Can politics be cleansed from within?

If you can’t beat them, join them! This is an old adage into which it is possible to read two meanings. Both have to do with a context in which you consider it essential for your own purpose to transform the attitudes and approaches of any group of individuals, whatever their field of activities, to your ways of thinking or doing things, and your efforts to that end encounter repeated setbacks.

According to one way of looking at it, you can give up, and instead of wasting any more time, join hands with the members of the group, even if they be your rivals, opponents, adversaries, whatever, and become an indistinguishable part of them, for good or evil, benefiting from all their strengths and facilities. Thereby, you get peace of mind and share the spoils. Members of mafias, in particular, find this expedient helpful in avoiding the gruesome prospect of physical elimination by rival groups!

Or, the other way, especially when your aim is to bring about an improvement, or undertake a cleansing process, is to join the group, not to merge yourself with it, but with the set objective of working from within to change for the better the systems, practices, habits of thought and modes of action. What other way of cleaning the gutter, except by getting into it?

GENERAL IMPRESSION

But does this apply to politics? Is politics a gutter? In its classical meaning, it is not, and in its actual working, it need not be. By definition, it is the art or science of government, concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy or with winning and holding control over a government. In its origins, it has always been taken as a noble profession. As long ago as in 1935, Rt. Hon’ble V. S. Srinivasa Sastri, the only Indian who had had the unique honour of being a Privy Councillor and was hailed by Englishmen themselves as a ‘silver-tongued orator of the British Empire’, was amused when introduced to a gathering as one who had shown in his life that it was possible to be ‘a politician and a gentleman at the same time’.

Sastri’s response that it was ‘‘hard for a politician to attain the impartiality, the courtesy and the honourable standards of a gentleman’’, makes it evident that even in those days of freedom struggle, with the likes of Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel, Rajaji and Kamaraj symbolising the spirit of selflessness, simplicity and sacrifice, the general impression entertained by the people about politicians was poor.

Among the last exemplars of that kind of nobility we saw during the fight against colonialism and imperialism and maybe for a few years after Independence, Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan devoted a whole life time striving to cleanse politics from the outside.

TOTAL REJECTION

Gandhiji was not even a four-anna member of the Indian National Congress, and JP refused to enter politics and the government, despite entreaties from Jawaharlal Nehru himself, and preferred to mobilise the people’s power in the form of total revolution and the like, against the rot in politics and ill-effects of bad governance.

The abysmal failure of both Gandhiji and JP to leave a legacy of clean politics speaks for itself when you survey today’s India in which cut-throat culture, mega-scams, money bags, fat cats and mafias flourish, and opulence and ostentation hit one between the eyes whichever way you turn.

Some others have thought of entering the gutter in order to clean it. The first was Rajaji who formed the Swatantra Party as a counterpoise and corrective to the political degeneration as he saw it.

M. S. Udayamurthi, the progenitor of the Makkal Sakthi Iyakkam (People’s Power Movement), was next to enter electoral politics, only to meet with total rejection at the hustings.

Jayaprakash Narayan, a retired IAS officer, the founder of Lok Satta (also meaning people power) and Arvind Kejriwal, the acolyte of Anna Hazare, with his Aam Aadmi Party have now plunged into politics. The former is the sole MLA of his party in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly, while the latter is yet to open his innings.

But going by the collapse of previous experiments by well-meaning activists, there is only a remote chance of their making any greater impact on conventional politics and their attempts to cleanse politics from within being attended with any greater success.

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