Sense and Consensus

There is something close to an iron law of Indian politics. If government proposes spending on any programme, the only political criticism is that it is not spending more. The usual way a distinction between Left and Right is carved is as follows. The Left wants the government to spend more money, the Right opposes this in all matters — except in defence. In our case, the distinction is between who gets to come up with a spending proposal first and who gets to endorse. Or, if someone even so much as suggests that it might be time to think of a paradigm of justice beyond reservations, they are unlikely to find significant political space.

The issue is not whether these schemes are defensible or ill-advised. Those debates often find expression in civil society. But the debate seems to have little place in politics. Even if you are not a liberal, there is reason to worry about the way the poor and marginalised are used to manufacture consensus. There is some irony to the fact that the area where we have most political consensus — that the state should do something for the poor — is the area where we achieve the least results. It is difficult to imagine how Parliament will hold the state accountable if it does not have enough people suspicious of its functioning, and even fewer willing to speak their minds.

The political debate on the NREGB is disappointing, not because it is a bad idea. It is fatuous to think India can evolve towards advanced capitalism without a genuine welfare state. There are some legitimate worries about how the scheme is going to be implemented, but these should be used to leverage reform in the state, not abandon the scheme. The disappointing aspect of the politics around NREGB is this. It was not used to leverage reform elsewhere in the system. Someone, perhaps within the Congress itself, should have got up and said loudly: “We agree that the state should provide some employment for those who do not have employment. But it is equally important that state policies and regulations do not impede the creation of new jobs.”

We should write a new social contract for employment, but direct assistance by the state is only one element of this contract. The state needs to reform labour laws and a whole set of other regulations that stand in the way of our becoming a manufacturing power house. It should disinvest, because mis-allocated public investment is impeding job growth and corrupting the state. It should withdraw unproductive subsidies because these subsidies help the privileged and make the state financially precarious. In short, if we are serious about jobs, we should be serious about job creation. This was an opportunity to bargain with the Left, test how sincerely they cared about employment, by asking them to relent on their opposition to something. The disappointing thing is that, in the end, the consensus has devolved on a scheme, not on employment generation. The political beauty of the NREGB is that it is a big scheme, but unlike other big schemes it does not really have to puncture any political consensus.

The same thing is likely to happen to a debate on regulating non-aided institutions. There is a genuine challenge: how to make education accessible to all who deserve it. But is it not time to pause and ask whether the combination of reservations and fee regulation we have endorsed is the best way of achieving the objective? This question, like criticism of the NREGB, can be motivated by a variety of self-serving considerations and bad arguments that dominate public debate. But I doubt even legitimate expressions of this question will find a very strong articulation across political parties. Again we will manufacture an easy and shallow consensus on a difficult issue but not address real problems.

A consensus politics is a politics of coming up with policies that no one can object to. But policies that no one can object to are often also policies that no one can quite believe in. Hence the paradox that the areas we have most consensus on are the areas where we achieve the least. But consensus also poses more dangers: it dampens genuine innovation. Could any great achievement have ever come about if people argued under the banner of a presumed consensus? Leadership is the art of bridging the gap between the desirable and the possible. But by not sticking our necks out, we are forever confined to present possibility. Hiding behind a consensus also heightens the gap between what politicians believe and what they profess. It gives some credence to Plato’s old charge against democracy, that while democracy has a lot of free speech, it has very few frank speakers.