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
(Copyright,
India News & Feature Alliance)
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