minister to resign because the charges had only been framed and not proved. The counter-shouting from the serried ranks of
the BJP was that since the charges had been framed by a court of law, not by the executive, Mr. Singh must resign immediately or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should dismiss him. This is symptomatic of the mixture of self-righteousness and hypocrisy on the issue of corruption that has become the hallmark of the two mainstream parties, and indeed of the entire polity. In a country where almost every canon of the rule of law and every norm of parliamentary democracy is thrown to the winds every politician clings to just one principle: “Innocent until proven guilty”. Ironically, there is an imaginative twist to even this doctrine. It applies only to the tainted ministers and members of one’s own party. Their counterparts across the political divide must abide by “democracy’s highest standards” and quit at the slightest suspicion of wrongdoing. In other words, the Indian doctrine on political ethics is a prettification of Franklin Roosevelt’s blunt edict on the need always to differentiate “between our s.o.bs and their s.o.bs”. Consequently, it is no surprise that, irrespective of which party is in power, those charged with not only graft and extortion but also such heinous crimes as murder and abduction sit pretty in Parliament and state assemblies, and sometimes adorn ministerial chairs. Against this bleak backdrop I, for one, was happy that a new pattern of prompt and decisive action against those facing charges of corruption was perhaps being ushered in. For, all reports had suggested that Dr. Manmohan Singh, evidently in consultation with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had insisted on immediate departure of his small industries’ minister. However, one should have known better. The joy has turned out to be
short-lived. The Virbhadra Singh episode is not the start a brave new chapter but, alas, only a rare exception to the rule. Of the available evidence, the chatter among Congress spokespersons - some of them
authorised, others self-appointed – continues to be that Mr. Virbhadra Singh has “nothing to be apologetic about”, and has resigned to “uphold the highest moral standards”. And then comes the punch line: This is something the “BJP has never done so and would never do” – a
compliment the saffron party is almost certain to return some day. This can, however, be dismissed as immaterial. But what is happening
right now about the monumental Adarsh scandal in Mumbai is the real and revealing indicator of the unchanged state of affairs. In the first place, Adarsh, a lavish high-rise building of luxury flats on the Defence Ministry’s land, was meant only for Kargil War heroes and widows. But these coveted flats have been usurped brazenly by relatives of politicians in power, their bureaucratic collaborators, Army generals and others with sufficient clout. And now every legal jugglery, every skullduggery and every dirty trick are being used to both delay indefinitely and confuse entirely the process of exposing those deserving exemplary punishment for their crimes.
Nothing could have been more revealing than the evidence that three former chief ministers of Maharashtra, two of whom are members of the
Union Cabinet, have tendered before a two-man judicial commission that
is investigating the despicable Adarsh fraud. The first to testify was Sushilkumar Shinde, Union Minister for Power, who squarely blamed his successor as Maharashtra Chief Minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, now Science and Technology Minister at the Centre. The latter shifted the entire blame to his own successor, Ashok Chavan, who, in his evidence, has again put the blame on Mr. Deshmukh and on senior officials. This
is clearly one of those cases where both sides deserve to be believed. But will the Congress high command do so and act accordingly or take shelter behind the standard plea: Let the law take its own course? The complacent, indeed cynical and casual approach of the powers that
be is best illustrated by their kid gloves treatment of Mr. Deshmukh. He was asked to resign as Maharashtra Chief Minister after 26/11 but was immediately rewarded with a seat In the Union Cabinet. Last year the Supreme Court indicted him for obstructing justice as the head of the Maharashtra government. The apex court underscored that he told a police officer to drop the investigations against the father of a Congress MLA. For what was the old gentleman being investigated against? For allegedly usurious money lending that had driven Vidarbha farmers to suicides! There were public demands for Mr. Deshmukh’s ouster but the Congress high command was unmoved. One of the judges who had delivered the judgment expressed surprise over this some weeks later. The Prime Minister’s response was to regret “judicial overreach”. And now that Mr. Deshmukh is the main recipient of opprobrium over the Adarsh affair he has been given “additional charge” of Mr. Virbhadra Singh’s ministry. This brings me to the point that judicial activism becomes meaningless when lamentable judicial delays make any action against those arraigned for corruption and abuse of power impossible. The case against Mr. Virbhadra Singh was filed in 1989. It has taken the court exactly 23 years to frame the charges. Is it any surprise that no trial of any influential politicians has ever ended in his or her conviction? For, usually the accused person passes away while judicial proceedings drag on. In at least one such case, that of Hare Krushna Mahatab, Orrisa’s first chief minister after Independence, the government of the day even issued a postal stamp in his
honour.
