Two Addendums

I have two additions to my previous two posts, which I am clubbing into one.
Today, December 30, the Right Honourable Shibu Soren, will be sworn in as chief minister of Jharkhand once again. In my last post on the issue, I had pointed out how corrupt and criminal politicians keep getting voted to power by voters, even after information is now available about their antecedents. The Association for Democratic Reforms has done an analysis of the antecedents of MLAs in the new Jharkhand assembly. The list is telling and tragic.
Twenty-six of the 79 MLAs in the Assembly (73 per cent) have criminal cases of a serious nature pending against them. The serious charges are murder (four), attempt to murder (14), theft (14) and kidnapping.
This is information collected from the affidavits all election candidates are supposed to provide. That means this information was in the public domain from the minute these candidates filed their nomination papers.
And yet they got elected. This is the value we attach to our votes.
Going on to the Ruchika Girhotra case. I am now beginning to seriously think that far too many people are cynically capitalising on this case.
Apparently a Chandigarh NGO, World Human Rights Protection Council, has decided to file a public interest litigation seeking harsher punishment for S P S Rathore and on the issue of the harassment of Ashu, Ruchika's brother.
And M S Bitta, head of the All India Anti Terrorist Front, toodled off to honour the Parkashes for the strength shown by them in fighting the case. Bitta is a publicity monger of the worst kind. I remember with disgust seeing his antics at the funeral of news photographer, Pradeep Bhatia, who got killed in Kashmir while covering a gun battle between terrorists and security forces. He was roundly ticked off but his face had an absolutely shameless look. Where was he all these years when the Prakashes were fighting alone? I am disappointed that the Prakashes refused the honour till such time as the case reaches its logical end. At that time, will they accept dubious honours from even more dubious people like Bitta? Why didn't they just snub him there and then?
I can understand Ruchika's father now deciding to come out into the open and knock the doors of higher courts for justice. After all, he no longer has to live in fear of S P S Rathore. But surely all these other people didn't have the same fear. And if they had all come forward to help the Girhotras when they were being harassed, could Rathore have gone to the extent he did? It is specious to argue that they didn't know of the case. Lakhanpal is an advocate in Chandigarh. How could he have not known of the case? Bitta is a politician. I find it hard to believe that he was absolutely clueless in all these years. One newspaper had written about the case and Rathore's harassment of Ashu Girhotra when he was made DGP. So why were they silent then?
Some of the issues that are being raised is absolutely pointless now. Like the inquiry against Sacred Heart Convent which expelled Ruchika on grounds of late payment of fees. That surely must have pushed the child over the brink. Someone should have come forward to help the Girhotras and Parkashes and fought the school then. Someone should have held the school authorities to account then. Nineteen years later, does it matter? Can anything be done to rectify it?
Right now, there are only two persons who should be proceeded against. Rathore and the then Superintendent of Police, Ambala, K P Singh, who, according to the Indian Express, registered all those false cases against Ashu. He definitely should not be allowed to go scot free.
People like him and Rathore must learn that the long arm of the law is actually long.
At the same time, let the publicity mongers be kept away.

Jharkhand and Us

As one sees the sight of the thoroughly immoral Shibu Soren insisting that he should be made chief minister of Jharkhand, the only thought that comes to mind is - perhaps states also need to be born under auspicious stars. What else can one think when one sees the tragedy of Jharkhand. When it was carved out of Bihar, it had a bright future. After all, it was undivided Bihar’s industrial powerhouse, it was immensely rich in mineral and forest resources, it had the benefit of a vision document for economic development prepared by the Confederation of Indian Industry (something the two other states created at the same time, Chhattisgarh and Uttaranchal, which is now Uttarkhand, did not have). But the state is sinking deeper and deeper into an abyss because of political instability and a thoroughly corrupt political class.

Now we will all sit and lament about the political system, the quality of public life and how corrupt politicians go scot free. But who is allowing them to go scot free? Why do corrupt politicians and those with criminal backgrounds keep getting elected? Because we vote for them.

Earlier it was attributed to lack of knowledge about politicians. But that is no longer the case. Ever since the Association of Democratic Reforms, through it public interest litigation, succeeded in making it compulsory for those contesting elections to declare their assets, educational background and involvement in criminal cases, people can’t claim to be ignorant any more. And yet we keep electing criminals and corrupt politicians. I quote from an earlier post, The Four Cs:

I have always held that the Indian voters may love to carp about corruption in plush drawing rooms as well as DTC buses, but that is hardly an issue in elections. Yes, it became an issue in 1989, when the Bofors scandal shook the nation. But that was probably because of the scale of corruption involved and that the Prime Minister himself was under a cloud. But has it ever been an issue after that? Why, Rajiv Gandhi was all set to return to power n 1991 when he was assassinated. Sukh Ram, the telecom minister in whose house currency notes were found stashed in mattresses, had no problem getting elected. The DMK and the AIADMK keep getting voted in and out alternately even though they are known to be corrupt. Similar examples abound. So if anyone thinks voters are going to rise in anger against corruption and throw bribe-seeking politicians out, they would be well advised to perish the thought.

