The middle class too sells its vote

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/campa-cola-to-aap-the-middle-class-too-sells-its-vote-1234619.html

In April 2011, anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare, riding high on middle class adulation, made a seemingly pithy remark. Indian voters, he said, can be bought for as little as Rs 100, one saree or a bottle of alcohol. They don’t, he lamented, understand the value of their vote.
It was an odious remark directed specifically at voters at the bottom of the economic pile, those who lived below, at or just above the controversial Rs 32-a-day poverty line. But barring a few commentators who slammed it, the ordinary public were delighted by it. Absolutely spot on, they said. It is the vote-bank politics that panders to these people which is ruining the nation, they sneered. The politicians regularise their slums and illegal power and water connections, give them illegal ration cards, protect the goons and so on.
And then there was the sanctimonious posturing. We don’t do these illegal things; we are law-abiding. We don’t go running to those vile politicians to bail us out.
That claim has been effectively shattered by the sight of the well-off residents of Campa Cola housing society in Mumbai not allowing demolition teams to enter the complex to bring down illegal structures as ordered by the Supreme Court. No tear-jerking histrionics were spared to whip up public sympathy. Pressure was put on the local politicians. In doing all this, the Campa Cola residents behaved no differently from the slum dwellers for whom actress Shabana Azmi sat on a dharna several decades ago and was roundly reviled for doing so.
There are some who hold that this case cannot be compared to that of demolition of slums. But the merits of this particular case are not relevant. The point is that the middle class is no different from the unwashed masses when it comes to breaking laws and then trying to go scot free.
The Campa Cola case isn’t an isolated one. In 2006, in Ulhasnagar in Maharashtra, public pressure forced the government to issue an ordinance that regularised illegal buildings. That same year in Delhi, a drive against unauthorised buildings had people who were singing paeans to chief minister Shiela Dixit suddenly turn against her. They even wanted the Delhi Master Plan to be changed to make the constructions legal.
The middle class also likes to believe – and more than that it would like others to believe – that its members vote responsibly and cannot be bought off. Nothing could be further from the truth. The middle class are as liable – and willing – to being bribed for its votes as the poor. Except that the bribe in question is not rice at Rs 1 a kg or cookers, television sets, laptops (regularisation of unauthorised constructions is something both classes have in common, though); the stakes are much higher.
What else was the announcement in September of the constitution of the Seventh Pay Commission but a bribe to the middle class voter? Why do reservations in educational institutions and government jobs become an issue before every election (the latest being quotas in Central government jobs for Jats)? Who else but the middle class of the target communities will benefit from this? What makes the Aam Aadmi Party zero in on electricity bills as the key election issue in the Delhi assembly elections? The majority of the Delhi voters are from the middle class (and are perpetually averse to paying bills and taxes) and this issue has touched a chord with it.
Remember also that the middle class is not a single ethnic/caste/community bloc. So its members are part of community-specific vote-banks (Muslim, upper caste Hindu, OBC Hindu, Dalit Christians etc.) that politicians woo and successfully at that through sectarian give-aways and promises.
What is also conveniently forgotten is that many of the freebies that are given in the name of the poor – notably the fuel subsidies – actually benefit the middle class. That is why one will never see the middle class criticising the economically disastrous subsidies on cooking gas, petrol and diesel, even as they denounce the equally ruinous food subsidies for the poor. And the middle class is quite willing to barter its votes for getting its illegal constructions regularised. In 2000, then Union urban development minister Jagmohan was a hero when he demolished slums in Delhi; he became a villain when the demolition drive targeted encroachments and unauthorised constructions in middle class and upper middle class localities. The demolitions became a major issue in the municipal elections and Jagmohan, who had to face the ire of his own party, lost the 2004 elections. The party cadres, facing the wrath of the middle class, simply abandoned him.
The middle class is going to play a huge role in the coming elections – the assembly elections round the corner and the general elections next year. And the middle class will be wooed – as a group and community-specific sub-groups – by politicians with all manner of promises. There will also be demands that the middle class will come up with, which will be met to the extent they can. Is this wrong? No. In a democracy, these are par for the course. But let the middle class not take the moral high ground that it is above selling its vote like the despicable poorer sections do.

