-Krishan Kishore
Today everything is just ordinary. Even in exceptional situations, we expect to see just the ordinary. Our eyes don’t open wider or narrower in reflexes. Our brows stay flat and smooth, not furrowed in anger or amazement. This flattened state of mind has generated a weird indifference towards happenings around. This insensitivity is both suicidal and brutal. Until the recent past our society abounded with heroes in all walks of life, families, schools, streets, politics, art, literature, films and in general making a difference that mattered. These not so distant memories remind us that our contemporary reality is very fragmented and fractured. What we imagine is not only what is to come, but more of what has been and might be again, our traditions and our national experiences. Our memories and our past constantly collide with our contemporary iciness and creates this state of frozen disillusion. Our political culture is a collective testimony to this disjoint. In the absence of a live and vibrant concern in people, the media only reports the street without generating a causative rationale to events as if there is no background to whatever happens. So, the space is wide open for all kinds of buffoonery and demagogy.
Whenever people had a chance to rule themselves and take charge of their own affairs, influential sections of society have produced these hypocritical, self serving, high sounding, glamour seeking, do nothing demagogues. In democracies, ancient and modern, demagoguery has always blocked the process of slow but steady pooling of people’s opinion. It created environment endemic to decay of political institutions. Glory came to the demagogues but the state perished. They portray political institution of democracy as a conspiratorial arrangement that works against people. Demagogues collect and use sporadic facts to manufacture arguments bearing semblance to a well founded ideology. For them reality is splintered in pieces of time and locale. People’s woes never go unutilized to their own profit or popularity. Working hard on the soil, creating a live environment that generates a vigilant culture for public good is hardly their intent, let alone mission.
Past seventy plus years after independence have gone without witnessing one single stretched out, mass debate on any issue of national or regional importance. Platforms are usurped by demagogues who thrive on fallacies. They create rhetoric about issues in isolation. They territorialize problems and refuse to see interconnections between national issues. This divisive rhetoric forgets that we choose to be one nation and not a combination of fractured regions with separate proprietary rights of lands or natural wealth. Be it the cause of our minorities, marginalized tribes, our displaced people by the cursed instruments of progress, poor farm workers herding to starvation and suicides, our trampled working classes in cities and towns by unethical triumph of Capitalism, it is a settled reality that anarchic blood shedding will never find a fertile soil here or anywhere to plant stable and culturally acceptable solutions. To say that Himalayas do not belong to the people living in the South is a fallacy. But to keep them destitute is a felony fit for trial in a court of law. Our eco and bio system cannot metabolize that grotesque inequality. In vast democracies, people share resources, tools of progress, knowledge and wealth. The concept of territorial ownership of all kinds ended the day we emerged from several of our past medieval or ancient practices.
On recent international scene, the declaration of end of multiculturalism in Germany by Chancellor Merkel, eviction of thousands of Roma tribe members in France or Tea party movement in USA are all intended steps to perpetuate aggressive nationalism on one hand and to please electorate on the other. Tea party candidates who contested recent powerful congress and senate seats in USA are anti liberal, modern conservatives and moralists. One candidate for Governor Seat in Minnesota proposed that pedophiles should be castrated chemically. How different does that sound from Iran’s recent court judgment which sanctioned amputation of hand of a thief who stole sweets from a shop. All these remind us of medieval or premedieval times when witches were real. Those were real beliefs of people then. None of these political and social leaders are medieval in practice. They are merely catering to all kinds of prejudices and sectarian beliefs just to win powers-social or political. Precisely that is demagoguery.
People’s governments are here to stay. They can only be worked better. Working hard with people and changing their political behavior, creating an alert democratic culture, electing a government of whatever hue or shade that stands in fear of people and respects their wisdom is the only goal that we need to strive for right now and for a long time to come. Can the democratic systems be abolished? Can the process of mass participation in solving problems be exchanged or changed for something better? Can violence and counter violence to curb it go on without involving people? Can the idea of harnessing folk wisdom and putting it to work be replaced by violent shortcuts? The obvious answer is NO.
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Self-rule is a way of life. This is not discernible when partitioned in periods of time. The continuum is fabricated when periodical occurrences, events and small pieces of history become the arbiters. To recollect the missing linkage we need to recline into the reverie, that this is the same dream which we dreamt in form of Sarvoday and Swarajya. Gramodya ( the rise of rural side) is also the same jingling dreamlet.
We don’t want to determine the merits and strengths of our body politic by import-export indices. Our confident and self sustaining rural side and its rootedness in democratic process is far more important. If our industries and our market economy only raises numbers of our middle class and doesn’t decrease the number of the poor, we reject that model. Education system that perpetuates casteism and class division is not acceptable. Lethally barbaric structure which allows caste fanatics to kill civil liberty of choosing partners, cannot be a model of secular co-existence. We reject the systems that strangulate our native cultures and alter the ecology of our linguistic and philosophic richness by which we so familiarly recognize ourselves. The desultory imitation of foreign languages and cultural mannerisms can never glow our faces even as a cosmetic. Assimilation is elemental, imitation is not. We need our own shine, our own glow. We need a powerful confident rural side, culturally secure towns and cities, fearless civil behavior, untainted resources and unbiased distribution. We don’t want to be anything other than ourselves. A kaleidoscopic version of America, Russia, Europe or China does not form India. The diversity and mutuality of our states, cultures and languages make us what we are or what we need to be.
Our leopard leap into the world market is only to enhance the fund of knowledge in a universal exchange. We want to progress, but in our own direction. We want to evolve a civility which is synonymous with our deep and well grounded aspirations. And not antonymous to all that we have been. We are not just a newly seeded sapling. We are a huge tree that needs its own soil and its own sky.
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In more than half a century, our political process and practice has failed to create a trust in our primary institutions. We have no faith in our law enforcement agencies, our legislative bodies, our administrative services, our health services, educational goals and other basic civic systems. Our masses still live in fear of cloaks of authority and power and lack essential confidence in day to day struggles of their existence.
This vast public power is least probable to be misused when it is widely delegated and when election results don’t end people’s role. This effective political situation does not obtain anywhere in the world so far. Most democracies around the world are confined to one or more of these kinds of systems: Capitalist, Dominant party system, market democracy or at best, hybrid democracy. All these systems minimize individuals and contain people’s power. People have already revolted against ideological suffocation , but truly people oriented systems haven’t evolved anywhere.
Recently, an agency of United Nations analyzed 167 countries for the functioning of political systems. The analysis was based on five basic principles of democracy : Electoral process, civil liberties, functioning of governments, political participation and political culture of a society. Based on these criteria, they divided the world democracies into four categories, Full democracy, Flawed democracy, Hybrid democracy, Authoritarian democracy. Most countries including India and USA were found to have Flawed democracies. Only two Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Denmark were labeled as Full democracies.
India is a wrong model with countless political parties without much different economic or political thoughts. This process of political maturity is taking too long in India. Other countries may have multiple political parties, sometimes ridiculously too many. But people have, by choice and mature behavior, limited their mandate in favor of just a few. At most places, people stick around two or three political parties. In USA, there are two major parties, Democratic and Republican, England has two Labor and Conservative. Russia has 17 parties, but three main ones, United Russia, Fair Russia and Communist Party. France has three dominant parties, Japan has two. Almost similar situation obtains in mature democracies. Most African nations have numerous parties just like us. Exception is South Africa where people have restricted their choice to one national party, i.e. African National party. That is perhaps because of towering presence of Nelson Mandela, even though he is not politically active now. In our society, individuals and not people form a party. Without choking our regional interests, we can also restrict the number of parties in a constitutional manner. The initiation of a political party should be made a protracted process by making it obligatory to seek some kind of people’s mandate.
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The patch work and hotchpotch of democracies that we see around is not very old. Only after the Second World War, a semblance of democratic systems began to emerge. Before that, it existed without any insistence or adherence to human rights. Most of Europe was hijacked by dictators or dictatorial rules. America was torn in strife of civil rights. Blacks and natives were not only segregated, they were treated less than human. Women were second rate citizens. China had not yet seen her revolution. Russia was harboring imperialistic designs. Asia and Africa were mostly colonies. South America was engaged in wide spread civil wars. In Europe, which was not colonized, a fierce nationalism was taking over, either in form of Nazism or Fascism or as its reaction. These were times of cavernous upheavals, but simultaneously transformational forces were asserting themselves. End of colonial rules, rise of nationalism, political application of ideologies and the beginning of cold war- all this took a resolutely clear form within fifty years. But all of that seems to have elapsed fast. After ideologies, after end of colonies, end of civil and cold wars, a new kind of self awareness based on cultures, religions and regions is emerging contradictingly along international interdependence. So, how the war of identities versus globalization impacts our will to exist is yet to be seen.
The truism so far is that globalization widely means only westernization. The sporadic commercial success of some countries doesn’t go beyond exporting some goods to the West. Emerging economies around the world are helplessly unable to check mate the cultural invasion and infiltration of the west, especially America. Culturalization is a subcutaneous arrangement of globalization. No western country is being easternized. All are being only westernized.