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Who’s afraid of the budget?
by Rajan Kashyap
Time was when everyone dreaded the Budget Day. What little economics we understood then prepared us for a market where everything was set to become dearer. For the housewife, the procurement of daily needs, groceries for home, or toys and biscuits and clothes for the children, was sure to pinch her tattered pocket. As students the reach of our meager pocket money could not be stretched to cover the rising cost (thanks to higher entertainment tax) of a cinema ticket, and we foreswore the luxury of a mandatory samosa and cold drink during the movie interval. Smokers and drinkers braced to take a hit on their pleasant vices. On February 28 every year cherished middle class dreams of purchasing a motor car or a refrigerator became more distant, as every budget made those wondrous goods dearer.With the passage of years we gained knowledge, if not wisdom, about budgetary resources, about deficits fiscal and revenue. We realised why taxes were essential to keep the wheels of government running, that the national policy of milking its citizens of some “wealth” enabled the creation of many goods and services, and that these resources contributed handsomely to the gross domestic product of a growing economy. We were taught of the inevitability of the government “excising” a portion of all sales. Taxes, we were assured, were a bitter medicine for our own good and prosperity. With such grand ideas of public finance we were ready, and reconciled to receive a few “slings and arrows” from the quiver of the Finance Minister. So what has changed over time? The top secret document called the budget is now a glossy book artistically created and delivered to our worthy lawmakers in velvet briefcases, a collector’s item. Its external shine is matched by its luscious contents. The central theme of the document is “No fresh taxes!” The book describes savoury goodies bestowed by Santa Claus on all and sundry, tablet computers for high school students, bicycles for girls at school, and marriage grants beyond, pensions for the elderly, freebies such as saris for women, and TV sets for family viewing, albeit not accompanied by any assurance of power supply to activate the gadgets. A grotesque promise is held out to the kin of those unfortunate voters who might be induced to take their own lives in the face of economic depravity unallayed by the state’s policies. States and political parties vie with each other in waiving taxes even as they promise more roads, hospitals and employment In almost every state of democratic India today, the Chancellor of the Exchequer longs to be acclaimed as a harbinger of goodwill and prosperity. He panders to populism unlimited. He forgets the sage advice, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everyone.” Any discordant voice pointing out that the projected expenditure exceeds the likely income is summarily silenced. The ingredients for the promised free lunches will be procured during the course of the year, it is assured. And so we await, apprehensively, the inevitable coming burdens that will serve to balance the budget, eventually. The suspense remains. For there will be many tomorrows that will resemble the Budget Day of
yesteryear.