Clearly, we are not willing to do much more than rant in our living rooms about corruption, as I had argued in Morality of Middle Class Politics. Till we are willing to do that, we have to suffer the Shibu Sorens of the world.

More Meaningless Vigils

Oh no, not again. That was my first reaction when I saw the news clips of the candlelight vigils for Ruchika Girhotra. Like it happened in the Jessica Lal case, this too may lead to a relook at the judgement giving S P S Rathore a laughable six months imprisonment and Rs 1000 fine. And it will be all hailed as a victory for middle class activism.

But I find this whole candlelight vigil business quite farcical. Read an earlier post of mine Middle Class Angst to understand what I am trying to say. I made a similar point in another post, Nithari and Us.

I wonder how many of those who participated in the vigil in Chandigarh knew the Girhotras and stood by them in all these years? From all accounts, it was only the Parkash family who did that. The Girhotras were forced to shift houses and leave Chandigarh because of harassment by Rathore. When he sent goons to their house to pelt stones did his other neighbours come out in a group and confront them? Or did they all sit quietly behind locked doors and watch the drama from their windows? When her brother was booked in false cases and tortured, did anyone other than the Parkash family take up his cause?

It’s very easy now to participate in a candlelight vigil after Rathore has been convicted. And once everyone is sure he is not in a position to harm them any more. I would have saluted all these people if they had done something like this in all these 19 years.

This candlelight vigil doesn’t mean that more Ruchikas won’t be harassed by more Rathores any more. I am absolutely certain that among those in the vigils there will be many who will not do even an iota of what the Parkash family did for the Girhotras when faced with a similar situation. Why, they will not even stop to help if they see a girl being teased in a bus. Even if it happened to their own daughters, they will, in all probability, hush things up.

We don’t need more candlelight vigils. We need more Parkashes.

Violence By Any Other Name

Sunil Varma has left a comment on my previous post and he has said something very relevant and interesting in the end. “I just feel we forget very easily and conveniently some aspects of this country's tragic past.”
How very true. Everybody is now remembering Indira Gandhi for being this great leader, and trying to gloss over the fact that her economic policies and his dictatorial/dynastic side did more harm to the country than good.
We keep remembering the 2002 riots in Gujarat but forget the Godhra massacre, which sparked it off (I am not justifying the Gujarat riots or the inaction of the Narendra Modi government. It should have anticipated the riots and taken steps to prevent it. It is as guilty as the Congress government in 1984 was.) As for the human rights brigade and the left-liberals, the less said the better.
In college, I was one of these human rights types – admired PUCL etc because of the opposition to the Emergency and the fact that eminent people like V M Tarkunde, Nayantara Sahgal and a lot of leading anti-Emergency types were associated with it.
But I got cheesed off with the entire human rights brigade when in all those years on the TOI desk, processing news about terrorist killings in punjab, I never saw any criticism of killings by terrorists though the human rights activists were always quick to flay fake encounters and even real ones (though i don't justify fake encounters). That’s still happening – in Jammu and Kashmir, in the Naxalite heartland, in the NorthEast. Not one prominent human rights activist has openly commended Kashmir’s Rukhsana who killed a LeT commander or condemned the retaliatory militant attack on her house three days back. Left liberals rant against the Salwa Judum (a vigilante citizens force set up to counter the Maoists) but are silent against killings by the Maoists. On top of that, they urge the government to open a dialogue with these people on issues of development. But when the government says ok, stop violence, let’s talk and the Maoists reject that offer, they are silent.
I once argued about this with someone years, years back and was told that terrorists/militants etc are not responsible individuals, they function outside the system and that it was pointless to criticise them. What utter balderdash.
But there’s one point on which I differ with Sunil. “Whilst the Prime Minister of India has apologised for the carnage that happened after Indira Gandhi was assasinated by those who were supposed to have protected her with her own life, has ANY sikh ever apologised for the countless Hindus that were killed by the extremists in Punjab?”
The Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi before him apologised not as individuals but as symbols of the Congress Party whose top Delhi leaders were instigators of the anti-Sikh violence.
But expecting individual Sikhs to apologise for killings by terrorists is to brand the entire community as having supported the terrorist movement. Which they didn’t.
Can the same argument be extended to the Congress Party – that is, the entire Congress Party was not to blame for what a few individuals in it did? No, it cannot. Because a political party is a more cohesive unit than a community and therefore has more control over its members. Because even though everyone in the Congress knew what was going on, the violence continued for three days. Because after the violence came that unpardonable `jab ek bada ped girta hai, to dharti hilti hai’ statement by the new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. And above all, because the perpetrators of those killings continued to be rewarded with plum posts by the Congress Party.
The entire Sikh community never identified with the Khalistan cause or had any sympathy for the terrorists. Sure, the extremists got local support, but it was from a microscopic minority. Often food and shelter was taken by terrorists from Sikh families in the villages at gun point. The bulk of the support for the terrorists came from NRI Sikhs sitting safe in Canada and the United States and from Pakistan.
So yes, maybe members of the Babbar Khalsa, the All India Sikh Students Federation, the Khalistan Liberation Army (these are some of the names I remember from those days) should apologise, but not ordinary, individual Sikhs. They were also victims, though the violence was being done in their name.

