If you wrestle with a pig you only end up dirty — while the pig thanks you for giving it exercise. That may be the eventual experience of the Aam Aadmi Party’s electoral forays
The political establishment has only sneers for Arvind Kejriwal and his band of pro-changers. There is no hint of nervousness in the remarks of the distinguished gentlemen — and honourable ladies — just casual disdain. Some even carry a ring of righteous indignation — the kind that professional doctors display when distracted by the claims of a quack practitioner or, worse, a witch doctor. It wouldn’t be surprising to see, in the run-up to the Delhi Assembly election this November, the Sheila Dikshit-Vijay Goel duo coming together (in the “national interest” obviously) to demand that the Election Commission declare that just as cancer warning on cigarette packets, so too should the posters and hoardings and posters of the AAP should declare, just like cancer warnings on cigarette packets, that democratic dystopia and national doom await Indians if this party is voted to power.
George Bernard Shaw had famously observed, “Corruption is embedded in the democratic system.” In Nirad C Chaudhuri’s Thy Hand Great Anarch -India between 1920 and 1950 (london, 1987), there is a whole chapter revealing how thoroughly the British rulers of India enjoyed the swift degeneration of the Indian freedom movement to a competition for the loaves and fishes of office. The British introduced democratic elections in India in a small way between 1920 and 1924 when limited electorates in the civic bodies of the three Presidency towns got the right to elect their own local heroes as Councilors and even have Indian Mayors. It was designed as the phased shedding of the white man’s burden — after all, the unwashed natives had to be slowly developed for self governance through a structured process, an almost pedagogical exposure to the western virtues of democracy, etc.
But the actual strategy — and did it work ! — was to weaken the nascent freedom movement from within. Already alerted on the dubious funding sources of the Congress leaders, the British astutely surmised that the innate greed and sensuality of the oriental lifestyle should be given free play and what better field could there be than the political hemisphereIJ As Chaudhuri’s elegant pen exposed, the ploy worked so well that by the end of the first decade of that experiment in Calcutta alone, the civic body of the Empire’s second city had widely come to be called “Calcutta Corruption”. (The Bengali Press actually coined a more damaging vernacular which is still recalled: Kolkata Chorporation).
The first Mayor, Chittaranjan Das, died soon after assuming office — in 1925. His untimely demise is identified by most historians as the beginning of the end of everything that was decent in Bengal’s public life. By 1940, the city had 10 more Mayors following Das, the average term in office being one year and two-and-a-half month. Only one (Jatindramohan Sengupta) completed a full term, while Subhas Chandra Bose, Bidhan Chandra Roy and Nalini Ranjan Sarkar could manage less than two each each. The rest were all nonentities who swiftly passed into history. With every Mayor busy protecting his own back, their gaze hardly covered the loot of public funds and corrupt dealings of the Councilors and officials. There was no simplistic explanation for this anarchical state of affairs except one that has its origins in the Indian national character which Winston Churchill so imperiously dismissed when Clement Attlee suggested the idea of an independent India — Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low caliber and men of straw…A day would come when even air & water would be taxed in India.
Mr Kejriwal is a former bureaucrat, a revenue official doubtless gifted with skills in reading balance sheets. His intention is to defeat the corrupt political system by challenging its components - Congress, BJP, etc. — in the electoral arena. After defeating them sometime in the foreseeable future, he hopes to give the citizens qualitatively better governance. Fine up till here. But aren’t he and his masses of admirers walking up a garden path of democracy which Mahatma Gandhi had warned against in 1920IJ Among all his contemporaries, only Gandhi had the astuteness to see through the British game when elections were organised for the central legislative assembly in that year. His entreaties to Congress leaders to shun the elections went unheeded because, as the British estimated, they were thirsting for the spoils of office.
Of course, the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party has been careful to handpick only non-professional politicians. One hears from reliable sources that he’d already rejected some influential BJP and Congress leaders who had attempted to cross over, doubtless in the hope of blackmailing their former bosses. Kejriwal is clear on one thing — nobody who has spent even one day in the houses of ill repute are worthy of being considered leaders of the Aam Aadmi.
But the awesome faith he invests in the legacy of that 1920 blunder is worrying. Before him many (including this writer) had entered the electoral system believing that the road to a better tomorrow lies through the muck of today. Things never work out that way. The Westminister system’s unsuitability for India should dawn on him. Corruption, chicanery and cynicism are indivisibles of a philosophy which places a premium on head-count. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once observed, “Democracy is about head-count, but what is inside those heads does not count.” To make an impression, Arvind Kejriwal must necessarily pick out 69 “winnable” candidates — the first step towards his movement’s fatality. These 69 worthies must necessarily pick out mohallah-level vote multipliers, again, necessarily, characters who fit the Churchilian “men of straw” description.
Democratic politics is a minefield of vested interests which in the north Indian experiences is all enmeshed with clan, caste, musclemen and, of course, money bags. It’s certainly not a playground for saints. If, on the other hand, Kejriwal had focused on the larger point — democratic reform through the Presidential system — he could have collected far more credibility on a nation-wide scale. By a national quirk, Indians (the same who hate politicians and have no two good things to say about the shared political experience) prefer, at crunch time, the politician with the deeper roots in muck. Yet, this same mass of people would like to see “genuine” change which they uniformly see in the personification of a “new leader”. What they lack is the power to articulate that need. Few Indians know that the changeover from the Westminister to Presidential system would be seamless under the Indian Constitution — a possibility last probed by Indira Gandhi (albeit with intentions rooted in self-aggrandisement) — and could free the chief executive from partisan, caste, goondaraj and pecuniary loyalties.
Mr Kejriwal, with his youth and articulation skills, could have given another 5-10 years to developing mass consensus in favour of the Presidential system which the founding fathers of the Constitution had budgeted for while writing their book. like Gandhi exactly a century ago this decade, he could have roamed the country collecting synergies, raising mass awareness and building up a new leadership of change makers. But tunnel vision, that curse of our polity, seems to have got him already.
Udayan Namboodiri | (The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer)