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Political
parties have their own distinct ideologies, on the basis
of which they draw up their programmes. With these they
go to the electorate for garnering support, and do so
in varying degrees. When the electorate does not support
them to the extent that they think it ought to have,
they feel let down by the electorate's incapacity to
appreciate their worth. They wait for the time when
the electorate will become aware of the virtues of their
particular programmes. All this is natural. A degree
of impatience with the electorate on the part of a political
party when it does not get the electorate's support
is natural. Confidence on the part of a political party
in the worth of its own programme is natural. But the
recent disquisitions of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,
which in effect blame the electorate for giving a "fractured
mandate", i.e. denying a clear majority to the
Congress Party, transgress these natural boundaries.
Manmohan Singh was, of all things, addressing the McKinsey
board in India. Why he should have been doing so in
the first place is itself a mystery. Prime Ministers
of the country do not go around addressing boards of
particular multinational corporations. It is so improper
for the head of a government to hobnob with individual
MNC heads or individual MNC boards that one of the first
acts of the Hu Jintao government in China, which was
also much appreciated by the people of that country,
was to debar explicitly all such meetings. In India
no Prime Minister has done so in the past. Meeting MNC
heads in a group is one thing, but meeting any one MNC
head or addressing one particular MNC board is quite
another. But Manmohan Singh had no qualms about doing
so.
What he said at this meeting is that "given the
nature of competitive politics and the very fractured
mandates given to governments, it has become difficult
sometimes for us to do what is manifestly obvious"
(HT October 23). Manmohan Singh in short argued that
the agenda he wished to pursue was not just "manifestly
obvious" to him or his Party. It was "manifestly
obvious" in general, i.e. "manifestly obvious"
to all. The hurdle that stands in the way of this agenda
being implemented is "competitive politics";
what exactly that term means is not clear, but obviously
the inference is that other people than himself and
his Party have such vested interests that they even
prevent the implementation of what is "manifestly
obvious" for carrying the country forward. And
since the electorate, to whom also the correct path
should be "manifestly obvious", obstinately
refuses to brush aside these political parties playing
"competitive politics", and hands out a "fractured
mandate" instead, it must also take the blame for
preventing the nation from going forward!
This, as mentioned earlier, is more than just an expression
of impatience at the lack of understanding on the part
of other parties or the electorate, at the whole messiness
and tardiness with which "correct ideas" gain
ground in a parliamentary democracy. The "correct
ideas" are "manifestly obvious" to all.
It is the perversity of the people that prevents their
being put into effect. Manmohan Singh's ideas are "correct",
and it is "manifestly obvious" that they are.
It is the perversity of the people who insist on handing
out a "fractured mandate" that prevents these
ideas from being implemented. One is reminded here of
Bertolt Brecht's poem written after the Berlin workers'
uprising in the mid-fifties: "The government it
appears has lost the confidence of the people. Why doesn't
it dismiss the people and elect another?"
What we have here is not just an instance of magnified
self-righteousness, that Singh alone has the "manifestly"
correct ideas and the honesty of purpose for carrying
them through, while all the rest are contemptible practitioners
of "competitive politics"! What his remarks
indicate is in fact a contempt for parliamentary democracy
itself. They represent a reification, of the sort that
Jean Paul Sartre had satirized in the context of the
post-war Hungarian regime of Rakosi: "Budapest's
subway is in Rakosi's mind; if the subsoil does not
allow it then the subsoil must be counter-revolutionary!"
The correct path for the people's forward movement is
in Manmohan Singh's mind; if the people do not vote
him to follow it, then the people must be perverse.
The essence of parliamentary democratic praxis, indeed
of any praxis, is a respect for the people. Even when
one is absolutely convinced about the correctness of
one's own position, if the people reject this position,
then instead of blaming the people, one has to ask the
question: why are they rejecting this position? To do
so may lead to some productive self-criticism. But,
not to do so, and to blame the people instead for handing
out a "fractured mandate" that prevents the
implementation of "manifestly obvious" ideas
for the nation's progress, belongs conceptually to an
authoritarian agenda.
To assert this is not to make any personal aspersions
about Manmohan Singh. A conceptually authoritarian agenda
in the realm of the polity is an integral part of a
neo-liberal economic agenda. The "manifestly obvious"
agenda for carrying forward the nation that Manmohan
Singh was referring to is the neo-liberal economic agenda.
While this agenda has been introduced in large measure,
several components of it still remain to be acted upon,
such as "labour market flexibility", "financial
sector liberalization", privatization of profit-making
public sector enterprises in areas belonging to the
"commanding heights" of the economy.