Slander as Rejoinder

If you can't fight activists on an intellectual plane, or if they don't submit to your blandishments, discredit them. Question their integrity. Impute motives. Allege links with fanatical organisations. That is the strategy of the government which flip-flops between ignoring activists, then falling at their feet and then getting firm with them.
When Anna Hazare didn't give up his fast and the government was forced to constitute a drafting committee with civil society activists for the Lokpal Bill, the slander campaign was directed against Shanti Bhushan and his son Prashant, both members of the committee. Allegations about shady land deals and evasion of stamp duty were planted in the media, which was anyway critical of these activists. The Bhushans had a rejoinder but his got much less play than the allegations. Then came a CD which had the father-son duo reportedly speaking to Amar Singh about fixing some judges. The Bhushans got a lab test to show the CD was doctored; the government got another test to show it was genuine. Only a few newspapers carried the Bhushan version. See this story in a media website for more details.
The idea was to show that the crusaders against corruption (the Bhushans have been at the vanguard of the movement against judicial corruption and also behind the public interest litigation on the 2G scam) were not lily white.
Now it is being said that Baba Ramdev has evaded stamp duty of Rs 58 lakh and has grabbed fertile farmland. And Home Minister P Chidamabaram is on television right now, saying that Ramdev is an RSS agent. Questions are now being raised about the extent of his empire and shady deals are being hinted at. Enquiries have been ordered into the medicines and formulations his ashram produces.
Like I have said before in my previous posts, I have huge problems with the Hazare-Ramdev gang. But their analysis of problems and solutions to them can be countered at an intellectual level. Their pronouncements are so ridiculous that it's very easy to do this. They have been able to capture the popular imagination only because of a trivialising, sensation-seeking electronic media.
But that does not justify slander campaigns against them.
If Ramdev is a stamp duty defaulter, why was action not taken all this time? If his empire is involved in shady deals, why had they not been put under the scanner and action taken? If his formulations were suspicious what were the relevant authorities doing all this time? Did his political clout have anything to do with it? And was the government using all this to bargain with him to be its pawn in dividing the anti-corruption movement? Is all this coming out now only because he didn't play ball?
The latest weapon that this government and the Congress deploys against anyone who crosses their path is The RSS Slur. Chidambaram is on CNN-IBN detailing how Ramdev is a front for the RSS. The television media has been going on about it ever since Sadhvi Rithambra appeared on the stage at Ramlila Maidan. There were some Muslim leaders too. Using that same logic, Ramdev should be the front for some hardline Muslim organisation too! Parts of the media have picked this up willingly, with one shrill television anchor writing a column saying this anti-corruption movement is part of India's right-wing nationalist revolution, if you please.
This is meant to scare the urban English-speaking middle classes away from glorifying (deifying, in the case of Hazare) these activists. It is a kind of McCarthyism at work. If you are not with us, you are not just against us, you are also with fanatical organisations.
The fact that this government and the Congress has only this method to counter a bunch of loose cannons shows its utter intellectual bankruptcy.

