Lame-duck legislators

It is not that the ordinary Indian is expecting Parliament to thrash out contentious issues complicated by years of politicking like the Ayodhya dispute, or the liberalisation of the economy or caste reservations. It is not the bigger issues like taxing agricultural income, updating rent laws, or creating grounds for an equitable common civil code that the judiciary would have to adjudicate in the near future, but small civic rights that need clarification.

Legislators have shown themselves to be impotent in taking action and implementing policy decisions for running the daily administration. It is the judiciary that today is diffusing crisis after crisis. Recently, Delhi experienced total darkness because its electricity board went on strike. But neither the Chief Minister nor officialdom brought back the power — the judiciarydid.

It is now generally accepted that governments cannot clear the roads of encroachers, or remove rickshaws from the city’s main roads. They cannot save parks from being destroyed by marriage parties, fill trenches left by the telephone authorities or clean the city’s drains. How can they, when such actions could go against their carefully cultivated vote banks?

When Union health minister Renuka Chowdhury proposed that MPs be forced to restrict the size of their families, she was opposed by activists like Brinda Karat who feared that lower-class representation would be reduced by such a restriction. Who can give back civic rights to citizens if not the courts?

Legislators have to exhibit a vision of the future, however limited, if they are to keep the wheels of administration running. Unfortunately, not only are our legislators unwilling to face this fact, they have no patience to let the final results bring them wider support. They are incapable, by their very training, of identifying the major stepsto be taken to bring about the greater good.

In the better-organised western democracies, the elite, including politicians, businessmen, experts and intellectuals, which rules the majority has the good sense “to agree not to disagree” on certain basic aspects of civic administration, national security and social control. It provides for certain freedoms — which can sometimes have a deleterious effect on society like profiteering from pornography — but it does not compromise on the unity and integrity of the country.

For instance, the US will allow Khalistanis to preach dismemberment of India and even train terrorists on their soil, but it keeps the Quebec separatists in check since the breaking up of Canada would be a disaster too close to home. Western societies have agreed between themselves to put a tight leash on subnationalism within the territory of the West and to allow it to be unleashed in the soil of the Rest. It is on the force of such an unwritten understanding that Samuel P. Huntingtoncan make the glorious declaration that the West will be able to hold out against all onslaughts on its hegemony in the coming century. It was no surprise then that he comes all the way to New Delhi to advise India to rely upon America as she is going to be a lonely Hindu country culturally isolated from other civilisations in the coming century.

The ruling elite in India does not have the capacity to create a general consensus on issues of basic national interest. For one, it has no experience of sinking its differences for the sake of fighting an extended war, or for colonising others. It is still divided ideologically along the old Cold War line of the Command Economy Left and the Free Trade Right. This even though such a divide has ended even for Russia and China. What is worse, our leaders like V.P. Singh have totally localised the American concepts of ethnicity along caste lines. India is now functioning politically as a multi-ethnic, multi-caste state within a command economy. In other words, like theerstwhile USSR, it offers all the possibilities of breaking up into Khalistan, Gorkhaland, Azad Kashmir, Bodoland, and so on, coupled with insurmountable state inefficiency inflicted by its public sector and long years of state subsidisation.

As a matter of fact, even sobering hardships such as long wars or disasters do not ensure political maturity. Our neighbour, Bangladesh, has been reeling from one natural calamity to another for nearly two decades but the fight between fundamentalists and progressives seem to be going in favour of the former. Populist compulsions continue to prevent leaders from taking hard decisions.

In such a situation it is useful to remind oneself of the golden days of the much-remembered Greek democracy. After Perikles died in 425 B.C. “power went to ranting democrats from the other backward classes, like Kleon the tanner, and Hyperbolos the lamp-seller, who unlike Perikles relied less on their intellect and more on popular likes and dislikes that made Athens lose the23-year-long Pelopennesian war. Mere popular demands are never enough to lead a democracy, and are certainly no substitute to a leader’s vision.”

The writer is a professor at Delhi University