Likewise, while the neo-liberal agenda has been introduced,
it has not yet been insulated against political processes
that give rise to changes in government. The Indo-US
Nuclear Deal which could have been one instrument for
ensuring such insulation, by making any Indian government
susceptible to energy blackmail by the US, and hence
forcing it to toe the US line not just on foreign policy,
but on economic policy as well, is now facing insurmountable
opposition. No insulation of the neo-liberal policies
against government changes has therefore yet been put
in place.
The panic that this would generate in international
financial circles in the event of a government change
was briefly visible when the NDA had lost the last election.
The Wall Street Journal had even asked the question:
why should countries like India have such frequent elections?
And the same newspaper had published an article at the
time which had argued that the outcome of elections
in countries like India should not depend solely upon
the people of those countries but should also take into
account the views of all "stakeholders" including
foreign investors.
The need for an insulation of the neo-liberal economic
agenda from democratic political processes therefore
is very real. But this insulation itself is tantamount
to a negation of parliamentary democracy. Since international
finance capital does not know what the next government
would do, it must ensure either that there is no next
government at all, or that the next government is so
hamstrung that it would willy-nilly pursue the very
same policies that the present government has been doing.
Either of these amounts to a negation of parliamentary
democracy, to a negation of choice before the people,
and hence to a de facto authoritarian system. This has
still not been achieved in India, which is the cause
for Manmohan Singh's pique. Singh's remark, that the
pursuit of economic policies, whose soundness is "manifestly
obvious", is hindered by a "fractured mandate",
is in an encoded language. The decoded version would
say: the institutionalization of an unbridled neo-liberal
regime is thwarted by the fact that we have a multi-party
parliamentary democracy where the people vote for a
whole range of parties, not all of whom can be rallied
behind a neo-liberal agenda. Thus the very strength
of our political system, the fact that it gives space
to a whole range of regional and sectional aspirations,
and thereby retains the unity of a country that is marked
by extraordinary diversities, and the fact that it prevents,
precisely because of these very diversities, a hegemonization
of its economy by internal finance capital, is seen
by Singh as its weakness. The strength of our parliamentary
democracy, instead of being a matter of pride, becomes
for him a hurdle. And that is symptomatic of the authoritarian
conceptual universe of neo-liberalism mentioned earlier.
Singh's disquisition continued when he inaugurated the
4th International Conference on Federalism. Here he
lamented the fact that "narrow political considerations,
based on regional or sectional loyalties and ideologies
can distort the national vision" (The Hindu Nov.6).
And this according to him happens when parties with
varying national reach, and many with a very limited
sub-national reach, form a coalition at the national
level.
Let us leave aside the propriety of a Prime Minister
debunking his own allies, (without whose support he
would not last a day as Prime Minister) - debunking
in public, and that too in front of an international
audience. Let us look at the intellectual merit of the
argument.
In
practical terms what Singh is asking for is that only
parties with a "national reach" should form governments
at the national level. But it is difficult to decide
which party has a "national reach" when no party gets
more than a quarter of the votes in any election. Singh
may want that only those parties which get more than
a certain percentage of votes should be allowed representation
in parliament, but this, quite apart from being a regurgitation
of the old and obnoxious idea that there should be a
two-party system at the national level, consisting of
the Congress and the BJP, does not even solve Singh's
problem, since the regional parties can come together
to form a front, like the present "third front" and
emerge as legitimate contenders for power at the national
level.
The vacuity of this entire chain of reasoning arises
because of two deep flaws in it. First, it is based
on an abstract metaphysical notion of the "nation" separated
from the people. Not surprisingly, it is so palpably
anti-people. The fact that in the national elections
people choose to cast more than 50 percent of the votes,
i.e. a majority of the votes, for parties that according
to Singh's perception "distort national vision", is
not just an expression of utter contempt for the people;
it is a forcible disjunction between the "nation" and
the people that is almost reminiscent of the BJP's "India
Shining" campaign in the midst of peasant suicides.
Second, while dissociating the "nation" from the people,
and apotheosizing it as standing above the people, it
implicitly associates it with the interests of international
finance capital. What after all is the "national vision"
according to Singh? The institutionalization of a neo-liberal
regime, and associated with it a strategic alliance
with the US. The "nation's" interests in short are those
of international finance capital.
There is a sense of déjà vu about all
this. Exactly a century ago, Rudolf Hilferding in his
opus Das Finanzkapital had identified as the ideology
of finance capital the glorification of the Idea of
the Nation. This was manifest during the period around
the first world war and reached its extreme limit under
fascism. The fact that neo-liberalism promoted by today's
finance capital, which is anti-people, should talk in
terms of a "nation" that stands above the
people but is actually identified with finance capital,
should therefore come as no surprise. The fact that
an intellectual and well-meaning Prime Minister should
be articulating such ideas only shows how strongly-rooted
ideas are in their material basis. |