Two Days I Will Never Forget

One journalist had recently written that nobody can forget where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news of Mrs Gandhi being shot. I remember too.

I was on morning shift in The Times of India and had popped into the cabin of the late V.D.Trivadi, the satirist and in charge of the middles section of the edit page, and Gautam G.S. Vohra, assistant editor and now a development activist. Someone (I don’t remember who) opened the door and said news had just come that Mrs Gandhi had been shot. We came out and moved to the teleprinters. Some of us young sub-editors smirked - `another attack drama?’ we wondered. Some years earlier, a stone thrown at her during a public rally was termed an assassination attempt. But no, this time it was for real.

The rest of the day went in a blur. A special edition had to be brought out, the teleprinters clattered without a pause. I don’t remember very much.

But there’s another thing people in Delhi will not forget – their first experience of/encounter with the anti-Sikh riots. Riots? Hell, no. It was a one-sided, targeted, cold-blooded massacre.

It was November 1. I was on morning shift again, which started at 9 a.m. I was on a 703 or 704, from Janakpuri to ITO. As the bus stopped at the red light on what is known as the Lajwanti crossing on Jail Road, we saw massive crowds on the road leading from the Delhi Cantonment railway station. No one had a clue what was happening (there were only small reports of Sikhs being attacked in South Delhi in the newspapers). Someone thought some train had got cancelled. And then the import hit us – several men got into our bus. “Koi sardar hai kya?” There were none. I quickly lowered my hand which was on the bar of the seat before mine and covered the kada I wear on my left wrist.

As I looked out of the window, I saw a middle aged Sikh man with his old mother on a two wheeler and the mob chasing him. He drove towards some office – it was probably a municipal corporation office or part of the Tihar Jail complex – right on the corner. But the employees there wouldn’t open the gate. There was fright on his face as he tried to speed away. The light turned green and my bus turned. I don’t know what happened to that man and his mother. Did they get to safety? Did the mob get to them? That picture haunts me to this day.

I reached office without any further incident. It was only towards afternoon that the magnitude of what was happening began to strike us. Cars were sent to pick up people in later shifts. When my shift got over, I was sent home in a car with someone else who had to be dropped home, crack reporter Ravi Bhatia (now deceased) and a photographer, probably Chadha saheb.

The images will never leave me. Panchkuin Road furniture shops being looted. “Gaadi rok, mere ko bhi ek chair chahiye,” Ravi joked, as only he can. We all laughed but all of us were shaken to the core.

I couldn’t believe that the ghost city I was driving through was the city I was born and brought up in. Burnt vehicles, still smouldering, blackened shopfronts.

The Kirti Nagar timber market was up in flames – we could feel the heat in the car. At one point, a lone policeman armed with just a lathi (a lathi!!), trembling with fear, flagged our car down. `Don’t go further, there’s violence there.’ With me in the car, Ravi and Chadha saheb decided to take another route. Near Naraina village, we saw a group with a Congress flag chanting that now famous slogan - `khoon ka badla khoon’.

And on the Delhi Cantt flyover – Janak Setu – the most horrifying sight of the day (for me, that is) – the half burnt body of a Sikh, his hair spread out.

And as we turned into Janakpuri from Jail Road, there was a huge poster that had been quickly put up – We mourn the sad loss of our beloved Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. It had been put up by Bakshi Properties – a known property dealer of the area and a Sikh.

Did that get him immunity from the rioters? Some said yes, and some said no. I never came to know.

The Four Cs

There is little doubt that four Cs have been the bane of Indian politics for some time now. They are – not necessarily in order of importance or significance – communalism, criminalisation of politics, corruption and casteism. Each of these (barring criminalisation) was made a major issue by some political grouping or the other. So what verdict did voters give? I feel that despite fulminating against all these evils and blaming politicians for fostering them, people haven’t reacted sufficiently against them.

Communalism

Everybody says that Verdict 2009 was a vote for the middle path, that people rejected the politics of polarisation. The evidence that is being offered is:

# the poor performance of the BJP, which also found its vote share dropping from 22.4 per cent in 2004 to 18.8 per cent in 2009.

# the lacklustre performance of the party in Gujarat – headed by an extremely polarising Narendra Modi – where also its vote share dropped from 47.37 per cent to 46.52 per cent and it managed to increase its 2004 tally of 14 seats by just one (it now has 15 seats in Gujarat).

# the poor performance of the Shiv Sena – far more polarising than the BJP or even Modi – which won only 11 of the 47 seats it contested and found its vote share dropping from 1.81 per cent in 2004 to 1.55 in 2009.

But is this enough to presume a rejection of communal politics? Somehow I am not sure. After all a hate-spewing Varun Gandhi won, with a huge margin. Of course, there is the possibility that this could be because his mother had nurtured that constituency. And the BJP’s lacklustre performance across the country is being attributed to the disenchantment with its lack of firm action against Varun. But I am fairly sure that the hate speech – or at least the over-the-top action taken against him – did swing things in his favour. The drop in the party’s vote share in Gujarat between 2004 and 2009 is less than 1 per cent. That means the Modi brand of politics still has a significant number of takers.

If the Shiv Sena did poorly, it had a lot to do with the fact that the Maharashtra Navnirman Samiti, which had exactly the same plank as the Shiv Sena, cut into its votes hugely, something that made Bal Thackeray fume publicly.

Corruption

I have always held that the Indian voters may love to carp about corruption in plush drawing rooms as well as DTC buses, but that is hardly an issue in elections. Yes, it became an issue in 1989, when the Bofors scandal shook the nation. But that was probably because of the scale of corruption involved and that the Prime Minister himself was under a cloud. But has it ever been an issue after that? Why, Rajiv Gandhi was all set to return to power n 1991 when he was assassinated. Sukh Ram, the telecom minister in whose house currency notes were found stashed in mattresses, had no problem getting elected. The DMK and the AIADMK keep getting voted in and out alternately even though they are known to be corrupt. Similar examples abound. So if anyone thinks voters are going to rise in anger against corruption and throw bribe-seeking politicians out, they would be well advised to perish the thought.

Criminalisation

Many people I know have been heaving a sigh of relief that high-profile criminals like Atiq Ahmad, Mitrasen Yadav, Mukhtar Ansari, Taslimuddin, Abu Azmi and Mohd Tahir as well as the wives of Pappu Yadav and Mohammed Shahabuddin got defeated. But the verdict against criminalisation is also mixed. The Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), which has been tracking the financial and criminal backgrounds of legislators has done an analysis of the winners in these elections and its findings are interesting:

# The number of MPs with criminal charges has actually increased – from 128 in 2004 to 153 in 2009.

# The number of MPs with serious criminal records has also increased – from 55 to 74 – between 2004 and 2009.

But there appears to be a silver lining.

# In 85 per cent of constituencies where only one candidate had criminal cases, voters chose the clean candidates. In 68 per cent of constituencies where there were two candidates with criminal backgrounds, clean candidates were chosen. The percentage of clean candidates however went down to around 40 per cent in constituencies with four or five candidates.

The press releases (available on the ADR website http://www.adrindia.org) are not very well drafted and I am not sure if I have paraphrased them properly. The data in the tables is also a bit confusing – how does ADR define criminal charges and serious criminal charges, for example. (This isn’t nitpicking but even defying prohibitory orders to demonstrate is a crime under the IPC). Anyway, this this gives a sense of the general drift – there is no overwhelming verdict against criminalisation.

Caste

Of the four Cs, I am most optimistic about the role of caste diminishing. I know I am sticking my head out by saying this, given how the caste composition of a constituency determines the choice of candidates. Some people also cite the poor showing by Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, which won only 21 of the 500 seats it contested and couldn’t put up a sterling performance even in Uttar Pradesh where it is in power as further proof of the voter rejection of caste-based appeals, which also polarise. But the BSP actually increased its vote share to 6.12 per cent from 5.35 per cent in 2004. why I am confident in spite of that, is that I believe Mayawati’s debacle has to do with a range of factors that relate to governance, among other things. The upper castes who voted for her in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2007 had done so because she held out hope for an alternative to the corrupt and criminalised Samajwadi Party government. There was no way they would have voted for a Dalit party, whose slogan was `tilak, tarazu aur talwar, inko maaro joote chaar’. When they found her government was not very different, they dumped her. So when they believed she would perform, her caste didn’t matter. When she belied those expectations, her caste-based appeals didn’t work.

Clearly, we are going to have to suffer the four Cs for some more time. They cannot be eliminated unless voters rise decisively against them.