Your Activist and My Activist

At the risk of being dubbed a RSS person, and without holding any brief for the Anna Hazares and Baba Ramdevs, I have to say this: I totally agree with the RSS  chief Mohan Bhagwat asking if Hazare and Ramdev are outsiders, what about the members of the National Advisory Council (NAC).
I have, in earlier posts, been quite critical of Anna Hazare's fast-unto-death over the Lokpal Bill and of the way his gang of civil society activists were trying to impose an ill-thought law on the country.
I have found Baba Ramdev's pronouncements on black money and corruption highly amusing and I was aghast when I found the government seriously engaging with him. It was a ridiculous attempt to pit one set of loose cannons against another and ultimately it backfired badly.
But when I see the government and the Congress depicting the Hazare-Ramdev bunch as irresponsible and asserting that the government cannot be dictated by them, then I can't help looking at the exalted status that the civil society members of the NAC enjoy.
Now the government and the Congress are saying that law making is the prerogative of the government and Parliament and it cannot be outsourced to civil society. Home Minister P Chidambaram reminds the country that we are a parliamentary democracy and elected representatives should not cede ground to civil society activists. Sure. A very valid point.
So what is the NAC doing, preparing draft legislations and using the clout of its chairperson - Sonia Gandhi - to force the government to accept them? And when the government refuses to accept ill-thought out recommendations, NAC members hold demonstrations.
On 24 May, three NAC worthies - Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze and Harsh Mander - demonstrated outside the Planning Commission along with close to 70 campaigners of the Right to Food Campaign over the definition of poverty.
Is demonstrating wrong? No. Peaceful demonstrations are a vital part of democracy. It is a way of expressing mass sentiment. (It's another matter that often crowds are paid and don't know what they are demonstrating for. Or that participating in demonstrations is just very fashionable these days, as we saw during Hazare's fast.) What raised eyebrows in this case was that the demonstration was led by NAC members. The NAC, after all, is a part of the current political establishment, though it is not a constitutional body and has been set up by an executive order.
The NAC, its website, says, "has been set up as an interface with Civil Society. The NAC would provide policy and legislative inputs to Government with special focus on social policy and the rights of the disadvantaged groups."
The NAC has been trying to dictate the agenda to the government on a range of issues ever since it was set up.  Many of its proposals, especially relating to the social sector, put a demand on fiscal resources that will strain the exchequer to the extreme. It drafts legislations and these are forwarded to the government, which is expected to take its recommendations on board.
So one set of civil society activists get a privileged status, while the rest are pilloried and discredited and set upon by the police.
Doesn't seem very fair to me.

Who Is The Irresponsible Voter?

Anna Hazare has an extremely poor opinion of Indian voters. He says they can be bought for as little as Rs 100, one saree or a bottle of alcohol. “They don’t understand the value of their vote,” he is reported to have said. His comment is finding resonance with a lot of people, especially the urban middle class voters, a fair chunk of which doesn’t vote at all.
Hazare’s comment is being seen as referring only to the poor, uneducated and illiterate voters. Why can’t it apply to the section that is concurring and even endorsing that statement?
Does this section believe that it alone votes in an enlightened manner, with national interest uppermost in its mind? That is bosh and nonsense. The educated urban middle class is as much prone to being bribed as the sections they sneer at.
This section will lament that no government will take action against slum clusters because of votebank politics. But when Jagmohan, who was urban development minister during the National Democratic Alliance government and who was a middle class hero when he razed or relocated slums in Delhi, dared touch encroachments by the middle class he was promptly voted out of the New Delhi parliamentary constituency.
Take also the issue subsidized LPG and petrol. Why is raising the prices of these in alignment with such a political hot potato and never attempted before the elections? Are these items of consumption of people who can be bribed by a saree, Rs 100 and a bottle of alcohol? Certainly not. It is the middle class who are the main consumers of these. National interest – the fiscal health of the country – may demand that subsidies on these are either withdrawn or hugely cut. But that will not be done in the name of the poor, though it is the middle class (the real beneficiary of this subsidy) vote that really worries any ruling party.
Who benefits from free power to farmers? It certainly isn’t the really small farmer or farm labourer who can barely make ends meet. It is the better off and prosperous farmer who can afford pumpsets. It is quite common for parties to come to power with promises of free power to farmers.
Aren’t these all instances of buying of votes? So it is okay for political parties to buy votes of the urban educated middle class, which barely votes, but not okay for it to buy votes of the poor?
Rs 100, a saree and a bottle of alcohol for an illiterate and uneducated group’s vote doesn’t cost the exchequer anything. But these freebies for the middle class and even the prosperous impoverish the exchequer. Will the middle class stop to think of this before it sneers at the poor and illiterate voter?

