Badly behaved Natives and the Chidam-bhram*.

Thirty minutes of mayhem on a TV Show – and why we shouldn’t take Chidambaram’s remarks seriously, and why the Government is responsible for how citizens behave.

I thought I’d let the squawking pass, but it seems that the advice of Minister Chidambaram to Delhiites to enhance their social behaviour quotient in preparation for the firangis who will visit us for 11 days during the Commonwealth Games has stirred a hornet’s nest.

Just as the dust was sort of settling on his banal observation, I was pulled into the maelstrom thanks to Pankaj Pachauri’s popular show Hum Log on NDTV India – and since I couldn’t refuse and agreed to go, I am now guilty of being party to this inane issue as much I hold the others.

Now I really have no opinion on the subject; Chidambaram made an off-the-cuff remark by all accounts and frankly what he said has been said differently by many people earlier, not often of the same caliber admittedly, but by and large, to sum up the unique experience of ‘north India’ when seen from the more sedate South India perspective. There may be truth in it as far as aggression goes or even as far as some of the other aspects that he seemed to have hinted at – rude, disrespectful of law, traffic etiquette etc. etc. – but he merely skimmed the surface of the subject. His statement was a remark – it did not call for action or ask for any real modification – it was merely a plaint – and should have been relegated to the dustbin of inane remarks by such high profilers who have no interest in the remedy of it – as to why this trend occurs or persists. Besides, who is to determine what constitutes good behaviour – and who sets the standards – the Brits? Anybody serious about this must understand that we do not have the luxury of a homogeneous society with similar behavioural norms – we accommodate people who think nothing of picking their nose or blowing it in public or spitting the ‘pique’ after a bout of chewing paan – what should we do about it – ban the picking of nose or arrest people if they do so? Or ban the chewing of paan or force people to swallow the pique just because the westerners don’t like it ? Then again, the pressure cooker existence in turgidly populated cities where we have to fight to secure a foothold on a bus, in a train, in a queue…So what is Mr. Chidambaram talking about !

But our valiant media has picked up the gauntlet, and so it was that after a week of national foaming at the mouth and even as I thought that the mild epilepsy was receding – I found myself on the show.

Things began badly. I was late for the show thanks to misreading the off day rush on the famous BRT –it was a Saturday and no better and I was a good 15 minutes later than the start of the recording and had to sit out until the first commercial break. So if you saw the telecast I would be introduced almost into the second half of the programme. When I was ushered in and tethered to the collar mike, I could recognize Kiran Bedi and Nafisa Ali among another three participants.

It seemed to begin innocently with Pankaj lobbing the same question, I guess, [I still haven’t seen the show] and I trying to get into stride with a roundabout answer on why I thought the issue was inane and the real reason for all this still remained the high tension levels we operate on in the city and which is really caused by poor governance because people live under stress and are constantly reactive, anxious and stressed out. Summed up by saying that people become what their environment makes them. Oh, and I used the expression, ‘living like worms’, as they do in ghettos, and which is why, if you care to remember, the Delhi Government had the brainy idea of putting up ‘temporary curtains’ to hide these eye sores during the Commonwealth days.

Now I don’t have a very high opinion of Ms. Nafsa Ali in almost every aspect of her public life, including her histrionic skills, but for some odd reason she bit big time into the usage I employed and embarked on a titillating tale of tenderness for she retorted hurtfully “don’t call them worms”. Kiran Bedi, quick as she is, said “He didn’t call them worms, he said they were living like worms”, but our lady of broken Hindi seemed to have broken heart – for she raved and ranted and had to be literally shouted down. Buy how typical, I thought – it is almost as if the Congress party picks and chooses this type with care – that she should pick up a metaphor to react to instead of the real issue! [You should know she’s left the Congress party and become a Samajwadian, by now]

Well, that did it for me. First to be late for the programme and the frustration of the BRT monstrosity, and now this imbecilic argument with a novice in half-french Hindi was hardly the beginning I had vouched for this Saturday morning. But this is life and things can get worse, as I found out later.

Ms. Ali had a neighbour on the show who seemed like a slippery guy from the moment one set eyes on him, and I am making no reference to his pate here. His comments and reassuring platitudes – couching plaudits to the government and trying to assuage everyone’s concerns on almost all issues – seemed suspect to me and, I gather, to my other guest colleagues. I saw this guy smirking the moment another guest remarked that as along as there is dynastic tendencies in politics, there could be no accountability. That was a dead giveaway – a Congress mole, next to a Samajwadi [femole!] party member, I thought. How well programmed.

Then we have some serious interjections from the audience members who made terrific sense and of course Kiran was bang on, on almost all points along with some help from the Jamia Ex-chancellor who was making a lot of good points as we went along. And just when I though this discussion was finally going somewhere, the slippery guy dropped the bomb : In a direct suggestion by Pankaj – and by this time Pankaj has seen logic in the collective opinion of the panel that it is governance that makes people who they are and how they behave – that Government has to go beyond whitewashing for guests and get on with real-to-show development in all fields, not just flyovers – this guy took over as official spokesperson for the Delhi government [and the Congress party, I suspect] by suggesting that we should not be looking at life in Delhi so negatively, we have progressed a great deal over the years [flyovers!, I am sure] etc etc. Obviously he hadn’t heard of people fighting off neighbours over parking space, the road rage, water fights, power thefts, the condition of public transport, crime per se and crime against women, the JJ clusters without toilets or schools and the ever increasing pressure on infrastructure as more and more migrants are accommodated in sub-human conditions in slums just because some politician has to win the next election.

Well, I squirmed in my seat while he spoke at length and then asked Pankaj that I had to set the record straight – and since this fellow admitted earlier in the programme that he works closely with the Delhi Government he was in my view “an interested party” [in my unexpressed opinion, a stooge] – and had no business to paint the life of an ordinary citizen in glowing terms when it was not true for the majority of the people. And then I proceeded to rubbish the asinine concept of Public Private Partnership [PPP] which Ms Ali also touched upon.

Now I have been saying this for some time that there is nothing called PPP [ it’s just a lot of Pee, frankly] to my mind for the simple reason that the state cannot take our money in advance as tax and then ask us to step in and assist it in doing the job it took the money for in the first place. That is the Bhagidari fraud this Government insists on playing on us. The other variation of the theme – more prevalently used in context of commercial projects – is not something that merits a term like PPP with its connotations of some social bonding project because it’s plain outsourcing, don’t you see. Even the darned Red Fort was built as a public private partnership in that case – the Emperor ordained its existence, subcontracted the construction, the finance was deployed by the state and eventually all works are for the public since the money is theirs. What’s so blooming PPP about all this?

And so it goes. But by now Ms. Ali is on song and she wants to spread good cheer and love and brotherhood – too much Sri Sri I think – “Why, we will build this city together” or some such stuff, she cries. And I just burst a gut.

If you have the stomach to see the show, click on the links my friends have sent me [more to rile me than anything else, I suspect].

If not, that makes two of us.

*Ref. the Title: There is a play on the word ‘Chidambaram’. For those who do not know much Hindi, “Bhram” is Hindi for ‘confusion’ or ‘misconception’. Mr P. Chidambaram is the current Minister of Home, Government of India and has reportedly told people of Delhi to learn to behave in time to receive international guests for the Commonwealth Games in 2010 at New Delhi. Chidambaram is from the southern part of India, which has a definite cultural bias that compares favourably with North India.

Hindsight, Happenstance and Hindutva- Part 3

It can be said with reasonable authority, even a modicum of audacity, that the BJP’s problems are more a manifestation of unusual and paranormal growth, rather than any deficit of it.

In respect of the Lok Sabha results of 2004 and 2009, while it is true that the Congress has consolidated and secured tactical gains lately, thematically and ideologically, the BJP is better placed to emerge as the main party in the next decadal based on its root strength and past trend-based analysis. There are some caveats to this, of course, but the general direction of BJP’s growth remains pointed north.

Whether it was the propelling force of the Rath Yatra by L.K. Advani, or the crescendo of the post Babri Masjid incident or the successive attacks on Indian cities by persons professing faith in Islam, or the Pakistani conundrum, or the sum total of the organizational work of the Sangh, or the frequent flare outs of religious conversions that added fuel to fire, or the rubbing in of the theme of pseudo secularism, or the genial popularity of A.B. Vajpayee, or the coming together of a spate of situations that saw three elections in three years, or all of it combined, which propelled the BJP into the centre stage of national politics, it remains a feat that is not often seen in political history for the speed it picked up. But this propulsion did not come without attendant disturbances, as all tectonic shifts must.

The commonest problem affiliated with spurting growth is that while the engine is chugging full throttle, the rest of the locomotive has yet to catch up. In effect, this sudden burst of thrust caused the BJP to acclimatize quickly to a new situation but with some crucial components not yet in place. Size, for instance. The fact that the BJP is yet to have a footprint as large as the Congress should have always been a reminder of our under-dog status. [In the ‘coalition era’, when alliances disguise such shortcomings, this fact tends to be glossed over, but the underlying weakness show up at the most awkward moments of stress for such agglomerations.] That the Congress has a 65 odd years’ lead over this process is as true as it is that the BJP’s work in many states yet to acquire quantum mass in the states of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and to some extent even Kerala.

The BJP’s loss, therefore, had more to do with a mathematical problem than any grand idea of a resurgent Congress or a wilting lotus, so to say. For a party that has yet to establish a presence in four large states of India, it was always going to be a struggle for the BJP to collate the desired numbers. The only way out would have been to pull off stupendous wins in the states where it had a presence, but as we now know, that is much easier wished than achieved – the law of averages ensures that that sort of thing does not happen too often, thanks in some measure also to the big bogey of Indian elections called the anti-incumbency factor.