Verdict 2009

Thank God we’ve got a stable government at the Centre. The thought that a rag-tag bunch of either the Third Front or Fourth Front would come to power or even play a decisive role in any government formation was giving me sleepless nights. Through the elections, I had only one thought - that either the BJP or the Congress should come to power on its own or at least in such a decisive position that crucial policies and governance aren't held to ransom by regional or caste- and individual-based parties with no national vision at all. The shenanigans of the Dravidian parties over the Sri Lanka issue only reinforced my misgivings about regional parties playing a decisive role at the Centre.
The people of India have clearly voted for stability. They want a government that lasts for five years and is not pushed into inaction by blackmailing small parties that have no vision for the country. Or an outdated vision, as in the case of the Left parties. Parenthetically, maybe the Left should be given credit for this win. Maybe if they hadn't been so disruptive and pig-headed, such a clear mandate may not have come about!
This is a vote for national parties to form the government at the Centre. The BJP has emerged as the second largest party. So the contest was really between the Congress and the BJP (as BJP's Arun Jaitley had been saying time and again for a long time), and the people preferred the Congress to the BJP.
That said, I don’t think regional and small parties have lost their relevance. In fact, regional parties have a significant role to play in such a vast country like India. Regional parties have arisen in a particular context and have caught the public imagination because of genuine grievances. N T Rama Rao became a huge success in Andhra Pradesh in the 1980s, riding on the Telugu pride wave, because the Congress chief ministers there were seen to be nothing more than dummies of the Centre, who were changed at the will of Indira Gandhi. The DMK and AIADMK were always regional parties, but they have tapped into an emotion which national parties like the Congress (which was once a force in the state) never did. Whether it is the Asom Gana Parishad, the Akali Dal, the National Conference or the People’s Democratic Party, the fact cannot be denied that regional parties articulate and address state-level issues in a way national parties cannot or do not.
The problem begins when these regional parties start playing a major role at the Centre. Then they are not able to replace their regional perspective with a national perspective. They are not interested in reconciling regional issues with national issues, as the Dravidian parties stand on Tamil Eelam shows. Does that mean they should have no presence at all in Parliament? No. They need to articulate regional issues at the national level so that policy making is more balanced. But should they be in such a position (as they have been in the NDA and the UPA governments) where they hold national policies (especially foreign and economic policies) and their implementation to ransom. The answer to that also is No.
But there is an interesting facet to the performance of regional parties in these elections. Not all regional parties have been decimated. TDP and AIADMK were punished because they chose to go along with a Left-led cluster which got identified by completely irresponsible politics. The Asom Gana Parishad, which once fired the imagination of the youth, had gone into a decline for some time now and got only one seat. But parties like the JD(U) in Bihar, BJD in Orissa, National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir, who were never identified with blackmailing tactics when they were part of the NDA, not just won but won handsomely.
The outlier is Samajwadi Party’s performance in UP. But that has more to do with voter disillusionment with Mayawati than anything else. Ditto for the Trinamul Congress (Mamata Banerjee can be quite, quite irresponsible). The TMC and the Congress benefited from the huge, huge disillusionment with the Left in Bengal).
So the second crystal clear fact about this election is this – people have voted against irresponsible politics.

What Next?

Is the decisive win for the Congress going to change the way the party functions and the way the new government will function?

It’s probably in bad taste to raise this issue, but when I saw Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh addressing the press yesterday, the body language was not that of two equals, which is what it should have been if one assumes that the Congress was voted back on the basis of performance of the government. Singh was not deferential towards Sonia, but the sense one got was of her being the dominant one of the team.

That misgiving got further reinforced when I saw Jyotiraditya Scindia on NDTV talking about Rahul as Prime Minister. Utterly disgusting any way but even more so coming from a young man whose father was considered prime minister material and the only thing coming in his way was the Dynasty.

I am raising this issue because there is a larger question involved – the Congress may have got a free hand vis-à-vis its allies, but how much of a free hand will Singh get vis-à-vis his own party? The separation of the party president’s post and the prime minister’s post is good, but the balance between the two is an uneasy one in any party and is likely to be non-existent in a dynastic party like the Congress.

Will Singh have a free hand to pick his team? In the last government, apart from the coalition partners who were in a position to dictate terms, there were any number of Congress ministers who were foisted on Singh because they were family loyalists and who made public display of the fact that they owed their allegiance not to the Prime Minister but to Sonia Gandhi. They functioned pretty much like loose cannons and Singh could do nothing to rein them in. The coalition pressures will still be there but will Singh be able to hold his own against party pressures?

I am also worried about is the impact of the election results on economic policy, especially because of the talk that this is a vote for the middle path etc. Already Congress leaders are going around talking about how schemes like NREGA, farm loan waivers etc brought in the votes. A lot of the economic thinking in the Congress is woolly-headed socialism and I fear that the mandate will be seen as one for such bleeding heart policies and they will just continue.

What the country needs is a good dose of drastic economic, administrative and police reforms. I, certainly, will judge Singh by what he does on all three counts, now that he is not shackled by blackmailing allies.

Challenging Political Cartels

Independents in the poll fray are increasingly facing criticism. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called them spoilers. Singh's harsh words can be forgiven - even dismissed - as arising from pique, since they cut into votes. All political parties feel that way about Independents.

But when a columnist like Shekhar Gupta starts questioning their relevance, as he has done in this article, then it is time to worry.

