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Politics, Morality, Identity: An Intimate Quest

by Vijay Pratap

Editor: Rajesh K. Jha   Cover Design: Dev Prakash

 

 

 

 

 

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Combating the Twin Phenomena: Curruption and Communalism

For an activist with average intellectual and moral capabilities, writing is a painful task. This time I had to write an editorial on fighting corruption. My editorial colleague suggested that since Lokayan has been part of the ‘Campaign on Right to Information’ I must write on this issue. Her case was that this is the issue on which there was a successful struggle in Rajasthan lead by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan of Ms. Aruna, Mr. Shankar, Mr. Nikhil and others. It forced the state government to concede that people had the right to information. The Rajasthan government has set-up a committee to go into the modalities of providing information to those who demand it. Responsive sections in the bureaucracy have gone a bit further, as you may see from the circular letters sent by Mr. N.C. Saxena to civil service probationers and to the Joint Secretary Personnel Department. In both these letters the intention is to create an ethos and institutional arrangements so that citizens will have the power of information to ensure that the state does not behave arbitrarily. That the director and many of the faculty members of LBS Academy, Mussoorie have taken the issue of fighting corruption seriously is illustrative of the concern of a section of the bureaucracy on the issue.

However, many of the writers analyse corruption as a potent and pervasive phenomenon. Ratnakar Tripathy writes, "we constantly debate over the acceptable degrees of corruption – how much is acceptable in a given situation, and how much is not. This by itself shows that we have come to regard it as the dominant norm". He further says, "our psyche is very much that of an accomplice who is constantly disowing his own involvement." While agreeing with the later statement, it is debatable whether ‘people have accepted corruption as the dominant norm’.

For the last 22 years, since the time of the J.P. movement in 1974, people have time and again expressed their opposition to this dominant ‘fact’ of life, i.e. corruption. People are as yet not willing to accept this as a norm. This is not an ideological statement by an activist trained in the Gandhian democratic socialist tradition. There is repeated and ample evidence to show that people are looking for instruments to fight corruption, so that they can lead a life of ‘Maryada’ and ‘Swadharma’ (leading life with a notion of moderation/limits and following the living ethical traditions as understood and practiced in a customary fashion). People appear to be disowning their involvement because corruption and corrupt structures have not been adopted by them out of choice, but have been grafted on to them. The elite is increasingly indulging in corruption because of its cultural-psychological ‘compulsion’ to ape the mad consumerism of Western industrialism. The poor majority are then forced to do so for sheer survival. The multiple failure and fracturing of the politics of the oppressed contribute to the perception of corruption as a pervading fact.

When the national elections were held in 1996, leaders from most of the large political parties were under the cloud of the Hawala Scam. Those of the Left Parties, the Samajvadi Party of Mulayam Singh and the Bahujan Samaj Party of Kanshi Ram were, however, not involved. The Janata Dal had only two of its leaders with small amounts against their names in the Hawala diary. Congress, a party with marked downward slide of its moral fibre, naturally had many of its leaders involved in this scam. This party has ruled the country at the centre since independence, except for brief interruptions in 1977 and 1989. As a respons, the opposition parties had to almost suspend their respective agendas and come together under the plank of ‘non-Congressism’. Their strategy of non-Congressism had succeeded only in an impure form in the major state of U.P., Bihar and Madhya Pradesh where they had to seek support from ‘defectors’ from Congress in order to form the provincial governments. This experiment was short lived.

In 1977 the opposition got an opportunity to form the government because the voters reacted against the authoritariam rule of Mrs. Indira Gandhi and her son. But this experiment did not last long because the Hindu rightist segment of the Janata Party was indulging in Machiavallian tactics of using one faction/individual against the other and the socialists, the other ideologically motivated group, failed miserably in resisting the temptation of becoming pawns in the power struggle. The ’77 electoral verdict and the courageous/vanguardist role during the J.P. Movement in 1974 and during emergency rule in ‘75-77 had offered the socialists an opportunity to shape India’s destiny. But they failed. Here it is important to note that the ’77 election saw people’s participation in an unprecedented manner. All sections of people, especially in north India where the experience of authoritarian rule was more direct, adopted Janata party candidates as their own candidates; they mobilised money on their own and every conscious citizen became a Janata Party volunteer.

Congress becoming prisoner of a corrupt system is comprehensible to many objective observers. The BJP’s corruption is however less widely recognised. The right-wing, casteist, hatred speading party had one of its chief ministers in Delhi, an ex-chief minister in Madhya Pradesh and its national president, Mr. L.K. Advani in the Hawala scam. Even a casual observer knows that now BJP is able to mobilise ‘unclean’ money for elections, generally leaving even the Congress far behind, despite not controlling the seat of political power in Delhi. People might not have forgotten that after the national executive meeting of BJP in Pune on the eve of ’96 elections Mr. Pramod Mahajan had ‘admitted’ or perhaps ‘boasted’of his inability to collect ‘clean funds’. Even before the elections, the BJP had made public that they will use seven air-craft during the election campaign. The rationale given for mobilising money from wherever it was mobilised was that the high cost of elections had compelled them to raise funds from the "moneyed people". We know from the experience of 1977 that if people genuinely own you as their candidate, want to give you a mandate to rule the country, then you don’t need money to win the elections.

Here we need to bring into the discussion another important point put forward by Ratnakar Tripathy. According to him, "over the decades as our political processes and social life got increasingly democratised, corruption as a phenomenon has grown in scale… But the fact is that corruption is essentially a retaliatory strategy against the process of democratisation. Corruption carries on with increasing democratisation, lives off it, and mars its liveliness." There is an absolute agreement with him on this. It becomes imperative to examine how the democratic assertions and urges are tamed by the ruling establishment of the society. There is a remarkable degree of similarity in the strategy of both the dominant parties of ruling sections i.e. Congress and BJP. First of all both the parties, understanding the psyche of Indian people who have not yet reconciled to corruption as norm, take a posture against corruption. In their 1996 election manifestoes both the parties took a position against corruption. Mr. Advani, President of BJP, had the temerity of taking out a chariot campaigning for ‘shuchita’ (purity). Would the BJP chief ministers dare to appoint supreme court judges of their choice in telling the countrymen (I) the sources of personal assets acquired by BJP ministers and ex. ministers in various states of the country (ii) sources of money acquired for ’91 and ’96 Lok Sabha elections (iii) rough estimates of amounts of money spent by BJP on these elections and on routine expenditure of the party leadership? Only after such acts would they have a moral right to talk about ‘shuchita’. In fact after the elections, when they assumed power for a brief period they did not do anything to weed out corruption. If they could clear the multinational Enron power project with great hurry and secretiveness, they could have come out with a consensus formula for institutional arrangements to weed out corruption from our body-politic. But how can BJP do it! The entrenched social classes which form the support base of BJP can not retain their exploitative position if corruption is not a dominant fact of life. Corruption is one of the most potent weapons of the ruling sections against processes of democratisation.

Combined with financial corruption, both the parties of the ruling classes have used other tactics. Let us examine how the other dominant party of the ruling classes i.e. Congress responded to the democratic assertion of 1977. When people defeated Mrs. Indira Gandhi who had promulgated a constitutional dictatorship using some of the loop-holes of our constitution, she whipped up three kinds of ‘identity – anxieties’ of Indian people. First and the most important was the identity of a citizen of a new state called ‘India’. She successfully led a disinformation campaign that the Janata Party can not govern. The pluralistic and open – ended democraatic character of Janata Party was portrayed as a sign of weakness. Her main slogan in 1980 parliamentary elections was ‘Vote for those who can govern’. A large number of Indian masses were duped by this slogan, because they rightly thought that they had a stake in the survival of the Indian state. They were made to believe that a pluralistic party like Janta Party could not ensure its survival. Janata Party could not counter this propaganda effectively for a whole lot of complex reasons, including the fact that its then information and Broadcasting Minister himself came from a political organisation where an elaborate structure and ideology of authoritarianism had been worked out and practiced. Indian readers know that I am referring to the RSS which is the parent or controlling organisation of the BJP (which was known as Bhartiya Jan Sangh before it merged in Janata Party in 1977). In my discussions during emergency jail detention (from 4th July 75 – 22nd February 77) I found many RSS workers almost defending the promulgation of emergency rule on the ground that JP had given a ‘call’ to the armed forces not to obey unconstitutional anti-people orders of the regime at that time. The Congress and BJP both believe in different forms of non-democratic functioning. Any example of pluralistic, open-ended work culture is used by them to contribute to the anxieties of ordinary Indian citizens regarding the survival and security issues of the Indian State. For the BJP, whipping up this anxiety and creation of a ‘seize mentality’ are the key instruments to stop the march of democratic assertions.

