Thursday, February 19, 2015

Indian Political Trends : Part I.The second coming of Aam Admi : The politics of despair and hope



                                                                                                          John Samuel
Politics plays out through multiple negotiations of power and perceptions.  Within the context of a nation-state, the politics of the state is in constant negotiation with the politics of the people, particularly in relation to the promises made, actual performance and people’s perceptions. The legitimacy of a government often depends on the organic link between the promises and performance and how perceptions are created or managed to derive the legitimacy required to survive in power. This social contract is based on the legitimacy of power, core principles of governance, and the performance of the government. However, the principle of the new social contract also includes accountability, transparency, responsiveness, inclusiveness and participation as an integral part of political legitimacy. When there is a disjuncture between the principles, promises, performance and general perception, there is a crisis of political legitimacy. This often plays out in multiple ways through the electoral process.
The recent election to the Delhi state assembly in many ways indicates multiple shifts in the Indian political and democratic process.  The electoral performance of a particular party or a candidate  is indicative of the general mood or perception of a particular electorate within a socio-political context. The nature and character of such verdicts also indicate the possible shifts in the perception and power dynamics within a given society at a particular point in time. In the last fifty years, Indian politics and its democratic process have witnessed different shifts in the way power and perception are negotiated through the electoral network and performances.

What does the landslide victory of AAP in the recent Delhi Assembly Election indicate? There have been hundreds of analytical articles and perspectives offered after the rather unprecedented electoral performance of a relatively new political party. The responses vary from jubilation, celebration, and cautioned optimism, critical appreciation to scepticism, grudging admiration and explicit dismissiveness.  While the traditional political parties and other fellow-travellers are seriously trying to understand the new challenger on the horizon, the outward posturing is that of bravado along with deep scepticism.   It is expected that when a ‘credible’ threat risks upsetting the core business of established political parties, there will certainly be opposition to the new actor with a new political agenda competing in the same market for power and perception. This is part of the reason that many of the established political parties and their die-hard believers look with a microscope to find fault with the AAP or anybody and its associates.  Some are concerned about the lack of ‘ideological’ clarity and purity of AAP, while others are simply being dismissive that such passing aberrations happened and disappeared in the past. Some are sure that the AAP is not going to perform and are certain that the party will slowly transform and become like any other traditional political party. A large group are convinced that the AAP is actually a B team of the BJP as a part of the Nagpur plan of RSS, while others are worried about the ‘upper-caste’ character of AAP and how it is not pro-women or pro-dalit etc.  All such responses follow the same old expected pattern, though those who predicted the decimation and eventual disappearance of AAP seem to be a bit concerned and worried about the potential and possibilities of a new challenger to demolish the vote share and ‘electoral’ market of the established actors.
Politics, particularly electoral politics, is a messy affair.  Clean slates of fresh values, ideals or rhetoric of lofty principles are attributes we expect of the people in a perfect world, although in the real world of imperfections, electoral politics reflects the tensions, compromises, aspirations, anxieties, prides and prejudices of society. The relevance or irrelevance of a political formation is within a given space and time. As such, its ability to negotiate with the diverse perceptions and its relative competence to validate them relative to that of other actors, remain in an ambivalent grey zone.
The rather unprecedented victory of the AAP indicates the politics of despair as well as politics of hope. The politics of despair arises from the wide-spread discontent against authoritarian tendencies, the increasing gap between promises and performance, the big difference between rhetoric and reality as well as a widely shared concern about the insecurities of minority communities. The politics of hope was largely due to the positive agenda of clean inclusive politics that promised more responsive governance, free of corruption.  Politics of hope is also due to the promises made to the poor and marginalised communities, particularly in relation to water, electricity, schools and health facilities.  While there are many sceptics and critics of the politics of AAP, the victory of AAP has rekindled the hope in Indian democracy amongst millions of ordinary people across India.
There are three underlying trends that indicate a shift in the Indian political process and the emergence of a new generation of political actors and leaders in the next ten years. These are:
a) Internal and external crisis of traditional political parties and a marketisation of electoral politics.
b) The emergence of a new civic politics and monitory democracy.
c) The emergence of an aspiring as well as vulnerable new middle class across India.
These trends need to be seen in the context of an increasingly entrenched nexus between corporate business elites and political elites on the one hand and the nexus between corporate driven media and political perceptions on the other. While the process of governance is taken over by a new nexus of bureaucratic –technocratic- policy elites, there is an increasing marginalisation of poor and marginalised communities, covered up in the rhetoric of ‘good governance’ and ‘development’. The emergence of new politics is a result of multiple discontents in the traditional Indian political and governance process.