Gupta is pretty scornful of people like Meera Sanyal, the banker who contested from Mumbai South, and Capt Gopinath, the founder of Air Deccan who contested from Bangalore South, and even Mallika Sarabhai, the danseuse who contested against L K Advani from Ahmedabad. He says they `betray an ignorance of our democracy’ and `lack respect for the ordinary voter’. Party politics, for him, is the essence of parliamentary democracy and Independents are trying to invent a new kind of politics that is `undemocratic’.

Firstly, I fail to understand how contesting for an election is `a lack of respect for the ordinary voter’? It is, in fact, an acknowledgment of their power. Isn’t that better than politicians who have lost Lok Sabha elections or who know they can never win one entering Parliament through the Rajya Sabha?

But I have far more serious issues with Gupta’s arguments. I admit that there are practical and logistical problems with too many independents in the fray. They reduce the chances of one single party getting a majority, something that is necessary for administrative stability and coherence in policy. But to term the rise of independents as undemocratic is carrying things a bit too far.

Why are such people are coming into politics, and as Independents? Gupta himself points to the growing anti-politician mood in the country. It has been there for several years now, but became more strident after the 26/11 attacks. Such tirades have always been met by taunts – especially from politicians – that it is easy to sit on the sidelines and criticise; why don’t these critics engage with the system and try to bring about change? But when they do just that, they get flak for being spoilers and for being undemocratic! It’s clearly a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t scenario.

Ok, so Gupta isn’t criticising their joining politics, but in their jumping in as Independents. He equates this to `challenging and wrecking’ the system from outside and then building a new one.

But why must people who want to join politics do so only a member of a political party? What if no party represents their ideology or world view? Should they stay out of politics, then? Will political parties give space to such people and listen to what they have to say?

In any case, what’s wrong with trying to build a new system? The point is that the existing system isn’t delivering on a lot of things. So clearly some change is needed. And that is unlikely to come from those within the current system – the political parties. Remember how Rajiv Gandhi tried to reform the Congress? And how miserably he failed? Change has to come from someone new. What is wrong if these new entrants appear `driven by a divine right to come and clean up our politics and governance’, as Gupta sneers? On a lighter note, there is a certain family which thinks it has a divine right to rule this country!

Let's look at Parliament as a political marketplace and apply the rules of the market to it. All markets function on the basis of competition and delivering value to the consumer. Different producers of a product package and price it differently to compete. But market distortions take place. Price cartels are formed and the producers gang up against the consumer, who then has no choice but to continue buying what is on offer.

What we are seeing in Parliament today is a market distortion, really. Existing parties have formed a cartel. Their products (their ideologies) may be different, but the kind of politics they indulge in is all the same. Just like commercial cartels gang up on pricing or other unfair trade practices, so do political parties display a rare unanimity on a range of issues that further their interests alone – hiking salaries of MPs, blocking moves to bar criminals from contesting elections, to name just two – even as they fight bitterly over measures that will further the welfare of the people.

In the market, cartels can be dealt with in two ways. One, government intervention or regulation, which doesn’t always work because crony capitalism tends to kick in. Two, new players in the market, who tap into the dissatisfaction of the consumers and offer them a better, or a more reasonably priced, product. This is a more effective way but will work only if there are no entry barriers.

Forcing people to join politics only as members of political parties is like putting entry barriers to challengers to the current brand of politics. It will mean allowing the existing cartels to continue unchallenged. That doesn’t seem very democratic to me.

I concede that a few Sanyals and Gopinaths may not be very successful. In fact they may be miserable failures. People don’t identify with them, don’t understand what they stand for. But that doesn’t matter. Initially all new players start small, face problems of acceptability and make losses. But they persevere and one day they challenge the incumbents and force them to change. The Indian marketplace is full of such examples. At least these Independents are giving some choice to people who don’t want to vote for the same tired lot of incumbent parties.

Gupta is apprehensive that even 10 per cent of independents could lead to sheer anarchy. I feel that is exaggerated, but even if one grants that, maybe we need some kind of churning in the near term from which a better system may evolve.

That said, this market parable should be understood by the Independents as well. If they seriously want to change the system, they should not disappear after losing one election. Instead, they should continue to engage in political activity in some form and contest elections. At least Sanyal and Gopinath, hailing as they do from the world of business, should know that success is always a long haul.

If they don’t hang on, put up with the grind, then they will prove Gupta right. And we will continue to suffer the current system.

Mayawati and the Middle Class

I am getting a bit tired of all criticism of the idea of Mayawati as Prime Minister being attributed to urban English-speaking middle class snobbery and a class prejudice. I have seen several commentators take this line in recent months, the latest being Suryakant Waghmore in today's Indian Express.

I am quoting from his article (to which I have provided a link) only because I have it in front of me, but the points that he makes have been made by several others.

First he says "while the English speaking middle class largely opposes Mayawati because of her caste, they do not express this by hurling caste abuses. They try to respond (not react) through English politeness and thus create a new English speaking middle class caste-culture.