The Congress’s pan-India spread, [traditional advantage over all others for reasons argued in part 2 of this series] gave it the edge it has enjoyed for the longest time, excepting minor aberrations as in the late nineties. Simply put, had the BJP been an equal player in as many states as the Congress, the results in both elections mentioned earlier, could very easily have been different. So, to buttress my point, it is the nascence of the BJP, or its shorter growth curve that handicaps it for the present, and as it continues up the ellipse, these deficiencies will iron out to its greater advantage, and the consequent disadvantage of the Congress.

This is not to suggest that the BJP’s current loss has been anything but a spectacular debacle when seen from the position of strength it enjoyed in the late nineties and early 2000. What irks is that some of this could have been avoided, in hindsight, if the party had not succumbed to hubris in 2004 and amnesia in 2009. But that is history, and everyone knows how a ship could have been saved after it has sunk. And yet, even in the short run, the damage is still not too great for the BJP to overcome.

We know the relationship between vote share and seats is at best tenuous, and this is particularly true when there is no discernible ‘wave’ in the run up to the elections and the difference in seats between winner and loser is not a figure that cannot be surmounted. Besides, as has been argued repeatedly, anybody who is serious about reading the correlation of electoral share with party performance right must know that it is not the depth of penetration of a party’s support base that is the determining factor, but more the skimming votes that allow a win to occur, seat by seat by seat on any given day. More like a 20-20 game of cricket than any real test of prowess over a five-dayer.

Given that, it is unfair to both, the winner and the loser in such electoral matches that the winning is as nebulous as is the losing: the winner is not really the master of all he surveys, and the loser is only a victim of chance. Between those covers, whatever happens is called strategy, but take it from anyone who has been close enough to the battle ground, it is often more happenstance than any programmable theorem.

In spite of all that, anybody who has followed political movements over time must accept that there has been exponential growth in popular support for the BJP in the two decades where it has moved from a measly two seats in Parliament to contender status for a national government today. That this paradigm shift was enabled by the foundational work done by the Sangh over the last fifty years is as much a tribute to the ideological framework within which the RSS has assiduously worked, as it is to the masterly evocation of India’s Hindu consciousness through a renewed vision of Hindutva, that had hitherto been all but buried under the debris of pusillanimous Nehruvian thought and the culture of the Congress he spawned.

It is appropriate that the poser above brings us back to the premise of where we started – that Hindutva has been the engine of the BJP’s growth in the last two decades from relative obscurity to centre stage of Indian politics. There is not too much to prove, nor any mystery to unravel – it has been the compulsive hold of the Hindutva theme that has coalesced large parts of this country into a solid support group that sees the premise delivered by BJP as a just, valid and necessary position to take for large sections of the electorate.

In sum total, the spectacular rise of the BJP, aided by its thematic adherence to Hindutva, sculpted and sustained painstakingly by the RSS over years has resulted in the creation of a new self-image of this generation of Indians who, while adhering to the essentially liberal attitudes of Hinduism are also now evolving as a pan-Indian political class – a feature that has never ever been recorded of Hindus in the history of this ancient land.

But one need not take my word for it – just look around for signals.

Remember this year when Sri Mohan Bhagwat took over as RSS Chief, every TV Channel gave it prime time coverage and it was the lead story in all national papers. Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw a leadership change at the RSS as a lead item in the Indian press? Read between the lines. Hindutva is working, and we should be taking note.

What we are calling defeat is the froth of impending success. That the BJP has yet to rise to its potential is a no-brainer. That it will, is my wager.

Hindsight, Happenstance and Hindutva – Part 2

The evolution of Hindutva as a political instrument is a work in progress.  

While its opponents go berserk deriding Hindutva, they might be losing sight of a critical development taking place before their eyes.

Put coarsely, the origins of the BJP’s growth, all through the muddled years of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Jana Sangh and the Janata Party, can be traced back to a sense of outrage at the successive political regimes that sought to undermine the brilliance of India’s indigenous culture at the altar of electoral advantage, in the guise of a well crafted concept that has been variously referred to as secularism, or more recently, as pseudo-secularism.

Secularism, in the Indian context, turned out a strange concoction of tolerance based around a rejection of religion in political space – a muddled version of gross Gandhianism bred with spotty western liberalism and which for various reasons became an anthem for most of the newbies of post independence India. Later it manifested itself as a side-effect of the faux socialism of the Nehruvian age, through an imposed sense of egalitarianism in a country unprepared for such largesse when it had still to deal with immense inequities of almost every conceivable parameter, particularly social and political.

Somewhere down the line, secularism degraded into a negation of the implicit commonality of the identity of India with Hindu thought and culture and became an armour to ward off any threat to the Congress’ hegemony of political space, using, most ironically, religion as its most potent instrument when applied to minorities, particularly Muslims.

While it can be argued that this was a natural corollary to Congress’ near total control of legitimate political space in post independence India, it was, in fact, a typical abnormality of post-emancipation political processes that left India without any alternate party for governance after independence. Every nation that has had such a long struggle for freedom and has negotiated with an occupying foreign entity has roughly had the same experience, where the reactionary forces which were more amenable to the occupants, slipped into post-freedom slots of governance or political prominence. In effect, the more fundamentalist the opposition to the foreigners, the lesser the chances of such groups having a shy at political legitimacy, which in most cases went to more middle of the road, ambivalent, malleable combination of forces that made the evading foreign power’s loss look more respectable.

Without going into the reasons for such phenomenon, for that is an involved subject on its own, it was clear that an unorganized group such as the pro-Hindutva votaries with such a strong streak of socio-cultural nationalism, was always going to struggle for large scale legitimacy when the engine of the freedom movement was all but monopolized by better organised structures like the Congress and led by pan-India leaders like Gandhi, later Nehru and others who secured cross voter support due to an ambivalent approach to the issue of nationalism, its meaning and its forms in a country still coming to grips with the concept of pan-Indian aggregation.

Progressively, this feeling among Hindus of being marginalized in the country of their origin – not socially, but politically – by using almost every trick in the book of the British – emphasizing diversity instead of commonality, underlining the divisions rather than the overlapping cultures – began subtly, but in ensuing years, with successive Congress governments more or less using the old Nehruvian model for electoral profit, resulted in a consolidation of the sense of cultural compromise – where to seem fair to a one legged man, others were expected to limp too. The Congress’ avowed and much vaunted secularism therefore has had less to do with a genuine ideological belief in non-partisan religio-cultural expression and more to do with electoral expediency, year after election year.

But the continuous corrosion of this theory, and its masterful re-use and revitalization under Indira Gandhi until it became an alternate dharma, caused much of what is seen as Hindu revivalism. In that sense, the BJP is really a byproduct of the Congress – even as it is its nemesis, and the rise and rise of this party over the last two decades is truly spectacular in a historical perspective. 

Whatever the debate suggests and however one may look at it, the undeniable and interesting fact is that it took a modern time like the twentieth century to see the Hindutva theme take centre stage. What explains that? If democracy has only seeped in more penetratingly into our socio-political system, if education has produced more aware, liberal and rights-conscious people, if we have integrated even more into a global system of liberal values, how do we explain the rise of a party that is so often cornered by intellectuals and left wingers and centrists as being a neophyte Hindu, rightist party with a lunatic fringe and now even an extremist wing!

The question need not be whether the rise of the BJP is good or bad, right or wrong: the question is, what explains the growing legitimacy of the Hindutva theme, if it’s so bad for the polity and so dangerous for democracy ?

Hindsight, Happenstance and Hindutva – Part 1

Post election media frenzy dictates that the BJP was compromised by Hindutva. Maybe the media compromised its judgement?

The cacophony of dirges that are being sounded ever since the post mortem of the BJP’s defeat has begun, is getting to be more like a requiem for the damned – it is no longer about any real analysis of the situation but more the dissection of a curse everyone believes has been set on the party’s fortunes – the curse being Hindutva.

The sheer volume of symmetrical editorials and stories in the press and on TV is indicative of the munificence of this theme but which also points to a suspicious confluence of views in a normally disruptive polity like ours where nobody agrees on anything.

The commoditization of news is one thing but this is really a case of sellers becoming buyers of their own commodities. It is noticed that the media is too often a victim of what is called the “echo effect” – you sound like what you hear. It happens that the more mainstream a media product is, the more difficult it is for it to go against the grain of popular belief and which eventually just becomes an instrument of buttressing the established view, or the view under establishment. Of course, some offbeat or boutique media may have the temerity to tread a different, perhaps truer, path but then their limitation of spread – what allows them to have the liberty to do so - retards their reach to have any perceptible impact on the larger mass of readers.

And so it goes, that  column after column, columnist after columnist is at pains establishing that it is Hindutva and its manifestations that blighted the BJP’s chances in the recently held Lok Sabha elections and which has led to a cat fight among the seniors if not the cadres.

But did it? And can we be sure?

To those whose aversion to Hindutva – the idea and the word- is so pronounced that their faculties short circuit at the mention of the word must also decide if they are really serious about this exploration : because to establish or debunk the relationship between Hindutva and the causes of BJP’s poor showing at the elections will require some amount of suspension of belief – for both, those on this side of the argument, and the other.

The belief that it was Hindutva that was under test in the elections is a fallacy simply because it was never put up for referendum by anybody. The BJP did not seek a mandate for either the continuation or the cessation of, or any revision of Hindutva; did not also put that up as a point of policy for debate or dissertation. It did not find place in the Manifesto as a point of action and was never referred to as a point of assertion or disagreement of any sort between its allies, the members of NDA.

The demonisation of Hindutva as a concept that can bring defeat in elections is also strange, for it is not an issue to be voted on for the larger support base of the BJP. Hindutva is a pervading theme, leitmotif, the raison de etre for the existence of the BJP, not an issue for debate. To question that ,would be to question its existence. Hindutva is the thematic umbilical cord that roots the party, vein and sap, into the soil of India’s fundamental cultural ethos. It doesn’t come into question. Like it doesn’t come into question that you were born of man.

But clearly this explanation is not enough to cancel out the argument of some of its die-hard critics, that there has been a rejection of Hindutva as a thematic agreement between the BJP and its voters, based on the depletion in its vote which has reduced to about 18% from 22% the last time. And yet, it only takes a moment to realize that the Congress has depleted in much larger volume over the last twenty years in vote share, so how do we sustain this argument?

But the detractor comes up with yet another analogy: the gap in vote share of the Congres and the BJP is now close to 10 percentage points indicating clearly that the Congress’  ’secularist’ agenda is a preferred alternative for the nation over the ‘exclusivist’ agenda of the BJP. Is it ? First: vote share fluctuates dramatically from election to election often without reference to ideological moorings of parties. Second: the difference in vote share is not directly proportional to seats won, as we have seen time and again. Did you know, for instance, that in 1998 when the BJP formed the Government on the basis of being the party with the largest number of seats, its vote share was actually less than the Congress aggregate. So, the thesis that the country has rejected Hindutva on the basis of the reduction of seats or vote percentage for the BJP in this Lok Sabha election is at best a specious interjection by political dilettantes.

The more real assertion should be that irrespective of the waxing and waning of electoral numerology, the Indian polity has now comprehensively accepted the BJP as an alternate political entity to the Congress and that this has, inter alia, validated Hindutva as a potent tool for aggregation of support for the party.

The BJP lost for many reasons: and we will come to that soon enough, but the BJP is what it is and Hindutva stays what it stays.

The inky pinky

In the high decibel lecturing during electioneering in India, to citizens to come out and vote, somebody forgot to ask a few questions.

 

If there was one thing that continued to resound all through the election season, apart from the noisy campaigning, it had to be the sanctimonious lecturing that we all received from everyone and his aunt, on the beneficial side effects of voting.

Now, who wants to take on the might of the media, which is more frequently confusing reporting for promoting, and the political establishment in whose advantage it is if you trudge to the booth nevertheless, and the Election Commission, which in fact is Aunt incarnate, or more like Taunt incarnate who ridicules you and calls you names – Pappu – if you don’t go out to vote. But seriously, somebody has to ask: what is the matter with them!

You couldn’t miss the maniacal chanting by TV channels, newspapers who decided they will alter the democratic landscape of India, student groups, RWAs, NGOs, activists, film stars – it didn’t end there – eunuchs and TV actors started haranguing us – c’mon, even Baba Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar jumped on the bandwagon. It was of course funny to see Mumbai’s Bollywood stars showing us the finger after polling, leaving it your imagination as to what the target of the insult was – Pakistan and Kasab or the Politicians of India. That indelicacy also inspired the title of this blog – since we could use the middle finger, why not the little pinky which also has important meaning attached to it.

But seriously, anyway you look at it, it amazes that an entire nation’s elite could be conned into such a spurious understanding of the electoral process or the democracy they so lovingly uphold. What is it about India and Indians that a 55% polling makes us feel suicidal. Hell, the Americans are 400 years ahead of us in democracy, and they don’t do better than 50% on average – and they’re all educated better than us, have a social security system in place and in general are better off than us on almost every index.

While this messianic zeal was at its peak, I was asked by one well meaning publicity hankerer to join a prospective meeting of citizens to understand why Delhi and Mumbai did not vote in the numbers they were expected to. I had to rather plainly put forth the theory I have mentioned above, with the caveat that not voting is in itself the biggest opinion one could hold about the elections and the representatives that are thrown at us. Did you think about that? He never called back.

So here’s the thing. The ones who constantly remind us to vote are being plainly juvenile because they want a different output from the electoral exercise without making a single modification in the input. The more discerning a person becomes, the less probable his chances of indulging in illogical behaviour: and if, as we all know and ADR, [the advocacy group working assiduously on tabulating criminal records and assets of contesting candidates] has been killing itself demonstration before every elections] that a number of those who we have to elect are corrupt or criminal, why would a sane man vote for them, and if both the choices were relatively similar, why would he come out to vote.

But more than that, my sense is that the middle class person is today more removed from the effects of politics than ever before due to the insurance of prosperity – I mean his relationship with politics no longer determines his immediate quality of life, because he can buy it for himself. What the poor man in a village needs from his local administration and through subservience to a local politician, a person in urban India just pays for and gets without obligation. School admissions or water, electricity or transport, bureaucratic red tape or security, he is able to circumvent each hurdle with the instrument of cash, or influence derived from availability of money. Ditto for the youth, who have neither the interest, not the understanding of how politics impacts their lives. Which leaves only the question of policy out – what if a government policy hurts them? That works, and so whenever we see greater involvement of people in elections – like in Punjab, where we had a 65% turnout, you can be sure that the people have an issue or a score to settle. Like in Delhi, when the Congress got booted out of the Corporation elections in the wake of the sealings and demolition mess. Otherwise, elections are passé for most of the elite. Don’t look at me – look at your well off neighbour, and if you want more evidence, look at America.

We did an experiment in Gurgaon in 2005 which reveals exactly how we can change the percentile of voting – but it also proves that if residents do not have a stake in the outcome of the election, they just stay away. When we discovered that most new Gurgaon residents did not have voter ID cards, or that they were not registered as voters, we ran a year-long campaign to enlist new voters ending with over 1 lakh new voter registrations [You can read more on this on www.peoplesaction.net]. Once we had those numbers, we asked residents what they intended to do with their vote, knowing full well that most residents were actually only interested in the ID card for its identity value. Anyway, we cajoled them into not wasting their vote and collectively agreeing to put up a candidate of their own choice through a novel ‘primary’ elections process – electing one of three contenders as the official candidate under the banner of the Gurgaon Residents Party [ GRP is now a registered party] and had him fight the Assembly polls of 2005 from Gurgaon. The results were expected – in that he lost – but surprising in the support he derived from their core areas of influence at that time – mostly new Gurgaon where he beat the Congress and BJP in eighteen booths and came second on twelve booths. Not bad for a one week old party and candidate.

The sum total was that people’s participation from the new Gurgaon areas reached historical highs – with areas notching up 40-50% polling whereas it used to totter in the range of 5-10% earlier. That changed things, and it’s not a permanent solution – they will have to continuously engage with the electorate if they want to draw them out the next time around. And that’s how it goes. If people find the stakes are high and they find credible candidates to vote for, they do. Not unless.

There is another reason for low voting which goes against the grain of logic, so to say, but trumps in behavioral science – and so it is that when people are mostly happy with a regime, voting is usually low, and when unhappy, voting is high. That is want explains the relationship between an anti-incumbency vote being normally high. This is also representative of human nature – anger and revenge are a bigger driver for voting, than the inertia of relative contentment, in the comforting arms of a status quo.

Plastic Bag. Elastic Ban.

 

Why the recent ban by the Delhi Government on plastic carry bags is both necessary and misplaced and why legislation is no substitute for logic.

 

 

The ban on plastic carry-bags by the Delhi Government, pursuant to High Court orders to similar effect, exhibits in one stroke the absence of sense on the one hand and the hypocrisy that maims political will on the other. It also points to the stark reality that government is today unable to respond to righteous needs and must needs the fig leaf of judicial activism to take cover before taking action for fear of displeasing one or the other lobby. We saw that in the CNG issue, in the sealing and demolitions issues, in the electricity meters issue even, more ridiculously, in the cow catching orders of the Supreme Court where a judge ordered MCD to offer a cash reward to people for doing so. In each case, a problem of governance required a reference to the Courts and took the judicial intervention to effect a change in legislation.

 

Now that the plastic lobby has cried itself hoarse claiming that this move ruins businesses [and lives] across the city, it might serve to make us laugh at the sudden penury of hitherto prosperous businessmen just because a certain micron of plastic bag is banned. But it does not also explain the knee jerk and almost senile response by the government and its department heads to shut out the menace with its typical head-in-the-sand style. That is why the recent spate of advertisements from an overactive State Environment Ministry, justifying the ban and offering organic bag substitutes to bolster its case. It has become so ridiculous that the environment department is actually looking like the marketing agency for the jute industry!

 

The unfortunate result, of course, is that we are yet again making a law infructuous even as we give it birth and in the process ridiculing once again the sanctity of lawmaking. Nowhere is the rule being enforced except in some class-conscious markets. For the rest, plastics bags continue as before. The reason is not difficult to see. How does this government expect, without alternatives in comparable terms that a poor labourer in East Delhi will buy a bag for 10 Rupees after buying half a kg of potatoes for less than that? Or that the retailer who serves such a poor clientele would be able to afford giving away free organic bags that cost the same. Oh!, But the Chief Minister thinks they ought to get themselves a cloth bag to carry around at all times! There you go again. Unrealistic, superficial, and tokenism at its worst.

 

The problem with the oft-repeated idea of replacement of plastic bags with organic bags is that it does not take into account the two fundamental reasons why this will never happen. The customer will not bother to carry a bag with him at all times because of inconvenience. He or she will not pay for expensive organic substitutes every time they make a purchase. And neither will the retailer supply expensive organic substitutes free of cost. So what is the solution?

 

A lateral view:

 

I have been working on this issue for a long time and our solution stems from finding a mechanism that is not only practical but also sustainable. We have since then developed a process which is called the Eco Bags Exchange [ EBX*] process  which solves all three problems and doesn’t cost any one. It works on the simple premise of offering the bag at a deposit which can be reclaimed by the customer anytime he or she wants to return the bag.