1)   Crisis of political parties and marketisation of electoral politics

 Representative democracy largely operates through established multi-party political process. The health of a democracy and political process is to a large extent dependent upon the health of a political party system in a given country. In the first fifty years of Independence, the main-stream political parties such as the Indian National Congress, Left Parties, and regional parties and then the Jan-Sangh/BJP negotiated the representational democracy through the institutional structures and process of the political parties. However, when an established political party became the power-establishment, contestation between individual interests and the broader ideals of political parties became a primary issue. Those with the resources influence and power (inherited or acquired) began to dominate the political party process.  Most of the political parties began as membership based socio-political movements with mass participation.  However, now, with the emergence of a neoliberal era, we see ‘market forces’ dominating public policy, social choices, and the media, eventually dominating the perceptions of the people. We see that politics itself has been reduced to ‘selling’ a product/brand/ image in the market place for votes. Election campaigns began to be less and less membership driven and started looking more and more like a performance or an advertisement campaign designed to alter perceptions and thus rope in the votes.

This ‘marketisation’ of electoral politics that was used for manipulating perceptions and voter-choices began to undermine the traditional structures of political parties at the grassroots level. Those at the grassroots level became mere implementers of an “advertising” or “marketing” based campaign strategy designed by the experts for the top-leadership. In other words, the grassroots members of political parties were robbed off their “sense of agency” and eventually “sense of ownership”.
The marketisation of electoral politics and top-down management of political parties looked more ‘efficient’ and effective to keep the “electoral competitive edge” of established political parties. However, marketisation of any product or process or institutions requires funds and investments. And in the neoliberal era, the big-time corporate houses or business interests began to invest in elections, political parties, and leaders. The process that began in the late eighties emerged as a well-oiled nexus, in the last twenty five years, between the corporate and political elites.

While  elections have become a market exercise for influencing and capturing vote share, the media was reduced to a negotiating agent used by political managers and business investors, and political parties began to be dominated by ‘up-ward’ mobile career- politicians.  In this sense, market, media and management began to influence the political party establishments. Those with links in the market, media and management began to dominate the structures and decision making bodies of most of the political party establishments.  In the last twenty years, we see that the grassroots fund-raising or member-ship drives of most of the political parties declined and the total budgets and funds from the corporate lobby increased exponentially. Political parties themselves also found investors to launch media channels for the party propaganda, and entertainment. This also meant that those with the blessings of big businesses or major donors to political parties began to get seats and acquire political clout in different parties. Millionaires could easily buy themselves into seats in the parliament or even join a political party at the very top. As political parties have become new “investment vehicles” in the neoliberal era for “policy returns” and “tax-rebates”, politics itself has become a ‘dhanda’ – a business.  And ‘crony capitalism’ was  seen as a part of the entrenched nexus between few corporate elites and political elites. In the process electoral democracy was made a ‘means’ for elite capture of the state.  The intrinsic political ethics of democracy got replaced by the instrumentalist market approach of using ‘electoral politics’ as a means to amass power and wealth. This has cumilately undermined the  political and social legitimacy of the mainstream-political party establishment as well as the claims of ‘good governance’, ‘economic growth’ etc wherein pro-poor policies were seen more as ‘populist’ or ‘freebies’ to contain dissent or to get votes.