"This, surely, runs contrary to a truly liberal attitude that would have celebrated Mayawati's great success and recognised what she has done as a single Dalit woman without any family legacy, in a highly patriarchal and hostile environment."

Now this is patently ridiculous. I have a sneaking admiration for Mayawati for where she has taken the BSP. I am sure that she could not have done this if it were not for Kanshi Ram's patronage, but I concede that she could have wasted that patronage but did not. I fully agree with Waghmore that "Mayawati and BSP's growth represents the deepening of democracy in India."

But look beyond that. What else is Mayawati known for? Personal aggrandisement and corruption. Has she done anything for Dalits or for the state in each of her tenures? Or even the current tenure, when the BSP has a complete majority? Apart from building statues and monstrous memorials, that is? Waghmore comments on English speaking middle class obsession with her statues. But why shouldn't that be subject to criticism? Is that a measure of development of the state or the uplift of Dalits? When, in 2007, Mayawati came to power on the basis of a new social coalition, eschewing the upper caste hatred that had marked the BSP's politics till then, many expected that this would be a sobering influence on her and that she would behave in a more responsible way, focussing on administration and good governance. Two years on, can anyone testify that she has done that? She appeared to be making some right moves in the beginning, especially on the economic front. But she quickly backtracked. The counter argument is that the Mulayam Singh was equally bad. Sure, but the thought of Mulayam Singh as Prime Minister will also frighten a lot of people. Sure no government has ever done anything for Dalit uplift. But does that mean Mayawati should not be criticised for doing nothing for the group she claims to work for?

Arguments like Waghmore's precludes the possibility of the urban middle class reacting to issues like corruption and personal aggrandisement. Despite my cynicism about its apathy, I think this is an unfair charge. The middle class was quite accepting of a Dalit as president and now as Chief Justice of India. If it was reacting purely on the basis of prejudice, then there would have been equally sharp reactions to these appointments.

I am an English speaking urban middle class Iyengar Brahmin. I am petrified at the thought of Mayawati as Prime Minister. But I am equally petrified at the thought of J Jayalalitha (who is not a Dalit but an English speaking urban middle class Iyengar Brahmin) becoming Prime Minister. Because Jayalalitha's regimes have also been marked by rampant corruption and a highly personalised style of functioning. Just like Mayawati.

I am petrified at the thought of Lalu Yadav becoming Prime Minister. Not because he is a Yadav or because of his rustic ways, but because of the way he ruined Bihar. I am more comfortable with the idea of Nitish Kumar as Prime Minister, even though he is a Kurmi and though he is an engineer by education, he is not an English speaking urban middle class person. I am petrified of Ram Vilas Paswan becoming Prime Minister one day not because he is a Dalit but because of stories about his corrupt ways. But I am also petrified of Kamal Nath, an English-speaking urban middle class person, becoming Prime Minister (never mind that he probably doesn't have those ambitions) again because of his reputation for corruption.

Behind such insinuations of the kind Waghmore makes is the belief that Mayawati should not be opposed or criticised just because she is a Dalit. This is carrying the politics of victimhood a bit too far.

Candles Aren't Enough

When, a month or so after the 26/11 attacks, I had written my post, After the Candles, some friends told me I was being cynical. I had criticised the swish set of Mumbai for their meaningless candlelight vigils, spewing venom at politicians and `the system’, calling for tax boycotts and use of Rule 49 O of the Conduct of Elections Rules, which allows one to register presence at the polling booth and say that one is not exercising the right to vote. I had said these people need to go beyond lighting candles, that the system is made up of individuals and each one of us needs to change for the system to change.
But the voting turnout in the third phase of elections, has shown that, finally, all the ranting on Facebook and on television channels was just that - idle ranting. Voter turnout in South Mumbai (the hub of all the protests) was a mere 43.33 per cent, less than the 44.22 per cent turnout in 2004.
I had written a feature for The Telegraph on 4 January chronicling individual efforts to bring about change and had spoken to some Bombay-ites who were attempting this. One was Owen Roncon, an entrepreneur but better known as Priya Dutt’s husband. He was working to promote active citizenship and said confidently: "Things are going to happen." Maybe I should go back to him and ask what happened.
Another veteran social activist - Samuel Paul of the Bangalore-based Public Affairs Centre – had sounded a note of caution: "This will not be easy to sustain. All this is more a reaction to a crisis than a lasting shift to a higher plane or a mass movement." How right he was.
This is not the first time I have been accused of being cynical about the middle class. In April 2006, I had written an article, Middle Class Angst, in DNA, after candlelight vigils in Delhi and Lucknow and sms protests. This was seen as THE definitive sign of middle class awakening and that this section was shaking off its apathy. I had questioned this view and said in that article, “It's so much easier to light candles and send outraged SMSs. That's a quick salve for our collective guilty conscience.”
That feeling has only got reinforced since then. I am particularly impatient with all this candle lighting business. It has become a meaningless fad. Someone gets murdered and if the case is not solved within two days, there’s a candlelight vigil, with posters demanding justice for the victim. The merits or the difficulty of the case don’t seem to matter. The candlelight vigil worked in the Jessica Lal case because the issue was so outrageous – the murderers had been acquitted by the court after the case dragged on for years because the police botched up on the investigations. But now we have candlelight vigils at the drop of a hat.
But ask these very people to cooperate with the police in solving crimes and they’ll immediately back off. Ask them to not turn away when they see something wrong being done – or worse, not do wrong themselves – and they’ll ignore you.
The middle class is not capable of ushering in any lasting change. That requires an effort that will make our lives a little less comfortable, as I explained in Middle Class Angst, to which I am providing a link. Heck, they’ll have time for nightlong vigils but they can’t go out and stand in a line for an hour or so to vote. This is the middle class awakening that we are all applauding?
Another Bombay-ite I spoke to for the article in The Telegraph was Vishal Dadlani, the singer (of the Vishal-Shekhar duo) who filed a petition against the media coverage of the 26/11 attacks. He said: "It's no longer about sitting in drawing rooms and criticising the state of affairs. Each individual needs to stand up and say I will do one small thing to change things."
Forget it Vishal, just forget it.

