Only a couple of days ago I made my shortest blog post in which I stated that I was not writing about the arrest of YS Jagan Mohan Reddy because I had nothing new to contribute, at least not yet. In the two days that passed since that post, enough has transpired to make me change my mind and write a post about it. Whoever said that the world can change in a matter of hours was right. In the last two days, things have changed so much that it is impossible to ignore those developments. Let me tell you here that this post of mine is not just about YS Jagan Mohan Reddy's arrest. It is all about the politics that surround it; these are politics that demonstrate how institutions in this country have collapsed and how politics have now found a new nadir. I am as a proud Indian totally devastated by the rot that has set into the politics of that country and how that has now percolated to all institutions of governance in the country. This is worrisome for the future of the nation because while opportunism can never be eliminated from politics it cannot be accepted that opportunism and the complete lack of morality in politics and institutions that driven by those politics will be the sole reason behind the governance of the country.
I was once hoping that capitalism would do some good to this country. Though I am by no stretch of imagination a Marxist, I somehow seemed to have accepted his argument that capitalism had a constructive role to play in history and in this case the history of India. I realize today that I had succumbed unwittingly to the fallacies of Western logic that include the freedom of the individual and its inculcation leading to the collapsing of traditional collectives in traditional societies and thereby leading to some emancipation. I was hoping that the introduction of capitalism into India would lead to the dissolving of traditional loyalties of caste, religion and region and free Indian society from the shackles of retrograde thinking. Today I realize that despite my constant distancing of myself from Marxist thinking and from Orientalism (the ideas that Western societies when they describe Eastern societies from a vantage that is convenient to them) consciously, I have actually accepted both of them without any critical thinking. My folly with Marxism I have already expressed now let me explain my other folly. By saying that capitalism and individualism would dissolve "traditional" loyalties, I had unwittingly accepted the Western division of Eastern societies into traditional and modern (also progressive) without too much consideration. I have walked into the traps that I thought I had been consciously trying to avoid and with my eyes firmly shut, when in reality I was deluding myself into believing that I was considering everything carefully.
If you are wondering what the above paragraph has to do with the subject of this post, I will tell you that it has everything to do with it. In fact, the change of mind that I have had about posting about YS Jagan and his arrest has everything to do with the realization of my twin follies. First let us consider the idea that capitalism dissolves the individual's links to identities imposed upon him by society. My thinking was that with capitalism and individualism caste based, religion based and region based identities would become redundant. But if you take the year 1991 as a marker in Indian history for this was when the latest wave of economic liberalization and globalization was initiated and consider the history of the country and its politics one would see that it is in the times of unfettered capitalism that politics of caste, religion and region have been strengthened like never before. Political parties such as the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Bharatiya Janata Party which represent caste, region and religious interests have gained true strength in this capitalist society. So rather than getting rid of or weakening of primordial loyalties, those have been consolidated and converted into vote banks. Of these caste groupings are the strongest. It was once contended that Maoism (previously Naxalism) believed in keeping regions and people backward so that roads are not built and development does not take place and this would keep the forest sanctuaries of the Maoists intact.
I do not know for sure if that was the interest of the Maoists, but I now know for sure that this is indeed the strategy of parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. Keep the Other Backward Castes and Dalits (Scheduled Castes) backward and then you always have an interest to articulate and come to power. It is not once but many times that both the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party have come into power; and not even once did either of the parties do anything for the people whose interest that they are purportedly supporting. While the Samajwadi Party provided a platform for the political careers of Mulayam Singh's family, the Bahujan Samaj Party provided several platforms for Mayawati to invest public money in making and placing statues of herself. The less said about Lalu Prasad Yadav and his Rashtriya Janata Dal the better. What he did for to the politics of Bihar is painful to recall even for writing this blog.