The Morally Upright Aren't Always Right

Like I said in my previous post, I have been observing this current anti-corruption crusade with some amusement and lot of cynicism. But now I am getting a tad worried.
People are just not willing to hear any criticism of Anna Hazare’s fast, the tactics employed by the worthies of the India Against Corruption movement or even objective analyses pointing out flaws in the Jan Lokpal legislation they are proposing. Business Standard carried an editorial, which had what could be called a needlessly provocative (though I found it very clever and apt) headline, The Hazare Hazard. The next day’s papers had three or four letters from readers criticizing the edit. The letters did not go into the merits and de-merits of the idea of ombudsman or of the legislation these activists are proposing, but were shocked that Anna Hazare was being criticised at all. Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s piece in the Indian Express has also invited a lot of flak.
I wonder how many people who are speaking up on social networking sites, fasting in sympathy with Hazare, shaving their heads, demonstrating and much else even know the broad contours of the Bill.
I haven’t and so I am not going into the Bill itself, Mehta’s article, this other piece by Rajiv Desai delve into those aspects.
I’m making a larger point – the unquestioning adulation we have for certain public figures who are either morally upright or highly efficient or both, because of which we are not willing to concede that they could be wrong sometimes. We are just not willing to accept that people we idolize can be flawed or that the wisdom or suitability of their actions can be questioned. And this adulation tends to make some of these public figures believe that what they say or do shouldn’t be criticised at all.
I am not even going into the whole Gandhi phenomenon here (not that I think Gandhi should not be criticised and he himself never wanted to be idolised). I am talking about much lesser mortals.
Take Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. No one doubts that he is honest. He knows that. So that is why he believes he should not be held responsible for all the scams that were taking place under his nose and which he could have, but didn’t, check.
Or take E Sreedharan, chairman of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC). I got this sms from a friend after she saw pictures of Sreedharan with Hazare: “Sridharan in a-c bandwagon. How laughable! How he fought against rti applying to dmrc! How closed his account books r!”
Neither she nor I believe Sreedharan is corrupt. I admire him for his work on the Konkan Railway and then on the Delhi Metro. But I completely agree with the contents of her sms.
How can he cheer for a movement for more transparency when his organization functions with complete lack of it? After the collapse of an under-construction metro pillar in south Delhi in 2009, resulting in the death of six workers, someone filed a Right to Information application seeking details of the design and layout of the structure. DMRC refused to part with the information and took the battle up to the Delhi High Court which finally said it had to supply the information.
I have had personal experience of the complete lack of transparency at DMRC. While working on a story, I had requested some information from DMRC and an interview with Sreedharan. Some of the information I had requested was very basic which should have been there on the website but wasn’t. I was shocked at the kind of stonewalling that ensured. One woman from the public relations team called me and wanted to know whether I was doing a positive or negative story. “Don’t tell me it will be an objective story,” she said with a sarcastic laugh. When I refused to tell her in advance what kind of  a story it would be, the wait for answers got longer and the interview with Sreedharan never materialized. Finally, after much pursuing I got some information but innocuous ones. I never got details on cost overruns (which were reported in the press), cost per km and response to some criticisms by critics of the Metro concept. There was a certain arrogance in the refusal to reply to questions from a journalist who was trying to do a balanced story.
If Sreedharan has become a demi-God of sorts, we are all responsible for it. Remember the shock when he offered to resign in the wake of the pillar collapse? Everybody rushed to stop him and he finally took it back. If the Delhi Metro comes to a standstill without Sreedharan, who is to blame? Shouldn’t it be Sreedharan himself, for not doing proper succession planning?
Also recall the controversy over the model of the Hyderabad Metro project. Sreedharan raised a stink over certain aspects like real estate development. Perhaps he had a point. But I suspect that people got swayed less by the merits of his argument and more by the fact it was Sreedharan who was opposing it. It didn’t help that on the other side was a corporate house.
What puzzles me is that this is happening in India, the cradle of Hinduism which encouraged intellectual debates and questioning of established wisdom. But somewhere along the line, that intellectual tradition has taken backseat to one where you don’t question certain people, especially those who are more educated and knowledgeable than you.
The worst manifestation of it is in the kind of following godmen and godwomen command – blind devotion. I can understand if an illiterate and poorly educated person behaves this way, but why do highly educated people also do the same? Why don’t they read or reflect on things themselves instead of taking as Gospel truth something a morally upright person has said?
Honest and morally upright people can be wrong. It will be better for themselves and for the nation if they and everybody else accepts it.

Combating Corruption

Social activist Anna Hazare is on a fast-unto-death. This fighter against corruption  (he is the founder of the Bhrashtachar Virodhi Jan Aandolan who returned his Padmashri award because the Maharashtra government did not take action against corrupt forest officials) and campaigner for the Right to Information Act wants the government to start work to enact a Jan Lokpal Bill. Apparently, close to 150 people have joined in, according to one newspaper report.
So why am I not impressed? And why am I amused when a newspaper says the fast has galvanised the nation's fight against corruption?
What fight, I want to know.
I live in a middle class locality of Delhi built by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA). DDA rules don't permit water tanks of more than 500 litres per flat on the terrace. Yet in the block I live in and in countless DDA flats across Delhi, people have installed 1000 litre tanks, endangering the structural stability of flats. Complaints are made, officials come to inspect and go away richer by a few hundreds or thousands. Unauthorised constructions abound, pavements have been encroached upon for gardens, motors installed on main water lines. In each case, ordinary middle class people - perfectly decent and respectable otherwise - have paid bribes so that they can flout the law.
When I was renovating my then recently acquired flat four years ago, a neighbour asked me if we could jointly build an extra room. I was agreeable till I found it was against the rules. When I mentioned this to his aged mother, she said, `don't worry, my son will take care of payment to the DDA officials. You don't have to talk to them." I put my foot down and said nothing doing.
These are the very same people who express shock at the various multi-crore scams our politicians and bureaucrats are involved in and rail against corruption in high places. They will praise Anna Hazare and maybe even go to see him. And when they are driving back, they will jump a red light and bribe the traffic cop.
Middle class people think it is okay for them to indulge in minor corruption but not for politicians to do the same on a grander scale. I had touched upon this in an earlier article, Morality of Middle Class Politics, where I had drawn a distinction between bribes that one is forced to give (to get perfectly legal things done) and the bribes that one gives willingly to do something that is patently illegal (unauthorised constructions and disobeying traffic rules, for example).
I feel it is possible to resist bribe demands of the first kind as well. After all, how long can someone hold back a death/birth/marriage certificate (believe me, this still happens) or an income tax refund or a completion certificate for a building.
Former chief justice of the Himachal Pradesh High Court, Leela Seth, in her book A Fine Balance, relates the incident about how an inspector in Noida kept delaying a completion certificate for her house, hinting at a bribe. Finally he came to her house and denied the certificate because some column was a couple of inches smaller than the rules permitted. There was again a hint of a bribe to ignore this. Seth spent far more than what a bribe would have cost her to get the column redone. Still the inspector delayed her certificate by over a year.
This may not be a practical option for many. I know a recent case where a newly-married couple had to pay a bribe to get their marriage certificate because the bride had to appear for a visa interview with the certificate. I pride myself on never having bribed but if I was in their position would I have been able to stick to my moral high ground?
But what about bribes paid for what are known to be illegal actions? Are people who pay these petty bribes any better than the politicians involved in mega-scams? I don't think so.
Also, political parties tend to make corruption an election issue? But is it an issue for the electorate at all? Known corrupt people keep getting elected all the time. Not in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but everywhere. Both the DMK and the AIADMK regimes in Tamil Nadu have always been marked by corruption. Yet one or the other party keeps getting elected.
Anna Hazare may succeed in getting the kind of Lokpal Bill he wants. But will that stop people from electing corrupt politicians to legislatures? Will that stop people from offering bribes for an extra floor or room that is not permitted, for flouting some rule that is based on logic and safety concerns?
Denying oneself of food is not going to stop corruption. Denying oneself some comforts that can be got only through bribes is the only way to fight it.