Singh Ain't King

So Manmohan Singh is smarting at L K Advani's barbs about his being the weakest Prime Minister and is hitting out. Addressing members of the Indian Women's Press Corps on Friday, he boasted that he would have quit if the Indo-US nuclear deal had not gone through and that it was his firmness that saw the deal being signed. And of course he took potshots at Advani's record as home minister - citing the Kandahar hijacking, the attack on Parliament etc.

A bad back prevented me from going to the IWPC do, but if I had gone and had got a chance to ask him a question I would have asked him this: Mr Prime Minister, you are the one of the key architects of economic reforms in this country. When you took over it was widely recognised that reforms needed a big push. But the Left stalled you at every point. Why did you not exhibit this firmness when crucial reforms that would have done far more to make this country economically strong were stalled? Why did you buckle under Left pressure each time?

I have no opinion for or against nuclear power or the deal. But when I saw the government striking unholy deals with an unholier party (the Samajwadi Party) just to stay in power after the Left withdrew support over the deal, I wondered whether it was worth it. I have dealt with this in my previous posts, Hypocritical Compromising and Nuked by Ambanis.

Another post, Reforms RIP, had pointed out the various economic reforms measures that are pending. If Manmohan Singh had made this as much as a prestige issue as he did the nuclear deal, the country would have benefited far more.

But let's get back to the point about Singh being the weakest Prime Minister. Do we really need an Advani to point this out to us? It isn't about succumbing to Left pressure (one can argue that Atal Behari Vajpayee also succumbed to coalition pressures on several occasions during his prime minister-ship). But Singh provides so many other examples to prove that he was a weak Prime Minister and that he devalued the office itself.

# Let's face it, Singh and Sonia Gandhi may go blue in the face denying it, but she always had a veto power over any major decision - from appointment of ministers to crucial policies. I'm not talking about ministers from coalition partners, but Congress ministers. Most of them owed their loyalty more to Sonia Gandhi than to Singh. Some were decent enough not to make that evident. Many were not. One Congress minister himself lamented to me about the loose cannons from the Congress in the cabinet. Singh couldn't do anything about them. And what could be more galling than to see a Sikh Prime Minister (and one who is supposed to have been extremely upset about the 1984 massacre) helplessly take Jagdish Tytler, an accused in the killings, as a minister and then to have to see him refuse to resign for several days even after the Nanavati Commission indicted him.

# Neither Singh nor Sonia Gandhi may have had a choice in terms of choosing ministers from the coalition partners, but once they were in was Singh doing enough to see that they performed properly? The answer clearly is No. T R Baalu, the surface transport minister, just wouldn't let the highways programme proceed smoothly even when the economy was in dire need of pepping up. But the Prime Minister could do nothing. Baalu kept fighting with chairmen of the National Highways Authority of India and had several of them changed in the five years that he was a minister. Surely Singh could have put his foot down on this and refused to transfer them? But he didn't.

Take also the example of health minister Anbumani Ramadoss. The Prime Minster watched helplessly as the minister hounded the AIIMS director, P Venugopal. This reached ridiculous levels when the Supreme Court had to direct Ramadoss to sign degree certificates of graduates (the minister had refused to sign them because the director also had to sign them and he didn't want his signature along with Venugopal's). Affected doctors had to go to the Supreme Court as the absence of degree certificates was adversely affecting them. Did the Supreme Court have to intervene? Didn't the Prime Minister know about this? Couldn't he have intervened and insisted that Ramadoss sign them?

# The crowning glory in all this is perhaps the un-edifying spectacle of the Prime Minister going with a bouquet to the airport every time Sonia Gandhi went on a foreign trip.

I rest my case.