Capitalism brought regional parties like the Telugu Desam Party to the forefront of things. The Telugu Desam was interested in the promotion of the business interests of the Kamma caste but brought that interest in the form of regionalism of the Telugu speaking people. Post the latest wave of capitalist liberalisation of the economy when K Chandrashekhar Rao fell out with Telugu Desam Supremo Chandra Babu Naidu, he used the same principle that was first used by Naidu's father in law NT Rama Rao while founding the Telugu Desam Party. He dusted the separate Telangana issue which was first used by M Channa Reddy to fight the coastal Andhra interest in the Congress Party. Unsurprisingly the Telugu Desam Party became a victim of its own strategy and today regionalism has reached a new high with life of people in the Capital of Andhra Pradesh having been disrupted for three years. All developmental activity is suspended and it is now once again battle of castes which gets articulated as the interests of the region. The caste politics which were made mainstream by VP Singh have actually strengthened the BJP since VP Singh was following the strategy of Ambedkar in trying to unite the Scheduled Castes with Muslims. The addition that VP Singh made to this strategy was to bring in the OBCs into the ambit of the caste coalition, something which was done with great success in Andhra Pradesh by the Telugu Desam Party. This allowed the BJP to talk about Hindutva by saying that Muslims were outsiders and oppressors of the original population of India and that they should be kept out of any coalitions involving Hindus. In fact, even Muslim had to adopt Hindutva as his motto in order to considered a nationalist. This has met with communalism from within the Muslim ranks exploited by parties such as the Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen. Both the parties has been around for many years before but the strengthening of religion based vote banks has been incredible post these developments.
Capitalism in India strengthened politicians by providing them with new means of earning money. One must remember that capitalism's primary objective is the realisation of profit and not the sustenance or maintenance of morality. Politicians have used the necessity of various capitalists to step away from the moral path to their advantage and have built huge fortunes by taking recourse to corruption. At one point they even realized that it would be to their advantage to create regimes of governance that would bend the capitalists (especially the multinational ones) towards corruption and bribery by introducing practices of governance which made it impossible to have any service without "additional payments". The money thus earned has carefully been used to spend on keeping vested interests alive by creating caste based, religion based and region based vote banks. The best way to create and keep these vote banks alive is to ensure that issues related to the vote banks are never resolved. This has also meant that now it is possible to identify politicians as a separate class for themselves despite their public posturing. This new empowerment of the politicians by capitalism has led to Indian politics taking the Plutocratic turn (something that I had discussed earlier in another post).
The makings of a Plutocracy and dynastic politics were always there in India but surprisingly capitalism instead of weakening the tendencies has strengthened it. I would like to point out here that even in an advanced democracies such as America there is some presence of family (read that as dynastic if you like) influence on business, sport (especially motorsport) and politics. But what we see in India is on an unprecedented scale and has brought new meaning to what the French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had called the paradox of poverty amidst plenty. Families holding power have used that power to turn themselves into corrupt and even more powerful families. And along with wealth and power comes ambition. This is where the question of YS Jagan Mohan Reddy and his ill gotten wealth comes into the picture. If there is an innocent reader here who thinks that the arrest of Jagan Reddy is indication of the law of land kicking into action, I would ask that person to desist from thinking along those lines. YS Jagan Mohan Reddy's and his father's corruption are nothing new. Yet the prosecution of the surviving son and mudslinging against the dead father are recent activities. It is here that one should remember plutocracies and family politics and see how within the Congress party two families have come into conflict and how one has been trying to liquidate the other. Of the two families one has history and a past while the other can be compared to a start up company. So this could be Microsoft vs Google or Google vs Facebook kind of rivalry, the difference being that this is being played out in the political arena.
The two families within the Congress party that I am talking about are the Nehru-Gandhi family which has always had its share of sycophants before PV Narasimha Rao tried to do away with the family's influence when he was Prime Minister. There are different characterisations of PV Narasimha Rao as a person, most comparing him to Machiavelli or Kautilya and others being charitable to him by saying whatever he did, he did for the party and the country rather than for personal gain. There is truth in both arguments but for moment we shall not look beyond his attempts to push the Nehru-Gandhi family into the background and succeeding in running a minority government. But at the first available opportunity sycophants such as Arjun Singh brought the family back into the picture (and for his services Arjun Singh was rewarded with the Human Resource Development ministry which controls education and in typical style Arjun Singh went onto destroy education in his country as best as he could). However, Andhra Pradesh which has always been a bastion for the congress except perhaps for 15 -20 years saw the emergence of YS Rajashekhar Reddy as the leader who did what he wanted to do (which is amass wealth and power) but by keeping the Nehru-Gandhi family happy and reasonably secure. His death and his son's ambition brought his family in conflict with the Nehru-Gandhi family. Jagan Reddy saw the victory of the Congress party after nine years of Telugu Desam rule and its coming back to power as the result of the efforts of his father. Armed with this belief and with the truck loads of wealth, he decided to stake his claim for the Chief Ministership of Andhra Pradesh citing the case of Indira Gandhi succeeding her father Jawaharlal Nehru (not a valid parallel since there was Lal Bahadur Shastry in the interregnum) as Prime Minister and Rajiv Gandhi succeeding his mother Indira Gandhi (valid parallel since Rajiv Gandhi became PM immediately post Mrs. Gandhi's death) as precedents.