Corporatisation of Political Parties

As politics became a business establishment with the essential corporate components of revenue, expenditure, investment, incentives, media management, network management and branding, those with such skills and competence began to dominate the political parties. The emergence of technocratic retainers and managers in the 1990s is largely due to the shift in the business model of political parties.  Along with the corporatisation  of political parties and managerial dominance in the decision making,  most of the political parties ended up becoming closely held private companies;  either family owned private enterprises operating in the public sphere providing a certain political service or publicly held large enterprises controlled by a power-cartel or family-held managerial clique.  The ‘entrepreneurial’ approach of political parties with business strategies, product, process etc in a way de-politicised  main-stream political party establishments, as ‘ideology’ was either for profiling or branding and the interests of the stakeholders began to  take precedence over the the original ideals of the party. Slogans no longer emanated organically from the grassroots members, but were carefully crafted by PR agents in the bellies of a few advertising companies. Leaders began to hire PR agencies and consultants to ‘manage’ their ‘image’ and profile in the media so that they could maintain perceptions and thus maintain their vote bank. Political parties have become electoral networks where ‘politics’ itself began to get ‘out sourced’;   media was managed through  PR companies  or hired professionals; party events were managed by ‘event management’ companies; and election campaigns were managed by hired  staff. All these required immense monetary power
While in the seventies and early eighties, election expenditure was primarily raised from people and locally managed, from the 1990s, election funds came from the top and the campaign strategies and advertisement campaigns were centrally managed. So in the first thirty years of independence, being a political activist meant giving up many comforts and the key concern was ‘how can I or we contribute to the party or a cause’. But in the last twenty years, there has been a perceptible shift at the grassroots as those who got active began to ask the question: ‘what do I get from the party’. When election campaigns imitated corporate advertising campaigns, or a reality show on the TV studios, the grassroots workers of political parties refused to work without clear ‘incentives’ and in elections this incentive meant ‘money’. Those who contested elections to the Lok Sabha and Assembly began to pay for the workers ‘time and energy’ while also covering almost every other expense.  Volunteers and voluntarism diminished or simply disappeared. Thus elections have become very expensive; much beyond the reach of ordinary people or the aam- admi and aurats to contest. The success of political leaders began to be seen in proportion to the funds and money he/she controlled.  Bigger the party and bigger the leaders, the bigger were the need for financial resources and this also exponentially increased the rate of legitimate and illegitimate ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour or corruption in the political class. The predominance of corporate money, often circulated as unaccounted black money, subverted the quality of democratic politics and political party establishments. Often, the money collected through corruption was sent out of the country through ‘havala’ route and a significant number of politicians or their kith and kin became investors or highly paid senior staff of such companies. A part of such corrupt money got back to the country in the pet-name of ‘foreign direct investment’ through shell companies registered in Tax-Havens.

Macro-Governance and Local Governance as power-sharing arrangement

In the last twenty five years, there was a clear division between macro-politics and ‘local politics’. With the enactment of the 73rd and 74th amendments, there was an opportunity for a clear division of a power-sharing arrangement. Local party workers and leaders got the incentive of being elected in the local government institutions and local government institutions too offered some amount of power paraphernalia (vehicles, sitting fees, privileges etc.) and significant budgets to implement the government programmes. The macro-politics of the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies were managed centrally and the decisions were made by a small group of people and the seat distribution began to depend on ‘winnability’ , ‘user value’ or ‘loyalty quotient’. This power management within the political parties reflected the new configuration and alignment between macro-power and micro power in consonance with macro-governance and local governance.  The policies were increasingly decided by a bureaucratic-technocratic elites, the political parties were managed by a nexus of political and business elites, and political party structures were filled with loyalists of one kind or the other where votes were managed through the caste/identity network While this division of power-arrangement between local government and state/central government looked like an effective system of managing power incentives within political parties, it also eventually killed the volunteer base or mass base committed to the ideology, programme and politics of a given party.

 While there was a political incentive for those local party leaders with loyalty to the top leadership, there was no political or material incentive for the ordinary people for their loyalty to a political party on the ground. And this loyalty at local level began to shift to identity –networks based caste, creed, new religious/denominational affiliations.. When the mass- volunteer base of many political parties declined, they began to be increasingly dependent  on the caste/identity networks or institutions to reach out to the ‘vote-banks’.

When the rhetoric of policy promises and promised economic growth failed to deliver on the ground and when the stories of corruption could not be controlled in the era of the internet and social networking, discontent on the ground among the ordinary people and masses has been increasing. Many of them felt they have no stake in politics. They became simply voters and unsatisfied ‘consumers’ of services provided by the government.


It is this discontent on the ground among the common people and the legitimacy deficit of the traditional parties that the new political formation the Aam Aadmi Party (‘common people’s party) tried to mobilize and began to project as a counter discourse in the method of party politics. They began to build the volunteer base many political parties lost in the last twenty years; they began to mobilize the ideas, expertise and imagination of a large number of young people. They began to enter in to the grey political and social spaces vacated by the Indian National Congress and BJP. Hence the victory of the AAP is also indicative of the crisis within the political parties and also the crisis of governance wherein a political policy and technical experts began to dominate.

No comments: