In defence of the Independent Candidates

Shekhar Gupta has lent his journalistic ardour to what Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi have said before as an electoral polemic: a vote for an independent candidate is a vote against democratic politics. When the leading lights of a national party take a swipe at independents, one can attribute it to their electoral compulsion. But when a leading light of India’s journalistic fraternity castigates independents in both practical and normative terms, his arguments need to be taken seriously.

In his highly acclaimed ‘National Interest’ column (‘The Partyless Wonders’; Indian Express, May 2, 2009), Gupta makes the central argument in the middle of his column: ‘Imagine a Parliament of 543 individuals or where even 10 per cent of members have no party affiliation. Imagine the incoherence, the sheer anarchy. Such a thing has only been tried in the past by military dictators!’

But then the idea of partyless democracy was also fervently advocated by Jaya Prakash Narayan, who was an outstanding socialist thinker and no dictator; India can hardly boast of a leader with a deeper yearning for democracy.

So what is important is to consider the context and the intent of the argument.

Shekhar Gupta makes the context clear: … ‘The notion that you can invent a new politics where independents displace parties is not only fanciful, it is also undemocratic. The essence of parliamentary democracy is party system. All democracies are built around competing parties, ideologies, mass leaders, manifestoes.’

Gupta’s assertion is that all those who seek to undermine this version of democracy are against democracy per se. But, to me, it appears a flawed premise. After all, democracy presents limitless possibilities and one of the possibilities is meaningful intervention by those who are not hidebound by the limitations of partisan politics.

What has been the outcome of partisan politics, the independents ask. Gupta rightly encapsulates their arguments in following words: ‘if after electing 15 Parliaments a majority of our people is still so poor, suffer so much injustice and corruption… something has to change. The tricky part, however, is: how do you bring about that change? By joining and reforming the (democratic) system from within, or by challenging and wrecking it from outside, and then building a new one? Their current sentiment is to go with the latter. So, party politics is vile. It promotes vote bank politics, casteism and communalism, personality cult and sycophancy and keeps the really talented individual out.’

I think that is a succinct summing up of the character of party politics, as practised by our professional politicians. If you have a conscience and if you have the democratic urge to speak your mind on issues of seminal significance to the country, and your views happen to be at variance with that of the party leadership, then it is reasonable to assume that you will be promptly sidelined in or banished altogether from the party forum.

If you are a Congressman and try talking about internal democratic process to choose the party president or the party leader in Parliament, you must forget about a political career in Congress. If you are a saffronite and you say that Narendra Modi is a national shame that the party should do without, then you can be assured of your political obituary handed down to you   For the professional politician to survive and prosper, the benchmark is not loyalty to the party, and certainly not loyalty to the country, but the unequivocal loyalty to the supreme leader.

So it is wrong to say that the party system drives our democratic politics. As a matter of fact, our democracy is driven by a feudal oligarchy, by individual chieftains and their henchmen. It is a misnomer to call these outfits’ political parties. These are basically congregations of individuals who have mortgaged their conscience to a leader to access the opportunity to exercise power and make money. If you happen to join any of them, you are participating in what is essentially a charade of democratic politics.

Shekhar Gupta, of course, argues: ‘As the track record of two prime ministerial aspirants (Manmohan Singh and Advani) shows you, politics surely has place for honest people.’ But that is a half-truth. Yes, both of them are personally incorruptible; but there is no denying that they have remained at the top only because they have enabled others to make money on the sly.

The hard truth is, if you are alive to your responsibility as an enlightened citizen, you need to look outside the make-believe party system to intervene. And that is what some of the independent candidates are trying to do. Shekhar Gupta makes fun of them, ‘half-facetiously’, as he himself admits, as belonging to Cocktail Party of India, who will lose their deposits.

He makes a mistake by presenting under the rubric of independents only the high-profile candidates: G R Gopinath, Meera Sanyal, Jaya Prakash Narayan and Mallika Sarabhai – those who have got huge coverage in print and television media in the last four weeks. All of them are successful professionals in their respective fields and it would not be surprising if they are at ease in cocktail circuits.

Gupta makes a pertinent point: ