Too many politicians are willing to use any means to obtain power. Even the time-honored device of the dodgy campaign promise has sunk to a record low: one leading politician, a former cabinet minister, became chief minister of India's most populous state by promising that, if elected, his first act would be to abolish an ordinance that prevented college students from cheating (the ordinance forbade outsiders from smuggling crib sheets into the exam halls, regulated the examinees’ freedom to leave the exam hall and return to it, and so on). He won the youth vote, and the elections, in a landslide. He was as good as his word: within seconds of taking the oath of office, he withdrew the anti-cheating ordinance.
Sadly, this politician's willingness to elevate political expediency above societal responsibility is all too typical of his fellow politicians today. The profession of politics, for all the reasons described above, has to a great extent become dominated by the unprincipled, the inept, the corrupt, the criminal, and the undisciplined. As with the chief minister I described, their quest for power is unaccompanied by any larger vision of the common good. But they do get elected repeatedly, for one of the failures of Indian democracy has certainly lain in its inability to educate the mass of voters to expect, and demand, better of their elected representatives.
One minister I spoke to said that he had once made a proposal in the cabinet that every politician should attend and pass a course in basic Indian history and civics before being allowed to contest a seat. The proposal was immediately shot down; but patronizing as it sounds, there may be a case to revive it.
Far more dangerous to Indian democracy than the deficiencies of its guardians is the fact that the combination of expediency and corruption, flourishing with impunity under the protection of the democratic state, discredits democracy itself. The institutions of the Indian democracy must be able to deliver what all citizens of democratic states expect, namely national security and economic prosperity. If corruption, maladministration, and political failure results in a citizenry that feels insecure and deprived, the resultant disillusionment with the system can destroy Indians’ belief in the very system that sustains India. And that is something every Indian needs to worry about.
My concern is more specifically to the faith in the system of what R. K. Laxman taught us to think of as the “common man”—the bedrock of Indian democracy. Whereas psephological studies in the United States have demonstrated that the poor do not vote in significant numbers during elections (the turnout in the largely poor and black district of Harlem during the last U.S. presidential elections was 23 percent), the opposite is true in India. Here it is the poor who take the time to queue up in the hot sun, believing their votes will make a difference, whereas the more privileged members of society, knowing their views and numbers will do little to influence the outcome, have been staying away from the hustings. Voter studies of Indian elections have consistently demonstrated that the lowest stratum of Indian society vote in numbers well above the national average while graduates turn out in numbers well below.
Yet they are the ones who also see how little they can expect from their leaders. It is not just the disgrace of fisticuffs, jostling, and the flinging of footwear in our state assemblies; not just the legion of unfulfilled campaign promises, crumbling foundation stones of bridges and roads “inaugurated” just before an election and never completed, fodder scams, and siphoned-off funds of development banks; not even the lordly air with which our elected representatives treat their masters — the people. It is, rather, that even the pretense of accountability is absent from the actions of so many of our politicians. They see themselves as having been elected not to serve but to exercise power and enjoy its benefits. But even this would be forgivable if the power was used to protect people from the vicissitudes of life. Instead the “common man” feels far more vulnerable than before.
Violence is an inescapable reality for the ordinary Indian; we cannot escape being sickened by the daily occurrence of riots, rapes in custody, murders by those who believe their power confers immunity, and rampant incidents of the powerful taking the law into their own hands. If that sounds like an exaggeration, one reads far too often of episodes of poor women in rural India being stripped naked and paraded through streets to humiliate them or members of their family into doing as they are told.
Though individual police officers, administrators, and judges have shown courage and commitment in the pursuit of justice, the democratic Indian state as a whole seems to be able to do little to end such occurrences. Indeed, the Marathi newspaper Navakal once compared the Indian state system to the drunken husband who contributes nothing to the household himself but beats his wife to obtain the money she has worked hard to earn — a telling image in a country where such domestic events are commonplace.
We simply cannot allow our politicians to continue to treat our people this way. There is no doubt that the combination of violence and corruption, flourishing with impunity under the protection of the democratic state, discredits democracy itself. I think it deeply sad that so many cynics see democracy in India as a process that has given free reign to criminals and corrupt cops, opportunists and fixers, murderous musclemen and grasping middlemen, kickback-making politicos and bribe-taking bureaucrats, mafia dons and private armies, caste groups and religious extremists. Worse, the danger is that ordinary people will themselves react by seeking solutions outside the democratic system.
The basis of democracy is, of course, the rule of the demos, the people; the rule, in other words, of all rather than few. Democracies uphold the right of the general body of citizens to decide matters of concern to society as a whole, including the question of who rules them in their name. We cannot let our politicians arrogate to themselves the rights of the demos. Churchill once described democracy as “the worst system of government except for all the others.” It is the quality of our leaders that determines how bad that “worst” is. Our politicians will have to improve if India is to rise to the challenge. Let's send them to “democracy school” if we must.
10. The Bond That Threatens?
THE FAMILY, THAT QUINTESSENTIAL INDIAN SOCIAL institution, has made a modern comeback through a phenomenon that did not exist in the India I grew up in — that of the television soap opera.
Indeed, a major change has occurred in our entertainment habits. No longer do Indians merely throng to the melodramas of Bollywood (or should it now be Mollywood, in deference to “Mumbai”?), where aging superstars chase cavorting virgins around leafy trees, singing of love as the inevitable downpour drenches her blouse but not his ardor.
Instead, the faithful pining wives and drunken villains of Bolly-wood have given way to the multiple adulteries, serial bed-hopping, and steamy passions of Western-style soap operas. This has not escaped international attention. An august American literary journal publishes a picture, in riotous color, of the family at the heart of the television serial Shanti; a popular international newsmagazine reports that the septuagenarian wife of the then president of India, Shankar Dayal Sharma, instructs her servants to tape every episode of the afternoon serial Swabhimaan that her official duties oblige her to miss. Thanks to soap operas, a new vision of the Indian family, teeming with betrayals, infidelities, and rivalries of every sort, has gained entry into the living rooms of the middle class.