 

We have had a great beginning with the project. One of the first things that has happened is the involvement of Earth Matters Foundation [EMF] which has offered us a grant in aid last month. EMF is a foundation led by well known film maker and environmentalist Mike Pandey. The entire association between EBX and EMF was authored by Mike’s nephew Arjun Pandey, himself a film maker and the collaboration was launched on March 8^th at a wonderful event at the Garden of Five Senses in New Delhi, where the Austrian Ambassador released the bags and the Austrian Chamber orchestra played some terrific music. See accompanying picture, and related photos on the link below.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjaykaul/show/with/3438868202/

 

I welcome your views on taking this campaign further, so if you have suggestions or ideas, do share them with me.

 

 

*[Patent-filed © Sanjay Kaul 2008]

 

Sanjay Kaul with Mike Pandey signing up for the EBX project.

The Third Affront.

 

Why third fronts happen, and why they shouldn’t.

  

Considering that juicy permutations of electoral admixtures has the media thrilled with   possibilities as we prepare to face the 15th General Elections, it might be appropriate to remember that the revival of the third front theme is not without numerological mysticism – for if all goes well and the election process concludes on May 28th, we will be within kissing distance of the exact date on which the third front first inflicted us with its mirthful instability –  H.D. Deve Gowda was sworn in as the Prime Minister of the then 13-party United Front on June 1st, in 1996.

 

Putting regional parties in charge of a complex country like India brings with it – as we have seen in the first two avatars of such leadership – a combination of values that seems to distill the worst elements of each of the coalition partners before it saddles us with a lame duck Prime Ministerial candidate. That the Common Minimum Programme of such regimes are more an agreement for common minimum performance, is another matter of course.

 

There is, however, no escaping the recurrence of a coalition of coalitionists since, every time we are close to a general election. Yet, despite repeated experiences of the inevitability of its breakdown, it is curious that national parties have not yet devised means to either control, manage or modulate the birth, girth or growth of such destabilizing factors on the body politic, as it were. The inevitable tensions that such arrangements face, result in further dissections until the smaller players first disband, then recoup, regroup and recast themselves as satellites of larger parties once again – the very point from where they began in the first place.

 

It is clear that the Indian electorate is maturing and finally taking on a more federal tone, refusing to paper over the sheer contradiction of its variety. Even a superficial exploration of the pattern of elections over the years will yield the basis for the progressive shrinkage of popular support to national parties – to the extent that the nomenclature itself is in question, for no party has for some time even held half the country under its belt. The inability of such national players to hold regions or end up ceding space to regional outfits is merely the second coming of Indian democracy. Those who were brought up on the fable of a seamless post independence India must disappoint, but India is no more the one-size-fits-all electorate; and it is not willing to accept that one party fits all, either.

 

In pure marketing terms, we are witnessing the breaking down of the political market into sub-segments who are looking for specific addressing of their needs. The fragmentation of the Indian polity was almost waiting to happen and visible to anyone willing to see.  In a country where disaffection and anti-incumbency is the flip side of any 5-year term for a government, it has to sooner or later turn to newer, more exotic arrangements if the underlying two-party system refuses to respond to the aspirations of the people.

 

It is also argued that there is nothing called a national election anymore – that, because eventually only local issues hold fort in Indian elections, a national party is an oxymoron. The data seems to buttress the facts. Except when an ambient issue holds enough potential to breeze through the entire country on the same wavelength, there is now no longer any congruence of issues along national lines. What holds the attention of the voter in Chennai does not in Jammu and ditto for Vidharbha vis-à-vis Poorvanchal. This matrix is going to be the pattern until – and unless – something earth shattering enough were to happen that binds our responses in orchestra. Not until then.

 

The response of political parties to this frequently established principle is also typically bat-eyed. They have neither invested genuinely in ancillaries, nor established a relationship benchmark with them that can withstand tremors of personality issues or electoral compulsions. There has been only an attempt to befriend or beguile, play a waiting game until the big game swallows the small or a mating dance ritual that is on and off depending on the season. For evidence, we have recent developments where hitherto rock-solid alliances of both mainline parties have come unstuck at a deeply embarrassing time, not to forget the leftist charade of a secular front the last time around. The only real issue for most parties has always been how to tango with a partner party to either cannibalize their territory and vice versa or settle for an uncomfortable bargain in power.

 

Then there is the intuitive relationship between a small regional party and criminality and corruption within its ranks which vitiates the political space even further. It has been argued that to point out this bias when a whopping thirty percent of the sitting Parliament is constituted of persons with criminal charges is unfair, but there is no denying that what is often a sore point with national parties is de riguer in regional start-ups. The variation in standards of accountability of national parties vis-a-vis the regional players on issues like criminality and corruption is too obvious to ignore. This dichotomy, created in the first instance out of the dependence of larger parties on smaller alliance partners, is not only buying the smaller, regional outfits a legitimacy that is inherently detrimental to probity, but is also establishing lower benchmarks in public life each passing day. Contrasted against this scenario, the painstaking documentation of criminal charges against candidates by well meaning NGOs is now looking more and more like a comic side show to the great Indian election circus.

