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| ELECTION 2009 | | A race for power for power’s sake | |
Gyan Prakash
The Indian Premier League (IPL) is on the television screen, its multicultural teams in multi-coloured uniforms. The camera turns, reluctantly, from the scantily-clad jiggling cheerleaders, to the owners-actors Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty. During a commercial break, you switch to Zoom, hoping for more colourful, celebrity-soaked images. Instead, a sombre black-and-white screen greets you with a civics lesson. One by one, solemn-faced movie stars — Abhishek Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, Kareena Kapoor, Asin and Ritesh Deshmukh — hold up their inked index fingers.
You have moved from the images of one set of celebrities to another, but the difference is huge. If the IPL’s riot of colours brings into view the commerce and media-driven reality of globalisation, the sober monochromatic images call to mind the world of nations associated with test matches. One paints competition and consumption as exciting and polychromatic; the other offers black and white instructions on duties of citizenship.
Such instructions have become increasingly vociferous since the Mumbai attacks of 26/11. After an orgy of anti-politics rants, the urban middle class now gravely intones the dharma of national duty. Newspaper columnists and television programmes fulminate about votebanks, the criminalisation of politics, corrupt politicians and their unprincipled alliances and the absence of policy and ideological debate in the current election campaign. With little chance of success, educated professionals have jumped into the electoral fray to uphold the cherished ideals of liberal democracy. But to win, they need to first understand what it is they denounce.
Clearly, the 2009 election is a contest without a real debate on issues. There is plenty of meaningless chatter in the media about who will form the government and how, and who will be the Prime Minister. Analysts treat the contest as a horse race, wagering boxed bets on which combination will win.
Underlying the idle speculations are the bewildering alliances forged by political parties. That these parties have struck alliances not to advance their ideologies, but to maximise electoral wins is not in dispute. Even the Left has opted to improve its bargaining power in the post-election scenario rather than strike principled alliances.
All this appears distasteful through the traditional lens of liberal democracy. Elections are supposed to be democratic exercises to make an informed choice from a menu of different ideological and policy recipes. Undoubtedly, this is absent in the 2009 contest. Politicians do denounce communal rhetoric, every now and then, but this is out of habit rather than conviction. However, to define the elections by the absence of ideology is to proclaim what it lacks, not what it is. It is to judge, not understand, the phenomenon.
To begin with, we should acknowledge that the current electoral exercise, its raucous and intensely competitive nature, expresses a robust scramble for power. This is to be expected, given India’s vastness and diversity.
The scale and intensity of the electoral contest also nurtures a plurality of political forces — something overlooked by the analysts who prattle on and on about regional versus national parties.
Second, we should view the nakedly political nature of the contest as a development of democracy, albeit a novel one. In Tocqueville’s classic definition, democracy constitutes politics as a unique arena for the representation of different social and ideological interests. It functions as an autonomous domain that acts on society, transforming it with political actions. This reverses the customary understanding of politics as something that exists to express prior and pre-existing social interests.
According to the traditional view, then, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) appears as an ideological expression of dalits, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the manifestation of Hindu interests, and so on.
In fact, politics enacts, bringing into existence these diverse social and ideological interests. Ideology "happens". Social interests are brought into being when Narendra Modi tears into "anti-national" forces, the Shiv Sena mobilises the "Marathi manoos", and Mayawati pleads for the "dalit daughter". Ideologies and policies take shape in the rituals, actions and performances in the political arena. And they have effects on society. Politics can reinforce, deepen and transform social relations, as India’s modern history of caste mobility, for example, shows. This is the gift of democratic politics.
But what do we make of political alliances and performances about nothing? What will be the effect of politics on society when electoral alliances are about securing the largest number of seats, devoid of ideological coherence? Rather than play the violin, we should understand the meaning of the new sounds of politics-as-market.
We are witnessing the operation of a hyper-rational pursuit of power, the ice-cold calculations of winning combinations. Gaining competitive advantage is all. The election is simply a contest, one attempting to free itself from the rhetoric of the past. Instead of bygone ideologies, the voters are presented with product differentiation — "weak" versus "strong" PM, regional versus national parties, Third Front and Fourth Front versus National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and so on. It is tempting to dismiss these as gimmicks, confirmation of our worst suspicions that elections are a meaningless exercise. But look closely, and you will identify a desire at work, a desire for the acquisition and accumulation of electoral seats. Of course, parties and individuals contest elections to win, but something important is at issue when winning becomes the sole driving force. Then it becomes "pure politics", an exercise that treats elections as a market and installs electoral acquisitiveness as the sole meaning of the political. There is a parallel between the elections staged as a market and the neo-liberal worship of the market. It is too early to say if this is lasting, or what will be the effects of the conduct of politics-as-market on society. If Tocqueville is right, then surely the society and the political parties, even those with an anti-market ideology, will be transformed. Then, we will not need civics lesson in black and white. The colourful IPL will itself serve as a platform for showcasing the elections. The current coincidence of their schedules is perhaps a harbinger of things to come.
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