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This globalised economic urban upsurge came with some devastating features for our overwhelmingly rural society. It was a myopic vision for a rural dominant country to imitate the economic policies of majorly urban nations. Examples abound. USA is 81% urban, Japan 95%, Russia 73%, European nations are more than 70% urban. Industries are the mainstay and back bone of their economies. Contrarily, India’s 73 % people still live in our rural side. Dismaying is the fact that only 17.4% of total nation’s GDP comes from this 73% population.
It is startling to note that only 6 %of our entire labor force works in the organized industrial section. A vast spread out 94 % labor force toils in the unorganized labor sector in our metropolises . Most of this labor mass left rural homes for lack of work. We all know their plight in the cities. Subhuman conditions subvert the will to participate in democratic process. Rural is a total way of life with its own culture, music, folk lore, joys and sorrows that come with genuine human relationships. Its sweat, toil and hardiness makes them a little more than human. Keeping them poor resulted in keeping them undemocratized, unsecular.
This chasm of rural and urban divide will never let us have a true national democratic experience. We don’t want a rural transformation in form of mini urbanized chunks of population away from the cities. We want a rural rejuvenation with cultural and economic prosperity. This partitioning of rural and urban chambers of economic power is at the core of our failings.
We must confess that threat to our civic and political values lies deep in our ancient brutal system of caste and class division. It wouldn’t vanish like a bad dream and herald a glorious dawn without some bloodletting. But disappointingly, during post Independence era, no prolonged, persistent resistance movement against this division was ever launched by any section of our society or heroic individuals. Only convenient and easy politico-legal ways were sought without a stubborn, prolonged and multipronged crusade. Resistance groups emerged for the opposite goal, not for a positive change. And who could work to bring the change? Our political and business class in its ascendency was steeped in their greed. Religious forces were always on the offensive, knowing that a truly democratic society would eliminate their authority or at least blunt their ruthlessness. We helplessly watched in expectancy for our intellectuals to bear the torch against these mighty vices. But this class, frustratingly clung fast to their creed of opportunism and ivory isolation from the masses and their cause. A black and white medium of paper and ink was never enough for a fight of this enormity. To hit the ground and wage a war was the only way which they never chose. Their easy perches were provided more cushion by the lords of the land. In the absence of a genuine cultural revolution, the caste and class division is still the most lethal impediment on our way to a civil society.
The other liability that has impaired our original thoughtfulness is the undying colonial mindset. Our global aspirations don’t contradict this mind set; on the contrary they set it in firmer stone. We have virtually kept intact all colonial structures of administration and dispensation of law and order. Imitation can never produce a fertile soil for deep roots of creative genius. We could take a cue from Europe and South America. Europe is a home of different languages and cultures. Their own languages and cultures are their best strength. They are not strangers unto themselves. They use English only for sharing knowledge as a global need, nothing more than that. Our infatuation with English language and clumsy imitation of western behavior has stifled a giant’s growth to the size of a pigmy in originality and intellect.
We don’t understand the culture we are so sheepishly huddling to. The images we are trying to emulate don’t give us a peak into the real sturdiness of daily lives in most western societies which gives that robust and unabashed intent to their culture. We don’t see that young girl working night shift at a patrol pump all alone. We also don’t see a senator’s son bagging groceries at a store without a glimmer. We don’t even see an ordinary truck driver engaged in a fearless conversation with the tallest leader of the nation as if they are neighbors or adversaries in equal business. We don’t see a top administrator walking out of his high office to greet a common man or woman who stepped in his office for a casual business. For us, all that is not even a distant feel of the toughness that constitutes their culture. It is not just a murky night life or a freedom that starts and ends with physical behavior.
Political culture develops like other cultural values. A free, uninhibited powerful communication of ideas and beliefs among groups of all levels of people is a core essential for a mature debate on local and national issues. The ground level is the only level at which issues need to be debated. That is possible only in a language people speak in their daily lives. Those opinions find their way upwards through small forums. But in our system, masses don’t seem to contribute to the pool of thinking because the elitists in their superficial imitated manners of expression have usurped all political and social platforms. . Ironically, the strength of expression that comes from native languages is confined only to negative forces which have divided our nation on religious and parochial issues. Therefore, the will of common people always remains uncharted and undocumented.
Cultures can never be translated and lived vicariously. Saying with Shakespeare, we are the stuff that dreams are made of and our dreams have a lot to do with our languages and cultures and finally a society that we aspire to be. If not, let us then choose to be content with what German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, a committed Marxist said ironically, “Would it not be easier in that case for our government to dissolve the people and elect another?”