Open Forum

New Delhi, 15 March 2023

Vicious Political Trends

PARTIES FRAGMENTING SOCIETY?

By Dhurjati Mukherjee

The recent Adani euphoria seems to have busted with purported unethical means of inflating his stocks with what appears to be in an indirect support from the powers-that-be, including State agencies and institutions. With the Supreme Court setting up a five-member committee led by ex-SC judge to investigate the Adani Group and suggest measures to strengthen the framework to protect Indian investors, it turns out to yet another case of the bane of Indian politics, of large-scale corruption having entered.

Not just corruption, but centralised control in most political parties has aggravated unethical tendencies in politics. A very small coterie has been running the parties and the voice of the people goes unheard. This is also true of the three recent elections in the North-East, wherein enemies are seen now as friends. This has led many an expert to form an opinion that democratic pluralism is virtually absent in the country.

To support this contention, one may mention here that in 2021, two of the most prestigious watchdogs of global democratic health, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute and the US-based Freedom House, downgraded the level accorded to Indian democracy. According to Freedom House, India had slipped from a ‘free democracy’ to a ‘partially free democracy’.  The V-Dem Institute estimation was gloomier still, relegating the country from ‘electoral democracy’ to ‘electoral autocracy’. The next year brought little change to the rankings, indicating a relatively stable consensus.

It goes without saying that it is in India’s foreign policy interest to take steps to assuage concerns about its ‘declining democracy’ even as it formally adopts an unperturbed visage. Since democracy promotion and political polarisation have emerged as major international fault lines, the Indian political leadership might have been expected to showcase a rational, fairer, problem-solving orientation towards the world. Instead, India started the year of its G20 presidency with a raid for ‘tax survey’ in the euphemistic official description on BBC offices after the news channel broadcast a documentary questioning the role of Modi as the former chief minister of Gujarat and this was followed by the Adani scam.

The centralised leadership that we see at the Centre and also within state governments is symptomatic of weakening party-society linkages, influence of television and digital media, frequent single party majority mandates and so on. There are also benefits of a strong leader at the executive, but decentralised governance is obviously much better. Though Prime Minister Modi is always critical of Nehru, the latter was hardly a proponent of the dangerous personalisation or centralisation of decision making where personal vision (or vindictiveness) supersedes the imperative of national interest.

Delving into the problem from another perspective, it has been evident that though political parties emphasised on a moral ideological enterprise in the last two-three decades of the past century, winnability in elections emerged as a practical requirement for political survival. Parties began to use ideology to justify practical manoeuvring and war of positions. The 1990s was a watershed moment in this regard.

Globalisation of the Indian economy directly impacted popular representation of politics as a section of the population began to be steadily ignored and pushed to poverty and squalor. In this changed scenario, the election centric meaning of politics was interestingly redefined. People’s movements in contemporary India represent a very different kind of politics. These movements raise the issues of caste, class, gender and communalism that goes against the basic tenets of justice, inclusiveness and equality. The only concern of the political parties appears to be just winnability of elections by hook or by crook.

Such a situation has arisen because elected representatives amass huge wealth and thus winning elections is the prime motto. Most leaders care little for people’s welfare and have very little contact at the grassroots. This was not situation say around five decades back. The declining political atmosphere has been the influence of materialism and consumerism inherited from the West.

Moreover, while the major political party has been harping on Hindu nationalism, it has very little or virtually no respect for the ethos and culture of the country. Added to this, following a policy of alienating the minority communities, is just aimed at garnering votes of the Hindus in the northern and western belts where illiteracy and ignorance is quite high. Whatever the leaders may talk in public, the focus is just to get votes by misguiding the masses and specially the youth,

With what are seen as wrong economic policies being followed with rising unemployment and underemployment coupled with inflation, the party in power has no other alternative but to motivate the youth about Hindu nationalism, leading to jealousy, hatred and community discord. The nasty political trends that are manifest today speaks poorly about the government in power and its tendency to split society, just to garner votes from the majority community.

These above trends have taken unhealthy dimensions during the post globalisation era, but these are far from what our leaders believed in a democratic polity. The nexus of politician-corporate-media nexus has forced the policy preferences of political parties, ignore the democratic norms and people’s choices. In the wake of these effects, even the role of the media has also tilted towards market forces, controlling their companies, thereby ignoring their democratic responsibilities.  

As such, the authoritarian trend continued to grow over the years. Obviously, under a decent democratic network, the present trends such as dominance of electoral prospects over ideological ethics of parties, undemocratic trends in part politics, growing role of media in manufacturing fictitious stories are unknown. Thus, ignoring people and keeping them aloof from democratic process and not ensuring their participation in governance goes against what Mahatma Gandhi preached and practised all through his life and work.

In the vicious political climate, it is difficult to presume that corruption would be controlled as a section of the rich are hand-in-gloves with the current dispensation and it was little different from earlier regimes. Also, whether the national or even the regional political parties are centralised or family-controlled it is indeed very difficult to come out of such a situation. The voice of the common man is not heard while mass programmes against corruption and anarchy do not have enough steam.

In such a situation, it is doubtful whether programmes like Bharat Jodo Andolan would be of any great help to consolidate the masses. What is needed is not just a change in the development perspective followed by the political parties, specially the BJP, but also a change in our outlook towards society wherein the values we just talk about like cooperation, fellow-feeling, compassion and sympathy are implemented in letter and spirit. If that does not happen, politics will take an ugly turn leading to social disintegration with resultant effects. ---INFA

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