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Canaries spell doom for the mines of culture
Management of culture does not require bureaucracy. By limiting culture to song and dance ensembles, government organisations that were supposed to act as patrons of our age-old traditions have caused the untimely death of hundreds of highly evolved folk art forms
Vandana Shukla
 It was a unique way of approaching music. You could not call it fusion, in the general sense of the term, which led to the creation of now famous ‘Sound of Worlds’ project. The project was initiated by a group of young Hungarian artistes, who were enamoured by the sounds and rhythms of Indian folk music. Their aesthetic innovations in the traditional compositions of music introduced the discerning music lovers of India to the range and depth of Indian folk music, but, in a contemporary mould. For the first time ‘Vilagok Hongja’(which means music of the world), the series on folk sounds produced by Istvan Jeszenzky, Gabriella Bacskai and their troupe, in collaboration with folk musicians of India, put the folk music on a pedestal where it earned respect usually accorded to classical music. ‘Vilagok Hongja’ was not the sole endeavour. In different parts of the country, people and private organisations, conscious of their cultural heritage were observing disappearance of our tangible as well as intangible traditions, and were working hard to protect them. Shabnam Virmani researched and archived the oral tradition of Kabeer Bani, as it is sung in different corners of the country, including some parts of Pakistan. She received help for this project from The Ford Foundation. Mehmood Farooqui revived Dastangoi, a powerful tradition of story narration, which disappeared with the gradual decline of Urdu speakers. Anoop Ranjan Pandey created ‘Bastar Band,’ in the heart of Maoist affected area of Chhattisgarh, to protect the folk instruments of the region. The oldest tradition of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam, of Kerala, was saved by the timely intervention by UNESCO, which declared it as one of the “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” This help meant that the practitioners of these traditional arts could continue to do what they excelled at, and not abandon their art in favour of a menial job to earn their bread and butter.
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Manjusha Art- on the verge of extinction
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A cultured beginning While these individual success stories are talked about with pride, and often showcased and claimed by the government agencies too, hundreds of our traditions have been disappearing into oblivion. In the last sixty five years, with hundreds of universities, culture academies and departments, and millions of rupees allocated to these departments in budget, we could not as much as document the vast diversity of our traditional art forms that enriched our lives for centuries. Despite the fact that in 1985, twenty seven years back, the late Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi created ZCCs (zonal cultural centres), exclusively for this purpose. The idea behind establishing the seven zonal cultural centres was to promote ‘unity in diversity.’ After about 35 years of independence, when several separatist movements were raising their head in the country, it was thought that by reviving the cultural bond across the length and breadth of the country, the elusive unity could be re-established. After all, despite repeated invasions, the people of this land had not abandoned Ramleelas, taziyas, nautankis, raasleelas, festivities around harvesting, fairs, and community singing, which had kept them together in a cultural bond during many historical upheavals. Culture can’t walk alone Like most government plans, which sound good on paper but lack cohesiveness, the zonal centres suffered from the bureaucratic hierarchy. Culture is a reflection of people’s way of life, as times change, people change and so does their lifestyle. Preservation of culture should not connote fossilisation of traditions. It had to be allowed to grow organically, with innovation and adaptation to the present environs. In the bureaucratic interpretation of culture, the ‘orders’ of culture events were taken rather literally, without using imagination and adopting ‘safe’ approach of repeating the old in the name of tradition, without using that rare commodity called innovation. Secondly, it was around the same time that the country launched National Literacy Mission( 1988) and Sam Pitroda initiated what we now know as the telecom revolution. All the three plans worked, but, they worked in isolation. If only the tribal and folk art forms were used for spreading literacy, if only new technologies were used to help the traditional forms adapt and evolve (the way it was done by the Hungarian artistes), so many forms would not have disappeared from our cultural landscape. And, literacy mission would have received wider acceptance, if it was related to people’s folk arts. ‘Inventing’ folk Faithfully carrying the target oriented mind- set of the nasbandi era, zonal cultural centres got too bogged down by the number of events and performances they were supposed to organise in a year rather than creating a culture balance sheet, that would reflect the number of art forms disappearing from right under their nose. At some centres, the lost art forms were created using imagination, killing authenticity. Once again, to make some brownie points with the bosses, some folk forms were ‘reinvented.’ With a blinkered approach to culture, many facts were ignored. That, Bollywood and consumerism were making inroads in rural India. That children of folk artists were getting educated, under the same Literacy Mission, and did not like to remain poor folk artists, like their parents. They would like to have a proper job. Urban migration was growing rapidly and the idea of ‘collective’ was breaking. These changes were not taken into account when culture policies were designed by the think tanks in the government, culture was relegated to naach gana, and was not taken seriously, as a reflection of people’s way of living. Majority of folk art forms are spontaneous and are celebratory in nature. They are collective and participatory. They were not designed for stage performances. The ZCCs brought these ‘performers’ to stage, on stage the ‘performances’ lost much of their spontaneity, staleness seeped in with the sameness of the repetitive shows. Not the bourgeois In the new class culture of our art forms, classical art forms were assigned the protection by the three Akademies- Lalit, Sangeet Natak and Sahitya, while folk and tribal arts came under the protection of zonal centres. While the artists of classical music are paid a few lakh for a single performance (usually ranging from 2 to 8 lakh), the folk artistes are paid Rs 400 for a day’s performance by the zonal centres. Though, a committee is now looking into raising it to Rs 1000 a day. This fact alone defines the status we accord to our folk art forms. Of the seven zonal cultural centres, two are being headed by superintendents of police, on deputation. This reflects the lack of seriousness we treat our cultural institutions with. Then, the selection of artistes is left to the vagaries of ‘contractors,’ who bring troupes of folk artistes from the hinterlands. Many oral traditions are disappearing, like the Sarada singers of Telangana region, who live the life of nomads, hence they remain outside the reach of all government programmes. Kavi Kale, a traditional art form of making frescos is disappearing from the temple walls of coastal Karnataka due to renovation of old walls carried out by government agencies. Manjusha art from Bhagalpur is almost dead. Hundreds of other forms of communication and artistic expression have disappeared post- independence. Such examples can be picked from any corner of the country, making one wonder, how such diversity of art survived without any patronage for centuries? These art forms were created by the masses, enriched by them and were carried forward by them. People centric culture is turned bureaucracy centric in the name of its protection. We must remember, the canary of culture is a fragile being, it needs the right balance of environmental ingredients to live. And, stale air certainly kills it.
The U.R. Ananthamurthy Committee, constituted in 1994, reported some of the major departures it found in the working of ZCCs:
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ZCCs have lost their focus, become excessively bureaucratized and insufficiently creative, their performance fluctuating widely because the lack of institutionalization makes outcomes heavily dependent on the personality and personal inclinations of the Director who happens to be leading the ZCC at any given period of time…n
Instead of being people-oriented, with cross-country cultural Yatras and participation in cattle and agricultural fairs and mass religious celebrations such as the Kumbh Mela or the Urs or Christmas celebrations, as originally conceived and undertaken initially by the ZCCs, too many ZCCs for too much of the time have since tended to be oriented towards their host State Governments and host State VIPs, as well as to Headquarters… n
This tendency to concentrate ZCC attention on HQs and VIP functions, and acting as a funnelling agency for folk and tribal talent to State Departments of Culture, is also aggravated by the dominance of classical artistes and activists in ZCC Programme Committees, with insufficient representation for rural and urban slum representatives, tribal and folk artistes and older artistes... In August 2010,the Mani Shankar Aiyar committee was constituted to examine the action taken on recommendations made by the Ananthamurthy committee. Some of their recommendations- n
The creation of infrastructure at the Headquarters (HQ) of the ZCCs is a deviation from the original concept of keeping them simple, cost-effective…the Committee recommends that the ZCCs should not spend more than 10% of their programme budget on HQ and Shilpagram programmes taken together. n
To offset the valid criticism that over-bureaucratization of the ZCCs has led to serious lacunae in the range and quality of programming, the Committee recommends that the proposed ICZCC must put in place an effective system of Cultural Audit to undertake an independent assessment of the quality of ZCC
programmes. n The rural orientation of the Yatras and chain programmes, the backbone of outreach programmes, needs to be revived, shifting the focus back to rural and mofussil venues in place of the present tendency to seek middle class venues in larger towns and cities. n
A compendium of folk and tribal art forms must be compiled and lesser-known folk and tribal performing art forms must be promoted. (Texts quoted from the respective reports)
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