Pet
Panacea Of India’s Ruling Classes: Two-Party Political System
By Badri Raina
23 May, 2007
Zmag
India’s
ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for
what they perceive the country’s ills. In arguing for a two-party
political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of
organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing
a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.
The line that is sought to
be pushed here is that the multiplicity of political formations in India
bears no significant relation to felt grievances on the ground, or to
any respectable ideological persuasions that diverge from the “mainlines”
of India’s party-political apparatus as reflected in the careers
of the two “national” parties.
Since such multiplicity is
viewed as merely a capricious nuisance issuing from the limited purposes
of individual sartraps in the “peripheries,” a managerial
answer is sought to be floated to bind these caprices into two oceanic
organizations into which all the haywire streams can be assimilated.
The problem of political waste, as it were, can then be resolved.
Charmingly simple as the
two-party formulation seems, the informing impetus behind the offer
is far either from innocent or benign. Indeed, it is something of a
disappointment that as astute a student of the issue as Paranjoy Guha
Thakurta (author of A Time of Coalitions), and one who is usually alertly
critical of most right-wing emphases in India’s political life,
should have missed the calling to underline forthrightly the class-based
design from which the two-party formulation, recommended most recently
by the President of India himself, issues.
In a recent lead article
in the Hindustan Times (may 18) he expends most of his text on indicating
the unlikelihood of a two-party system consolidating any time soon in
India rather than on critiquing the ideological source of the poser.
Indeed, while stressing that something may be said “in favour
of many parties and coalitions co-existing in a heterogeneous, plural,
deeply divided and highly hierarchical society such as ours,”
he is willing to concede “that a bipolar polity is better than
a fragmented multi-party political system.” It is ofcourse possible
that writing for the HT such a critique may have been inadmissible.
II
To put the matter baldly,
the proponents of the two-party thesis do not have in mind formations
that are ideological polarities. As in all other matters (militarism,
technological ascendance, great consumerist prowess, centralized mega-markets—all
that with a dash of “values”), the idea is to emulate the
political superstructure of the American system wherein the two parties
are infact one and the same—a tweedledom and a tweedledee that
agree permanently on the nature and components of the base that is to
be protected and furthered at all costs.
The substance of that base
may be encapsulated briefly in the following unstated stipulations:
that Capitalism is provenly
the only (and eternally) valid system of
economic organization;
that private ownership of
the means of production and consequent
expropriation by the owning class benefit all citizens;
that all varieties of the
socialist experiment must be understood to have “failed”
once and for all;
that the ills that often
accompany Capitalist democracy (poverty,
unemployment, malnutrition, waste, dearth of equitous health care,
gender discrimination, racism, bigotry, insensate corruption and crime,
and war, to name just a few) do not constitute “failure”;
that these consequences do not flow from the Capitalist system but,
as Malthus, Darwin and others have so astutely pointed out, from “nature”;
that the free-market is
not the expression of man-made preference but reflects the principle
of liberty that is autonomous, ordained, and thus above and beyond “ideology”;
that the state must never
interfere in the operations of the free market, but must at all times
retain sufficient coercive apparatus to intervene whenever disgruntled
sections of the polity seek to thwart those operations;
that the state, however
secular, must retain a regard for “values” since, apart
from their intrinsic worth, these come in handy as the cultural arm
of control, discipline, and social punishment;
and that all challenges
to the authority of the state thus constituted must be unequivocally
dubbed at the least, malafide, and, at their worst, “terroristic”,
deserving of the severest reprisal, even if for the time being the requirement
of reprisal involves the Capitalist democratic state in contravening
the noble principles of liberty from which it derives its legitimacy;
that the informing principles
of equality and fraternity must not be
construed to mean that equality and fraternity can either be obtained
or are even desirable of attainment.
Going down that table of
substance, it should be obvious that the two major, “national”
parties in the Indian political system share most of its meat. It may
be argued that the one area in which the Congress party has consistently
made protestations of divergence from the BJP is the one that concerns
allegiance to secularism. Yet, it is curious that not once in the sixty
years of India’s existence as an independent republic, especially
during the dark moments of intense right-wing Hindu resurgence, has
the Congress given a general call to the people to fill the streets
in defence of secularism—a lack that is starkly underscored, for
example, by recent events in Turkey (commonly perceived as an “Islamic”
nation). Not a day passes when hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens
do not materialize from all corners to make explicit their preference
for separation of state and religion. Despite every vicissitude, the
Congress remains wedded to a notion of secularism that, rather than
disregarding religion in the operations of the state (not to speak of
coming down with any heavy hand on its nefarious attempts to usurp the
state), looks upon all religions with a benign and equitous concern—a
stance that repeatedly leads to a policy of catering. It is hardly a
secret that many distinguished Cabinet ministers reserve a corner, not
just at home (which would be fine) but in their offices for a holy idol
or two.
III
It is understandable, therefore,
why the two-party slogan should receive instant favour from India’s
upwardly-mobile elites. Everyday contemptuous of politicians, their
strongest desire is to evacuate Indian democracy of “politics”
in toto. An ideal democracy is visualized as one wherein managers and
technocrats take over the state, wherein “knowledge commissions”
distribute enlightened and efficient governance to the hinterland, and
wherein people at large are taught to keep their place and peace, if
not through persuasion, then by the might of the regimented state.
Alas, sixty years of democratic
practice, however guided, has brought home to the people of India the
realization that the interests and predilections of the major parties
do not necessarily reflect their felt needs and urges. Be it the issue
of democratic rights and concrete equality in law, be it the matter
of justice in relation to talent and opportunity, or of livelihood and
stake in the environments which they traditionally populate, be it the
matter of full and free cultural and political expression, or be it
the question whether “we the people” truly possess the Constitution
that operates in their name—Capitalist democracy, unbeknown to
itself, teaches them that other and better things are desirable and
possible.
And the agendas of those
aspirations may not, as they patently do not, bear convergence with
the hegemonic designs that inform the two-party slogan. Often they see
in the major national parties a relay team that but carries further
forward the same baton. And writ over that baton is often one and the
same message as well.
It is just as well, then,
to acknowledge (sooner the better) that India’s democratic career
and agenda has not arrived at the finishing line. By no stretch of the
imagination has history ended. And also to acknowledge, crucially, that
the plethora of political expressions that obtain are not simply the
evidence of some naughty, pointless mischief, directed crudely at the
best interests of the state, but projections of dissent and divergence
that issue from concrete historical need.
In the years to come, it
would be worthwhile to explore the possibility of gathering the chief
contending features of that divergence into a broad coalition of right-wing,
centrist, and left-wing forces. Perhaps such a process is already underway.
But to hope or propagate that two parties, clones at best, may be trusted
to answer the call of India’s incomparably diverse and complex
polity is to live in a cloistered complacence of potentially dangerous
consequence.
Let it be understood that
consensus about the political superstructure can happen only when a
consensus exists in regard to the base. In a situation where some seventy
percent of the population remain unfulfilled by the character of the
base, it is folly to wish that what “knowledge commissions”
at the top believe to be knowledge is truly so.
Managers and technocrats
but run the given; politics seeks to make the new. And in India there
is a lot of making waiting to be done that would seem to lie beyond
the will or ideological preference of the two major parties.
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