 

However, what rankles the electorate most is the sheer audacity of regional satraps who is spite of knowing the realistic impossibility of having a third front last for any substantial time, work towards it as a means of jockeying for either position or power within the system. The abject lack of sincerity in their effort and the clear hypocrisy in their design underlines that it is never a principled alliance based on fundamentals, but a see through stitch-up that masks only personal ambition or short term wheeling dealing or merely a stunt to settle old scores.

 

Notwithstanding the reasons and the causes for the rise and fall and rise again of such dubious arrangements, it remains a mystery how we, the people, remain powerless as voters to affect the fortunes of such coalitions and must eventually wait out the time it takes them to self-destruct. By which time, of course, precious years would have been lost and another election thrust upon the electorate, paid for by the people of the country. To that extent, should it transfer into reality, maybe the Third Front should really be called the third affront – not only because it remains an affront to real democracy but also because it would be the third time in thirteen years that we’d have to bear this burden, once more.

 

 

© Sanjay Kaul 2009

This piece has also appeared in The Daily Pioneer of March 21, 2009 under a modified headline.

 

The communal and the criminal.

Gun runners, match fixers…what else do we need to shine up Indian politics.

 

New Delhi, India: 20th February, 2009

Just when you thought civil society activism is leading to a purging of crooks and charlatans from politics, we are greeted by a new breed of would-be MPs whose largest impact on public service and public memory is that they have run foul of the law, and have been indicted or punished in acts that were detrimental to national security or pride.

The celebratory enrollment to two main political parties as Lok Sabha probables – Sanjay Dutt to the Samajwadi Party and Azharuddin to the Congress – is a telling commentary on what is preferred in Indian politics for long – notoriety over capability; criminal antecedents over public record of service, and zero political experience over name recognition. Interestingly, and as you will see, both appointments are essentially a deadly combination of the communal and the criminal. Both have been hired to secure Muslim votes and both have been known to have links with the underworld.

For some years criminalization has been a specialty of the Bihar UP cadre of politics with RJD, SP and BSP leading the charge, but now it is clear that the old hand of Congress is catching up. The fracas over Sanjay Dutt being secured by SP was, to put things in perspective, not to the liking of the Congress not on any principled grounds as is clear now, but more for the loss of edge to the SP and the star son’s loss to a bitter sweet rivalry in the conundrum of UP politics.

Then, there’s the underlying theme of communal agglomeration of votes in the SP’s choice of Dutt for Lucknow. Note the lineage, the recent marriage of Dutt, the legacy of invoking a mixed marriage as a secular backdrop and the first forays into media supported visits to re-discovered ‘aunts’ of the Rizvi family. But how do we excuse the fact that this person was technically guilty of the most heinous crime of all – of waging war against the nation? Sanjay Dutt is a criminal according to the laws of this country. It is argued that Sidhu has the same record but that is a completely specious argument. Sidhu was not accused of anything close to what Dutt was guilty of : Sidhu’s was a personal issue, Dutt’s impacted the nation, its security and sovereignty. Sidhu’s was an act without plan, Dutt’s was a reasoned involvement in a program that involved an enemy nation’s support to an enemy of the nation – the prime accused for the Mumbai blasts. There is no comparison and there is no case for comparison: unless of course, the context of our country and the security of our nation is a mere trifle for us.

Similarly, Azararuddin’s inclusion among the Lok Sabha probables from the Congress party surely is a double edged stab at the body politic too. A cool communal move aimed at rounding up Muslim votes in Hyderabad and a cooler criminal move when you remind yourself of his record of match-fixing. What were they thinking: this is the new India we are looking ahead to? A country run by a guy who gave away runs to lose a match merely to make a few bucks and buy that Rolex watch. There is vigorous argument each time I propose this, ostensibly because he was not felled by law like Dutt Junior was. But why was he suspended from playing cricket for the country? How is it possible that a country which does not consider Azharuddin fit enough to represent it in a cricket match is found fit by the Congress Party to represent the nation? And what can we expect now: another MP who will ask questions for cash because he wants that shiny Ferragamo he saw on his last visit to Dubai? Or, who will now provide privileged information to our enemies on the same basis – remember the hidden camera expose on match-fixing [by Tehelka] where Ravi Shastri candidly, and clearly without consideration of favour, suggested to Azharrudin’s links with the big boys of the underworld ?

Guys, this is the Parliament we are talking about. The question is, are we now ready to have the underworld’s proxies in parliament?

You tell me.

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200902181918.htm
http://news.indiainfo.com/columns/bahal/041205match-fixing-azhar.html