Politics In India

Contemporary Review, March, 2000 by AS Raman

Parliamentary democracy cannot take root in a country where parties take only its form without getting the feel of it -- where these are caste-based and not issue-based, and the driving force is muscle power and not open debate. That is why there are so many parliamentarians and State legislators with criminal backgrounds. The challenge that Indians face is the bankruptcy of political leadership -- mature, responsible and informed statesmen, concerned more with basics that unite people and less with trivialities that divide them. Leaders who are dedicated to national priorities above party interests, party interests above political ambitions and personal perceptions above casteist pressures. Such men of vision are not in sight.

Indian political parties basically are medieval hierarchies, demanding abject servility not only from the cadres but from the second line of leadership, if there is any -- all in the name of discipline. Indeed, it is difficult not to react negatively to the present politics of India, despite her magnificent achievements in other areas. It is a distressing fact that a foreigner with no qualification other than the accident of her marriage into a privileged family has emerged as the new political face of India.

Why this freakish twist to India's destiny? The answer lies in the incongruity of democracy, a sophisticated system of government and, more importantly, way of life, imposed on a poor, illiterate credulous electorate vulnerable to the undemocratic and unethical pressures from feudal culture. The concept of democracy is clearly out of context in the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru whose unworthy political heirs have debased it by institutionalising sordid, self-serving vote bank politics. Feudal oligarchy has taken over from parliamentary democracy, expediency from ideology, personality cult from party discipline, mafia culture from the rule of law, private privilege from public accountability and power-brokering from statesmanship. In a nutshell, democracy in India is romanticised publicly and vandalised privately, publicly consecrated and privately desecrated by a generation of political leaders who have given the go-by to universally respected and practised constraints of public life. The silver li ning to the cloud is the consensus politics and personal ethics of Prime Minister Vajpayee who has proved that he is more than a match to Sonia Gandhi even in charisma, her only claim to public attention.

One alarming feature of the post-poll scenario is the negative politics of non-BJP parties who have ganged up together only to throw out the Vajpayee Government at the earliest opportunity available. This is their only agenda. They have nothing else in common. Secularism is the fig-leaf that covers the nakedness of their obstructive politics. The Congress is emphatically not secular. Nor is the BJP under the Vajpayee leadership communal. In fact it was Indira Gandhi and her son and successor, Rajiv who fanned communalism dangerously resulting in the storming of the most sacred Sikh shrine, the Golden Temple of Amritsar -- Operation Blue Star --, followed a few years later by the genocide of the Sikh community in Delhi, triggered by her retributive assassination at the hands of her own Sikh bodyguard. As for her son, he amended the Constitution to uphold the Muslim Personal Law against the Supreme Court judgement ordering the payment of alimony to an indigent Muslim divorcee in the famous Shah Bano case. Anot her Congress Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao (1991-96), a confirmed Nehru retainer, virtually abetted the demolition of the disputed 16th-century Muslim monument, Babri Masjid, on December 6, 1992, by the Hindu activists who believed that the mosque was built on the ruins of the temple of their God, Rama. Rao looked the other way, as the mosque was being pulled down. Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi pretended to be secular, but in practice they did whatever was possible to strengthen the divisive forces in India. In fact the BIP baiters' idea of secularism is, not to strengthen the Muslims and other minorities, but to emasculate the Hindus who constitute a massive, more than 80 per cent of the total population and they are an open society which is by tradition and culture pluralist.