YPOST

Run For The Big Race

Electioneering for the 15th Lok Sabha is slowly but surely on. Though the pitch is still not feverish, yet the power seekers and the power brokers, in Delhi and provincial capitals, see a job on their hands. Permutations and combinations are being worked out to out manoeuvre one another and hijack the mandate. As the polling date approaches most of the countrymen look forward to the results with a hope. They want present Government to go, after what they have gone through the last five years of the UPA-2 rule. Physical security concerns, particularly of the womenfolk, the national security scenario, crippling high prices of the essentials, loss of jobs and general mood of despondency have demoralized so many. Therefore, some hope that spring will bloom on the dawn of 16th May 2014 when a new government at the Centre will take place. However, some are fearful of the events which may unfold post May 2014; on the assumption that no Political party will reach the coveted number of 272 so as to form a stable Government in Delhi. They foresee political and administrative chaos on the horizon. The brazen exhibition of inflated egos , disproportionate political ambitions and the tantrums of the motley crowd of political mavericks and the regional satraps , which will be in display in good measure as soon as the election results are out and they gather in the Capitol, are enough to shake faith, even , of a diehard optimist . It will be a nightmare for the person who has followed the contemporary Indian political scene.

In the background of the ensuing elections, feelings of hope and despair, simultaneously, enter the thoughts of a common man. It is a foregone conclusion that no single political party or a formation will cross the threshold of 272 in the coming LokSabha , necessary to ascend the Delhi throne. So , the nation is for another coalition drama. Past experience informs us that it won’t be a pleasant one. But then   looking back to the Congress governments from 1947 to 1967, coalition of varied political views, in the same party , is quite visible . On one side we had certain political and economic policy of Jawaharlal Nehru, Moulana Azad, Rafi Ahmad Ansari , Raja ji , Krishna Menon and some others , whileas on the other side there were men like Sardar Patel, Rajindra Prassad, K M Munshi, Parshotam Dass Tandon and others who had serious differences with some of the Nehru’s policies. Then a third group of equally well-meaning persons co-existed in the grand old party. To name few of them , Jay PrakashNarraian, Acharya Narendra Dev, Ram Monohar Lohia, Ashok Mehta should suffice . Babu Jagjiwan Ram represented the caste element. All cohabited together under the broad cover of a political organization called All India Congress Party. Similarly, the Party had men of extreme probity and some who had no hard moral scruples.

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.

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 hegemonisation 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.

                                                                                                                                                   Arijit Das

M.Sc Media, P.G 1