Mrs. Indira Gandhi, after she regained power in 1980 propped up Bhindarawala, an extremist demagogue, against the patriotic and democratic Sikhs of Punjab. Congress and BJP worked in unison in painting Akalis (an important political party representing Sikhs of Punjab, which had offered a heroic resistance against the emergency rule of Mrs. Indira Gandhi) as anti-national. Their democratic demand for more power to the states was dubbed as anti-national. During 1977-80 also Mrs. Gandhi had quitely whipped up the caste anxieties of various communities. With ’77, peasant castes for the first time had a say in the power echelons of Delhi on their own. Indira Gandhi, to a large extent successfully, painted this regime as anti-dalit. She did not restrict herself to the populist tactics of riding an elephant in Bihar to protest against an incident of atrocity against dalits. Her party-men instigated Jats and Dalits to fight each other on the issue of allotment of small plots of land to dalits from the village commons. There was prolonged agitation on this issue with Kanjhawala, a village in the Union territory of Delhi, as the head quarter of this agitation. The long and short of this story is that institutionalising corruption is not the only retaliatory strategy of the ruling sections to blunt the democratic assertions of the people. Congress and BJP had both whipped up identity anxieties, the identity as an Indian as well as various caste and community identitites. This had to be resorted to because Mrs. Gandhi had realised that redefining corruption as she had done, by amending the laws retrospectively when judgements were delivered against Congressmen, was not enough to ensure continuance of her corrupt rule. Incidentally, one of the cases was her own in which Justice Sinha of Allahabad High Court on 12th June, 1975 declared her election as null and void. She clamped emergency rule late on the night of June 25th, 1975 to meet the dissent within and outside. But people taught her lesson in ’77.

Indira Gandhi was wiser after 1977 and she did not restrict herself only to corruption as her strategy. She also used blind identity politics as a retaliatory strategy. Even before BJP, Indira Gandhi whipped up Hindu anxieties openly in an election campaign in Jammu and Kashmir. BJP used to do this clandestinely through an organised whisper campaign against minorities using the gigantic RSS machinery.

Her son Rajiv Gandhi, who came to power in December 1984 continued with the same policy of using corruption and whipping up of blind identity anxieties as strategy against democratisation. During his tenure as Prime Minister the disputed portion of the mosque in Ayodhya was opened for the public. This was projected as a concession to Hindus by the internal security minister at that time, Mr. Arun Nehru who later came close to the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. VHP/RSS and muslim communalists obliged Rajiv Gandhi in contributing to the identity anxieties of both the communities. But even with all this Rajiv Gandhi and the ruling establishment did not feel secure.

Rajiv Gandhi then sold the dream of consumerism of the 21st century. This accentuated the consumerist aspirations of all sections of our society. Middle classes became part of the consumerist mad-race syndrome. Success as a consumer of modern/western/MNC products became the supreme societal goal. India started borrowing from global financial institutions unthinkingly. This led to erosion in our economic sovereignty and the eventual ‘crunch’ in 1991 when Mr. Narasimha Rao removed all barriers for national and international capital. This resulted in a two-fold gain for the ruling sections. The first was, identity and secondly it opened up the space for more corruption by attempting to legitimise the making of the easy buck. This is how the era of Narasimha Rao is described by Prof. Kamal Nayan Kabra-as an ‘Era of Scams’.

The accentuated identity anxiety was sought to be transformed into an anxiety of Hindu identity by the BJP. The success of BJP, though limited, is precisely because it has been able to manipulate these identity anxieties for its electoral gains, indulge in high corruption but still take a posture against corruption. For an anxious Hindu corruption has become a secondary issue. Thus whipping up communal feeling is the most important tool of BJP to keep its corrupt ranks together. The corollary of this phenomenon is that those of us committed to the issues of secularism, equity and social justice avoid criticising secular and democratic forces in the face of the onslaught of communal forces, because we are also anxious about preserving our identity of an Indian democrat or a pluralistic Hindu or a patriotic Muslim.

In the Indian case the ruling classes and their two most important political parties have intertwined the two issues of corruption and communalism so much that if we do not target both the issues simultaneously there will be no opening up of the political space.

Fighting communal forces and creating structures of accountability are two faces of the same coin. Writers like P.S. Appu have talked about reforming political parties including practice of inner party democracy. This is a very important issue if we want to create enduring structures of accountability. But to be able to execute reform of our political parties we have to take into account the anti-political attitude of our middle classes and lack of a strong tradition of philanthropy for routine political tasks of organisation building. This problem has to be tackled ideologically by launching campaigns for mobilisation of funds for political activity. We also have to arrange for core state grants to political parties based on some formula evolved by taking into account the percentage of votes polled by a political party and membership of the party.

It is evident that the people in various sectors of life want to get rid of corruption as a dominant fact of life. We must take up the challenge recognising the merging of identity anxieties (communalism) and corruption as a potent phenomenon countering democratic processes. There is an urgency to win the battle lest corruption should convert itself from ‘dominant fact’ to ‘dominant norm’ in our lives.

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