The problem was that there were not many takers for his analogies but his never say die attitude and having enough wealth to want to take on the Congress party and the Telugu Desam kept him going. When he started becoming a factor in Andhra Pradesh politics and hurting the Congress party's interests, the party headquarters in Delhi which is run by the Nehru-Gandhi family decided to exert pressure on him by trying to expose his and his father's corruption. But Jagan Reddy has been confident because a share of his family's ill gotten wealth also found its way to the other family. That is when institutions such as the CBI have been brought into the picture and they have come in quite late perhaps due to the headquarters cleaning itself out before slinging mud on YSR's family. In this mudslinging match that has started in earnest now, Chandra Babu Naidu, K Chandrashekhar Rao and anyone else with remote interest in coming to power have started taking part. This is okay, since this conforms to what we expect out of politicians of today. But what is startling (at least to me) is the response of the people.
Even as I am writing this piece Jagan Reddy's mother and sister are touring the State trying to trump up support for their son/brother and there are hordes of people attending their roadshows. Naidu is busy making allegations against both the Congress and Jagan Reddy while the TRS is busy hurling abuse at all three. News channels and newspapers are faithfully covering all this and in all this yet another murky detail to emerge has been the revelation that a Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court was involved in taking bribes to grant bail to Gali Janardhan Reddy one of the main accused in the Obulapuram Mining Case (he and his brother are supposed to be beneficiaries of the generosity of Jagan's father and that they have returned the favour by parting with some of their wealth and giving it back to YSR's family). The bribe amount is Rs. 10 crore. When I wrote a piece on the Sri Krishna Committee report and said that either the Justice who denounced the report in his judgement or Justice Sri Krishna himself were wrong since they were saying contradictory things, I was chided by a lawyer friend for my misdemeanour which he said could be tantamount to me being in contempt of court. I was glad that he pointed that out to me but today I am saddened that the judiciary which is the last line of defence against corruption, graft and fraud and the final authority that can protect the rights of people has members in its rank who do not mind being flunkies to the rich and corrupt politicians. While lackeys of corruption in the judiciary is a matter of great concern, what concerns me even more is the apathy of the people to this whole process.
When politicians of all hues and cries have meetings there are many paid people who comprise of their audience. That too is not too serious an issue. What is of concern is that while the paid audience is at the location of a politician's meeting or the road show is perhaps bad enough but those who sit at homes and watch these numerous TV channels who show these road shows and meeting, as if they are watching a circus. The credibility of TV news is less than zero with every TV channel either being owned directly or indirectly by politicians. Nobody who is seeing these channels is getting news, they are only getting views and yet they are glued to the TV sets. Same is the case with newspapers. In this scenario where people are happily spectating the games that politicians play against and with each other and where institutions such as the CBI and the judiciary are not immune from these games and their effects, what hope does this nation have? What kind of a legacy are we likely to leave for the future generations, for our own progeny? Look at the choices one has as political parties in Andhra Pradesh. Congress, YSR Congress, Telugu Desam are the pan AP parties while BJP is not a contender and MIM is a niche party as is the TRS. None of these parties can boast of a leadership with rectitude. Nationally too the situation is the same. The UPA comprises of the Congress, Trinamool Congress, DMK, RJD and some outside support of SP and MIM and the NDA consists of the BJP, the Akali Dal, the AIADMK, perhaps the BSP and outside support of TDP if they win any seats that is and numerous other small parties. What unites both the alliances is that leadership of the constituent parties of the alliances are headed by and comprise of corrupt leadership and cadres. I am therefore reminded of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 when I think of the future of the country. Also Hobson's choice comes to mind. Whatever the metaphor, the net result is the same. I wonder who will save my beloved country and more importantly how? Time will tell us all. Till then I wait with trepidation and baited breath.
P.S: My usual apology of not having proof read this long piece.
