Great Indian Muddle Class

Beware, the middle path can be a prescription for policy confusion

The parade of serious issues other than cricket that have made headlines recently is evidence of a range of incipient crises gnawing away at Indian society. During the last few days, these issues have included an order by a single judge in the Allahabad High Court, subsequently stayed by a division bench, declaring that Muslims are not a minority in UP; Tamil Nadu8217;s decision to have an exclusive quota for Muslims and Christians; the stay on implementing OBC quota for this academic session; the EC notice to the BJP over an inflammatory CD. There is a common thread running through these issues: baiting the politics of caste and community. But, in an uncanny way, the manners in which they were handled also have much in common with the other item in the news: the government8217;s handling of SEZs.

India likes to pride itself on the politics of taking the middle path. But the middle path has two meanings: it can mean a principled reason for choosing a middle path, or it can mean simply splitting the difference between two options. The former is conscious policy choice, the latter an artifact of arbitrary power. There was at least some integrity to the viewpoint of those who were either sceptical about SEZs or were mesmerised by the promise of large SEZs to transform India8217;s industrial landscape. But the so-called middle path chosen in this instance might give India the worst of both worlds: a whole plethora of exemptions without the corresponding benefits of scale. But in miniature this is an instance where rational argument, the matching of ends and means, the sober allocation of priorities have become all but impossible.

Cumulatively these examples signify the real threat of impending institutional anarchy. It is very rare today for any institution to give reasoned and principled justification for their actions. On almost each policy decision it is as if the forms of a free government and the ends of an arbitrary one can be easily combined. It is almost as if every institution, or individuals within them, can stick out a boot in someone else8217;s path, not with a view to establishing justice, but to asserting their own momentary power. Although the single judge order in Allahabad was stayed, the process is an example of a slowly dissolving understanding of what public reason means. If serious constitutional questions are to be raised, they should be raised at the proper forum; judges ruling on matters that are not even at issue are not a sound precedent.

There is an underlying issue in all this that will simply not go away. We are in the midst of some profound questions about the relationship of minorities to the rest of Indian politics. They are coming up in so many different contexts: the arguments over rehabilitation in Gujarat, Muslim under-representation in public services, the dispute over how to even characterise their economic situation, the PILs filed over parallel Shariat courts, the accommodation of religious identities within the already distorted framework of reservations, the alleged and unprecedented communalisation of foreign policy, the re-igniting of protests in Kashmir, and the dispute over whether minority rights to their institutions are best protected under the rubric of a general right to run institutions that is equally available to all communities, or as a special right. These issues are forced upon us in the context of not just a profound change in the global geo-political landscape, but also profound aspirational changes happening within Indian society. Yet the only political tactics that we can deploy to handle these sensitive issues is derived from the 1950s: an attempt by some parties to keep Muslims a supplicant minority, on the one hand, and by others to viciously target them. It is something of a silver lining that Indian pluralism has survived these cynical assaults. But what the Allahabad High Court8217;s stay order cannot wish away is the fact that these questions need deft political handling, and a veritable renewal of a national conversation. This gnawing gap between changing social needs and what is getting politically articulated is being filled by patchwork grandstanding, whether by judges or by politicians. And cumulatively this vacuum will at some point produce a devastating insecurity.

In part, there is no national conversation on issues because leadership has almost vanished. Leadership has two core meanings: the ability to think and act on one8217;s own thoughts, and the ability to forge a new and better consensus rather than follow whatever default consensus might exist. It would be wonderful for the BJP leadership not to simply scurry behind some technicality to absolve themselves of the responsibility for the CD, but for them to actively repudiate its message. The PM acts under serious political constraints. But when was the last time he effectively intervened in a debate that was not either at a high level of platitude or did not evasively take cover behind a so-called politics of consensus? Even on the Indo-US nuclear deal, an issue he made so much his own, the momentum has dropped; the puzzle in the current debate over economic reform is that no one is even sure what the PM8217;s views actually are. Under these circumstances who will be the catalyst of a reasoned public conversation? Or take a different example: when was the last time a Supreme Court chief justice really took the bull by the horns on the question of judicial reform? The simple truth is that every itsy bitsy player in the system is feeling entitled to take whatever potshots they can, because there is a total vacuum at the top. The utter confusion among leaders, parties and institutions is a harbinger of a disorder to come.

Nothing illustrates this more than the fact that even our language is experiencing a disarray of Orwellian proportions. Growth has suddenly become a bad word, social justice is equated with patronage, secularism with the bracketing of all important questions about reform, leadership with consensus, constitutionalism with arbitrary intervention, ends with means, and the horizon of India8217;s future with a six-monthly political cycle. Perhaps, as Raja Bhoja once put it pointedly: the corruption of language leads to adharma; the constitutive uncertainty in our language betrays a fundamental confusion of values that our institutions are doing much to exacerbate.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research