The prognosis of India's democracy based on its electoral and social politics-II

What I intended to write yesterday had become too long and therefore I broke the piece into two.  This post is a continuation of the arguments that I had begun yesterday, the substance of which is that Indian democracy is definitely in a crisis thanks to the nature of politics which are prevalent in society and also due to the nature of leadership of political parties.  Indian society which has always been stratified is now witnessing a kind of politics that is very much akin to marketing where there are clearly defined target-market strategies and any agenda of development is now just for lip service while the real agenda is the perpetuation of personal gain by politicians who have primarily started using caste as the variable for targetting electorates.  With the absence of any viable party or politician who can see beyond immediate gains, Indian politics and along with Indian democracy have reached a precipice which in my opinion is already a point from which there is no turning back.  Since politics are more or less the exclusive prerogative of those who have the two Ms, meaning money and muscle it is absolutely impossible that anybody sensible can enter Indian politics and make a difference to the country. Therefore there are large scale systemic changes, Indian democracy could become the greatest enemy of its people.

It is for this reason that I have been advocating the idea of supplementing electoral democracy with discursive or deliberative democracy.  I would like to bring to your attention that it was not just writing that I was doing but also trying to create discussion groups in colonies where citizens from all walks of life would meet without their paying heed to their economic status and their professions.  I must confess that the upper caste and upper classes are completely against this idea saying indirectly that it would be an affront to their social position and perceived self image to give the same weightage to the arguments of someone who was a sweeper, janitor or a maid servant.  Most, actually all uniformly believed that the problem with Indian democracy or democracy for that matter is that it involves the illiterate, uneducated and senseless hoi polloi and that they are responsible for the kind of leaders that we have in India today.  It is therefore not very surprising that they believe that there can be no such thing as a deliberative democracy that aims for the common good of all through the use of what Immanuel Kant had called the Good Will.  Some of the upper caste groupings which have actually become upper castes (they like to refer to themselves as forward castes) through a process of Sanskritisation that the sociologist MN Srinivas talked about, like to believe that for Indian democracy to be meaningful there should be the presence of upper caste leaders who take token support from the backward and lower caste leaders (by co-opting the latter into the money making process) and rule the country.  Again to believe that all upper castes are unified is absolutely nonsensical so each upper caste wants to have its own members in the charmed ruling circles so that their caste groupings benefit the most.

It is pertinent to point out here that I was once at a seminar where two scholars from two different castes in the Scheduled Castes list fought over the necessity for categorizing scheduled castes differently and providing them reservations in accordance with the numbers.  While one professor argued that this kind of categorization would lead to the dispensation of social justice the other believed that this would lead to the scheduled castes being divided and dominated by OBCs and upper castes.  The argument went on for sometime when I intervened and said that it perhaps time for the SCs and OBCs to ask for reservations even for the upper castes depending upon their population percentage in the entire country and people should apply for seats in schools, colleges and also for jobs competing with members of their own castes, be they upper or lower.  This was anyway the agenda of Periyar and the Justice Party who argued that two percent of the population of the Madras Presidency comprised of Brahmins but they were taking 98% of the jobs.  Nearly a century later the country seems to be still stuck in the same morass that it was once stuck in.  And things will continue to the same if the agenda of creating vote banks on the basis of castes and religious communities is not somehow countered.  It is indeed very disheartening to see that castes have crept into Islam and Christianity.  I was shocked to see a classification among Muslims which says Ansari surname holders are weavers, Qureishis are butchers etc.  The real meaning of those terms is very different but now it is being argued that people who converted from Hinduism to Islam started using certain surnames that now identify them as a certain caste.  The same is true of Christianity with an increasing crescendo among Christians claiming to be dalit Christians.  It is therefore wrong to assume that caste stratification is only among the Hindus.

But to return to the point I am making, the politicians create vote banks along caste lines irrespective or religion and in some cases use religion itself and these vote banks will remain alive only if they are kept backward.  The nature of this realpolitik has seen cracks in Indian society widening into crevasses into which the people of this country will fall.  The exceedingly disheartening and sad aspect of Indian society today is that people irrespective of their social and economic status are uniformly unenlightened.  I have many times said that the rich and the middle classes in India which coincide with upper castes sometimes have been irresponsible towards their own society and therefore schisms are becoming chasms.  However, the upwardly mobile from the backward sections of society (I refuse to use the term caste here because in this context it is meaningless and if you read on you will understand why I say it is meaningless) do precious little for people of their own once their upward mobility starts.  It is like the Indians who go to the USA believing that they have left behind their useless brethren in filth and squalor so will try to identify with the white Anglo-Saxon protestant population of that country.  Those people who have taken benefits meant for the backward sections for two generations should voluntarily give up their using of those privileges so that the benefits that come with them should percolate to people who after 65 years of independence are living in conditions which are for them not at all different from the pre-independence days.  That is why I was aghast when I learnt the Indian government is also collecting caste data along with census data.  Needless to say this data will be used by politicians and political parties for further dividing the people of the country for their own purposes.

Education should be provided only by the State in schools that it runs.  Any kind of private players should be forbidden from entering the education sector at any level.  Every child in India should go to a school which makes uniform mandatory and does not recognize the social and economic status of parents.  Only such a beginning can change things in this country.  The honourable Supreme Court of India has upheld the Right to Education and has said that even private schools should reserve 25% of seats for the underprivileged sections of society.  Immediately private school managements have said that the government will not reimburse fees and therefore they will look at legal options to challenge the judgement.  As long as there are private players in the field they will work only for profit even though their schools are registered as non-profit making educational societies.  Private schools mirror the divisions in society and promote elitism and therefore education should be provided by the State alone without asking questions of caste, creed and religion.  The State must provide free education till the doctoral level because that is the only way in which the privileged will learn to live with the underprivileged and treat them as their equals. 

But this is something that can only happen in the long term.  In the short term electoral reforms must be enacted to ensure that the executive is free from the legislature.  One need not go the American way, there is also the French way where the President is directly elected by the people.  Coalition politics can make scoundrels out of gentlemen since the expediences of realpolitik make it mandatory to make moral compromises in order to continue in power.  From where I stand, and from what I wrote it will appear that I am despondent, which I am.  It may also appear that I have a sense of hopelessness, which I don't.  What is the reason for my optimism?  I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and in that truth has a way of triumphing.  Ask yourselves how many people have successfully hidden lies from all for all the time.  You will see that there is not one such example.  Indian society has thrown up great human beings when it seemed that things were hopeless.  Mohandas Gandhi, Bheem Rao Ambedkar, Joti Rao Phule, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri et al have done good for the country when it was needed.  The future too will throw up equally great people and that is the root of my optimism. Truth cannot be suppressed and therefore it will triumph.  Jai Hind.