A close look at India’s pre-election political discourse would reveal that the working principles of democracy are significantly absent. The first of these is that a democracy must allow scope for political dialogue. Thus, the pre-election discourse must generate criticism, confrontation, challenge, and a genuine attempt to frame a response. In fact, our democratic politics provides the politician significant scope to shut up the questioner. A telling example of this would be when Commerce Minster Arun Jaitley was asked, at the close of the BJP’s National Conference in Hyderabad in January, that if his party’s policies were so beneficial to the poor, why have so many farmers committed suicide. Jaitley replied, “We believe our policies have been beneficial for rural India.” It would be difficult to match this as a conversation stopper. But it also represents the absence of institutionalised structures to pin politicians down on crucial questions. As such, when politicians are voted in and out of power, the exercise becomes little more than political mime. Why were they voted out? Easy answer: Anti-incumbency. Any government’s failure to win the next elections can be subsumed under the broad, overarching explanation of anti-incumbency. Such an answer serves to overlook the multiple levels at which a government may have failed or betrayed its supporters. Thus the new set of politicians coming in to power do so without any sharp edge to the awareness that the flaws of the past cannot be repeated. The flaws, to put it simply, are not recorded in the election dialogue. Perhaps the most significant point, though, about our pre-election politics is the complete absence of choice facing the electorate. The choice is overwhelming in terms of the number of political parties, but how does one choose one over the other? In Karnataka, for example, from where I am writing, in the pre-election scramble a large number of All India Progressive Janata Dal (AIPJD) members went across to become members of the Congress. Does this mean they have changed their stand on policy? The same AIPJD had aligned with the BJP in the 1999 elections. Such scrambles are of course happening all over and have become the bread and butter of India’s democratic political practice. In the process we have lost sight of the fact that these shifts underline that what sets parties and politicians apart is not a substantive stand on policies and politics, but the quest for power. This alone, provides a rationale for the shifts. As far as the voter is concerned, this spells two negative things: First, that the basis on which we are asked to vote for a candidate is always shifting and is, to that extent, false. Secondly, behind all of this lies the stupendous fact that in a country with huge and continuing economic disparities, there is no choice before the voter in terms of political parties with alternative economic policies. For instance, the political dialogue does not admit the discussion of critical economic issues. Thus, the Congress party’s only criticism of the BJP’s economic policies has been to reiterate the advances in the economy that had been made during the time of Indira Gandhi. Beyond this assertion, however, there is no effort to open up substantive policy issues for discussion. The key to this silence may well be the following. Indira Gandhi’s earlier regimes were certainly of a left-of-centre colour, manifested not only in the garibi hatao rhetoric, but also in policy areas such as targetted poverty removal, employment generation, and the like. The Congress has come a long way from that political perspective. As is widely known, the Congress was indeed the harbringer of marketisation/liberalisation policies. How, then, to put forward a critique of the NDA’s economic policies which, basically, took forward the Congress line on liberalisation? This does not mean that economic liberalisation per se should be dumped. But in a context of widening disparities, surely we need a political debate, at the very least, on a policy package that does not create employment? For the BJP, there appear to be two main pillars of the election dialogue to this date. One, through the ‘India Shining’ and ‘Feel Good’ announcements, the party seems to have closed the debate on economic policy. These proclamations underline that the party is not willing to be an active participant in any questioning of the principles underlying marketisation, and its possible impact upon a highly unequal society. L.K. Advani, of course, recently proclaimed that Feel Good is not complete until every farmer begins to Feel Good, but this obviously is a promise of extending current policies and practices, not of reviewing them critically. There is, secondly, the deliberate attempt to focus on issues about which, in fact, there can be no debate. Should a foreigner become our prime minister? Or (Rajnath Singh’s latest election hysteria), would Kalpana Chawla ever have been allowed to become president of the US? Then, there is the distinction, frequently made, between real secularism and false secularism. Who would seriously start thinking or talking about these issues? But, these successfully serve to throw out the real issues and to fill up the political vacuum. Yet, at the level of civil society, a network of groups and collectives are closely engaged, in dialogue and activism, over those very issues, which the political establishment is so shy of addressing. Whether it is farmers’ suicides, corruption, poverty or human rights, there is no lacks of debate and organisation in multiple domains of deprivation. This pulsating activism is multi-hued, in terms of its ideology, sharing only a concern for rights and empowerment, and a conscious distancing from political parties. Between genuine grassroots activism, on the one hand, and the cynicism of parties, on the other, lies an enormous chasm. This partly explains the absence of political dialogue. Whether the future will be sold to that cynicism, or whether it belongs to a political force that can coalesce the many genuine impulses to activism, depends now on our determination to forge a politics that approximates a dialogue. The writer is associate professor, Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore
