The Manmohan Singh factor

A good natured, comical aside this election campaign has thrown up is the explanation why Vijay Kumar Malhotra has been pitted against Ma...

A good natured, comical aside this election campaign has thrown up is the explanation why Vijay Kumar Malhotra has been pitted against Manmohan Singh: because he too is a professor! The point here is not that apples are being compared with oranges: they are being compared with pumpkins. Both have their incomparable uses.

A refreshing feature of Manmohan Singh8217;s campaign has been the quality of people who have been impelled to come out and address his meetings. He has not attracted stars in the sense of some electoral manifestation of glamour. He has attracted serious writers, artists, economists, sociologists, and others who place some premium on the life of the mind. And now that Sonia Gandhi has been deftly kept out of his campaign, it is possible for influential but independent actors from diverse fields to work for him.

It is not just in Delhi that Manmohan Singh has his supporters. Similar groups would cluster around him should an opportunity arise in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow,Chandigarh 8212; in fact in every state capital. Does that make him the darling of the metropolitan elite alone? This conclusion would be an insult to the robust common sense of the new intelligentsia.

There are several reasons why Manmohan Singh emerges as an attractive candidate, quite independent of the party label he carries.

The first reason, quite ironically, is the collapse of the Congress party. The party has simply decomposed. What remains is a rusted old election machine, still the most extensive. This huge vacuum in the middle ground of Indian politics unnerves the intelligentsia.

The national movement was led by intellectuals: Sri Aurobindo, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Gokhale, Tilak, Gandhi, Nehru. These leaders and a host of their contemporaries were role models for younger men and women fired by the idealism of independence and nation building.

But during its years in power the Congress degenerated into a party of vested interests. Were the best and the brightest in our schools andcolleges drawn to the Congress as a party retaining some residual idealism? What were the sorts of young men and women who were tempted to join the party in the 8217;70s and 8217;80s.

Story continues below this ad

In my village those who could educate themselves became civil servants and teachers. But those with an eye on the main chance, searching for contracts to build canals, stretches of roads, selling bus permits for premier routes 8212; in brief, the petty racketeer 8212; became the base of Congress pyramid and they gradually moved upwards.

The more idealistic youngsters found their way to the cells of the Communist parties on the one hand and the RSS and the BJP on the other. Thus, the two cadre based formations on the left and the right became the premier recruiting bodies for the youngsters fired by idealism and in search of an ideology. You may disagree with them but you cannot question the idealism of those drawn to the Communist parties or to the RSS and, to a lesser extent, the BJP.

In the middle ground evolved this apolitical mass,swiftly joining the ranks of the middle class living in the vague delusion that it was linked somehow to the Con-gress. When it realised that the Congress shamiana it had habitually felt secure under was in tatters, it looked at the national landscape bereft of options except the two ideological columns.

Manmohan Singh responds to the elite which finds the left too doctrinaire and the Hindu right retrogressive.

Story continues below this ad

From the earliest days of our Parliamentary democracy, there had been a growing hiatus between the peoples representatives and the elite which sat on judgement on their performance. This distance was magnified by leaders like Raj Narain who knew his India but whom the metropolitan elite found laughable. The elite had to lump it.

Yes, egalitarianism was taking its toll in terms of the quality of people being elected to the legislatures but it all reflected on the vibrancy of Indian democracy as well. The peoples were returning to the legislatures their representatives. This phase led to theromanticisation of the rustic leader. The Dravidian movement in the South and the emergence of Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in the north were accepted in this framework.

It was known that the new representatives of the people would not have the skill to run the modern state. But they were accepted as democratic fait accompli. Acquiescence in this form of leadership has over the past decade been replaced by exasperation. Against this background, Manmohan Singh could well inaugurate a trend of inspiring the best and the brightest to consider politics, not just NGOs, as an option.

Romano Prodi counts him among the world8217;s finest economists. Amartya Sen is his personal friend. Manmohan Singh8217;s international stature makes him that much more attractive to the kind of elite which is out campaigning for him. But is the universal attractiveness of a candidate to an informed elite in direct proportion to his ability to win elections in a developing country? The test is on.