The good, bad and ugly

A recent Outlook-AC Nielsen survey reveals that 75 per cent Indians loathe their politicians, 5 per cent say they don’t even bother to vote, a majority feel that individuals join politics for selfish ends and over 60 per cent say politicians today are far worse than they were two decades ago. Yet how fair is this fashionable hatred of politicians and politics?

To be sure, there are some serious villains. There are the shooting, thieving MLAs. There are the alleged nasty goings-on of Amar Mani Tripathi, Sahibuddin of Siwan and Raja Bhaiyya. There are the wealth-amassers, the Pota-deployers, the judiciary-manipulators, the caste-fakers and even, note N.T. Rama Rao, the cross-dressers. But step back from the busy swarm that prances across the newspapers every morning and certain conclusions emerge.

First, politics remains an avenue of stupendous upward mobility in a country still dominated by rigid caste networks. Second, there are many politicians today who are individuals of spectacular personal charisma, who have emerged from the crowd because of their robust appeal. Third, in conditions of searing unemployment, politics provides jobs and dignity to thousands.

Let us gaze at the chief ministers of India today, as well as at some chief ministerial candidates in the assembly polls. Ashok Gehlot, chief minister of Rajasthan, is from the mali caste and comes from a family of village magicians. But today, in Rajput and Jat dominated Rajasthan he can look Maharani Vasundhara Raje in the eye. Maharashtra chief minister Sushil Kumar Shinde was a court constable. His dalit grandfather would not be able to look up at any upper caste individual in his village. Today Shinde sits in the Mumbai mantralay. Uma Bharti was a baal sadhu. Because of her natural gift of oratory, she became the family meal ticket and her parents took her from village to village so she would entertain crowds with her colourful “pravachans”. She lost her childhood early, she wasn’t allowed to marry, but the child-preacher from a dirt poor Lodh family has risen to become union minister (however volatile and unpredictable) and potential chief minister.

Look at the Yadavs of UP and Bihar. They have flouted every democratic norm, they stand accused of massive corruption and venality, yet Laloo’s parents were illiterate farmers and Mulayam was once a wrestler in an akhara. While this in no way mitigates their often highly anti-democratic behaviour, the point is, politics still remains, for better or for worse, an avenue of tremendous upward mobility. In times when unemployment is raging more fiercely than any other disease, politics is a job, an industry, and provides dignity and status. When recruits are given cellphones, badges and a monthly income in place of unemployment and hopelessness middle class scorn about the “end of politics” seems slightly self-indulgent.

J.K. Galbraith had an interesting phrase about middle class disillusionment with politics. He called it the “secession of the successful” and in his book, The Affluent Society, he writes that the successful and the wealthy are always in danger of seceding from the public political realm and retreating into an alienated cocooned private world. The middle class has “private services for their well-being, private education, personal security guards, private recreational facilities, private transportation, combined with a deep moral indignation over the invasion of their liberty by taxes”. Yet, in India, to retreat into a private world may be materially enriching, but it is socially impoverishing as it cuts you off from the fantastic human stories of those who have risen through the hurly burly of mass politics.

The TV-watching class is convinced that every MP drives into parliament, Amar Singh style, in an angry new Merc, immediately afterwards hot foots it to the latest Page Three party. But, for every Amar Singh, there are an equally large number of MPs who use the parliament bus to attend parliament and go quietly back to their constituencies every weekend. For every MP who misuses his discretionary funds, there are others who build hospitals, computer centers, schools. For every MP who lives in a flood-lit Grecian palace, there are others who stay in austere quarters equipped with only the bare amenities, whose homes are like railway platforms for constituents who turn up at all hours of the day and are supplied with tea and food.

Yet the middle class voter is turned off. A Centre for the Study of Developing Society (CSDS) Election Survey in 1996 showed a rise in the participation of lower castes in politics but a fall in the participation of the educated middle class. In an analysis of trends from 1971 to 1996, the survey showed that the probability of voter turnout among Hindu OBCs was 2 per cent higher than earlier, among SCs it was 28 per cent higher, STs was 6 per cent higher. However in 1996, voter turnout among middle class graduates fell by 5 per cent below the national average of 58 per cent.

While it is the duty of every citizen to challenge and interrogate the politician, mindless alienation and hatred of the neta is dangerous. It creates a divided society in which important sections turn their back on the realities of their own country and erodes any belief in what is called the “public realm”. In Pakistan, for example, they don’t even care that over a dozen of their politicians hold dual — American as well as Pakistani — nationality.