The Hindu Business Line : Elections 2004: Beyond politics

Life has not only "Swamps and marshes and muddy places but also the great sea and the mountains, and snow and glaciers, and wonderful starlit nights and the love of family and friends and the comradeship of workers in a common cause, and music and books, and the empire of ideas."

— Jawaharlal Nehru

MORE than 655 million voters are expected to visit some seven lakh polling stations to elect the new Parliament in May. Every election sees a galloping expenditure and this time the country will be spending over Rs 1,100 crore to elect its representatives. For the first time in recent decades, the election will be fought on economic issues, central to the emergence of India as a global superpower — Indira Gandhi did it in 1971 with her Garibi Hatao campaign. Roads, power and water are said to be the planks of the ruling NDA's development agenda. Can there be any dispute on such a plank? What should the electoral debate focus on?

Campaigns based on "sins, shame and scams" will not make much headway. The judicial verdict in such cases as the Hawala, Bofors, Tansi, Lakubai Pathak, and so on, has seen to it that corruption is a non-issue in the electoral arena. The BJP has mothballed the Ram Mandir issue, as also the demand for a Uniform Civil Code.

What should be debated is the development path that the next Government should pursue. This is the one occasion which should be fully used to secure a vote on reforms. It was not for nothing that representative democracy was described as "the grand discovery of all times" (James Mill). The world is witness to what Huntingdon describes as the "third wave of democracy", the previous two having been engulfed by Fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist ideologies.

Even the most benign dictatorship will not be compatible with human development. Democracies are much better at managing conflicts because of open institutions and channels for debate. They are also better at guaranteeing basic human rights. Amartya Sen illustrates how India never suffered a famine in the post-colonial years despite being plagued with them regularly during the imperialist rule. Neighbouring China rolled back the disastrous impact of the Great Leap Forward which extracted a toll of 25 million people in 1958-60.

The difference lies in the presence or absence of strong opposition parties and a free press, which can hold erring governments accountable.

Asia has had political systems that function like ``authoritarian democracies''. Political authoritarianism may be helpful for economic growth. This implies some disregard of human rights and deep scepticism of political liberty and civil rights.

Globalisation and liberalisation

An important issue is the role of the state in the march towards globalisation and liberalisation. The state has been reduced to that of an administrator, thanks to open borders, economic, social and political flows and the dominance of multinational corporations. The problem gets accentuated by the western demand for minimal state intervention, which has been thrust upon developing countries time and again by the Bretton Woods institutions.

Developed nations have pursued a particular agenda in least developed countries (LDCs) — setting up democratic institutions rather than achieving social and economic change. This has resulted in the creation of what has been called ``low intensity democracies'' which can pursue worse repressive social and economic policies than authoritarian regimes while maintaining the necessary trappings expected of democracies. Ultimately, the push to democratise the world seems to stem out of a need to maintain and pursue economic planning and investment in a globalised environment (Evans 2001:625-639).

In contemporary democratic theory, the notion of political participation is articulated in terms of political obligations and legal-constitutional rights of citizens with respect to electing representative governments and ensuring their democratic functioning (Almound and Verba 1963; Milbrath 1965). By conceiving participation in passive terms of limiting citizen's role and activities to the institutional arena of elections, parties and pressure-groups, the theory secures (or at least seeks to provide justifications for securing) the decision-making procedures of representative governments from the high-intensity politics of mass-mobilisation and direct-action, which the occasionally surfacing popular movements generate in a representative democracy.

This, indeed, has succeeded to a large extent in lending institutional stability and political legitimacy to liberal representative democracy, making it appear as if it is the only natural form that democracy can have.

Since the nation governs itself through its representatives, it is important that they articulate the views and aspirations of the common man. Without there being a sustained campaign, there has been a sizable anti-globalisation movement across the world. Different captions are given to the term like ``neo-liberal globalisation'', ``imperialist globalisation'' and so on. In essence, globalisation would mean the weakening or eventual elimination of national boundaries. Fidel Castro, the last remnant of the fast vanishing communist order, delivered two famous lectures recently invoking the blessings of Karl Marx to the globalisation trend. He made a distinction between socialist and imperialist globalisation and declared: "In our view, globalisation is nobody's whim; it is not even anybody's invention. Globalisation is a law of industry; it is a consequence of scientific and technological development... I believe globalisation is an irreversible process and that the problem is not globalisation per se, but the type of globalisation".

The Leftist interpretation of the cry for globalisation. There can be no poverty in what Nehru visualised as ``the empire of ideas''.

The Leftists have been fighting a loosing battle in this great clash of ideas and ideals. China amended its constitution to protect private property and human rights.

The US has not bothered about fiscal deficits and balanced budgets. Parties have to educate the electorate about the rival roads to economic growth. How do we finance our capital budgets? Who should bare the burden of additional resource mobilisation?

A recent ruling of the Bombay High Court highlighted the plight of senior citizens and fixed-income earners who have become victims of the low interest regime; a problem compounded by the absolute lack of social security and health-care facilities (Mulraj Jayantilal Sheth versus Governor, Reserve Bank of India — 2004 — 50 SCL 97 BOM).

The middle-class never had it so good. But what about that vast continent of people with per capita incomes of about Rs 100 per day? They demand a voice. The Opposition parties are inhibited by the dynastic politics. If they fail to highlight the issues central to the common man in these elections, they will be proving the adage that the gene has skipped one generation.