The Hindu Business Line : We have as many words for protest as Eskimos have for snow

Albert Einstein once said, "Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity." A relative truth, perhaps, because political equations around us seem to eternally change, making current Indian politics as complex as rocket science.

To help out the lay, here is a book of essays titled `India's Political Parties,' edited by Peter Ronald deSouza and E. Sridharan, from Sage (www.indiasage.com) .

"Political parties in India enjoy a very low level of trust," reads a statement in the intro, which you may readily trust. It seems a 2004 survey on the public's trust-levels of institutions found that `even the police fared better'!

An interesting essay, dating back to 1980, is `A plea for the reconstruction of the Indian polity' by Jayaprakash Narayan.

He uses `an idiom of mathematics' to describe democracy as `a function of so many factors'. The house of democracy has `many mansions and many types of bricks', he describes. To Narayan, party system is okay, but not parliamentary democracy, which is `very expensive and appallingly wasteful'. General election, he avers, "creates unnecessary passion and excitement", and so should be abolished.

Rajni Kothari's essay discusses, among other topics, `Kamaraj Plan' - a 1963 proposal that sought to secure the voluntary relinquishment of ministerial posts to work for the party.

"It was not the removal `for party work' of the Central Ministers and Chief Ministers but the induction of party managers into positions of power at the national level which proved of greater consequence," comments Kothari. After Jawaharlal Nehru's death, though, people who had been `kamarajed' returned to the Government.

Four types of party systems that Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar identify in post-Independence India are: unipolar hegemony, bipolar convergence, multipolar convergence, and competitive divergence. In addition, there are three `irregular' systems, viz. one-party domination, closed one-party system, and system-less competition. If the last one looks like the easiest to understand, please note that it is a `widespread' malady!

One reason for the system-less-ness may be that "Indians have as many native words for protest as Eskimos have for snow," as Myron Weiner quips. "There can be satyagraha, or civil disobedience; gherao, or forcibly locking an official in his office; dharna, or general strike; morcha, or march; and there can be fasts, black flag demonstrations, work-stoppages, slowdowns, strikes, one-day walkouts, silent marches and long marches... "

Say `No' to zenana dabbas, urges Madhu Purnima Kishwar's piece. "Accepting the present scheme of 33 per cent permanent reservation for women is like demanding that some seats be reserved in every bus for women or the equivalent of a zenana dabba (ladies compartment) in every train," is a snatch of Kishwar's writing from http://indiatogether.com. "Men then come to expect women to remain confined to the ladies section and assume that all the rest of the seats are reserved for them."

Kishwar doubts if one-third reservation, or about 180 seats for women, will `empower' ordinary women citizens. She poses an aggressive question: "Has the presence of 500 plus male legislators in Parliament empowered the men of India?"

Thought-stirring.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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We have as many words for protest as Eskimos have for snow