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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The Circus is in Town

The Circus is in Town

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published Published on Jan 3, 2012   modified Modified on Jan 3, 2012

-EPW

 

Bereft of any meaningful vision, political parties have reduced politics to gladiatorial contests.

Much was promised of the Lokpal Bill in the winter session of Parliament. While a toothless bill was indeed passed by the Lok Sabha, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was unable to have even this endorsed in the Rajya Sabha on the last day of the session. Did this have to do with the inability of the UPA to win support in the upper house or was the Congress-led government really not interested in getting the legislation enacted? For that matter, no political party – other than the left – seemed keen on a strong anti-corruption law. The Lok Sabha even failed to provide constitutional status to the Lokpal because of opportunistic opposition from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The flurry of legislative action – including on the Citizens Right to Grievance Redressal Bill and the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill – has to do with the UPA wanting to dent the growing support for the anti-corruption movements, particularly that of Anna Hazare and his group. Not enough attention has been paid to debate, deliberation and consultations and, not surprisingly, all political parties, as well as “civil society” groups, have concentrated on scoring points. While the Lokpal debate saw an element of decorum if not substance, the overall conduct of Parliament during the winter session was in keeping with the recent trend of debasing the apex institution of parliamentary democracy. Disruptions and adjournments were the norm rather than the exception during the first half of the winter session. All in all, this has been the fourth parliamentary session which has been substantially wrecked by the opposition’s determination to not let the government transact normal business. The government has contributed its bit, for instance, by taking its ill-fated decision on retail on the eve of the winter session. The disaster that Parliament has become in recent years is symptomatic of Indian parliamentary democracy today. India’s political parties have reduced political contestation to a gladiatorial fight and converted Parliament into a circus.

It is instructive to see how we came to this pass before we try to understand how. The re-election of the UPA in 2009 dealt a severe blow to the political ambitions of both the BJP as well as the parliamentary left. Despite their “mandate” and the “free hand” they supposedly got due to the absence of the left, UPA-II has floundered both on policy formulation as well as implementation. It has neither managed to initiate any meaningful social development policies nor pleased its free-market constituency. The recently ­introduced Food Security Bill has been designed to pay lip service to the 2009 promise of the Congress Party and has been tailored to meet the immediate political needs of the Congress rather than long-term development goals.

Despite the very high inflation for much of the last two years, the opposition parties of the right and left have found, to their frustration, that they have not been able to generate public support for their actions on agendas which have traditionally been public mobilisers and vote catchers. Issues on which the BJP and the left had till recently managed to start political agitations did not get the same traction. The left has been unable to sustain either the anti-nuclear agitation or the anti-price rise one, while the BJP has not found the same level of support for communal mobilisation.

It appears that political parties, whether the ruling Congress or the opposition, have lost their ability to both address the people with real agendas and also be conduits of people’s demands. Their inability to understand the “people” has been a phenomenon for some time. It is this which led the then ruling National Democratic Alliance to so comprehensively misread the political situation and hand power to a Congress which appeared to have sleepwalked to Raisina Hill. It is this same disconnect which, on the one hand, made the left parties think that their anti-nuclear campaign and Third Front would galvanise the people against the Congress and, on the other, fired L K Advani’s prime-ministerial ambitions. Today we have reached a stage where practically no political party really knows what their electors will do. Political parties are, in a sense, groping in the dark. The disruptions of Parliament can perhaps only be understood as the wild, purposeless flailing of a political class desperate to find a political buoy to hang on to.

It is this state of politics which creates the space for the anti-politics of forces like Anna Hazare and his group and other petty, yet dangerous, agitators. But what explains this hollowing-out of our political parties?

A tentative explanation for this phenomenon could be that political parties continue to understand India’s social and political life in terms which may now be obsolete. The manner in which they articulate their politics finds decreasing resonance with their traditional constituencies, which themselves have changed both in form and content over the past few decades. On the other side of this coin, the demands and needs of an increasing number of our citizens remain unarticulated by our political parties. Over the last two decades, India’s economy and its poli­tical and social structures have witnessed massive transfor­mations. Hardly anything has remained untouched and unchanged, whether it is castes and classes, gender and kin relations, communication and transport, literacy and laws, or media and demographics. The social group(s), class(es) or caste(s) which a political party earlier represented have transformed fundamentally, and with that has changed the interests and ­demands they embody. However, much of our political language remains informed by ideas and concepts which predate these changes. Our political parties speak the language of the 20th century to a 21st century population.

In classical Marxist terms, our political parties have perhaps failed to understand the new contradictions which have emerged in the transformations caused by two decades of economic reforms. If this is even partially correct, it is a dangerous situation since political parties are supposed to help materialise these contradictions through their programmes and actions, and thus help mediate them in ways which sustain democratic politics. The failure of poli­tical parties to do that opens the space for anti-politics and fascism.

Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XLVII, No. 1, 7 January, 2012, http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190847/

Tagged with: Governance



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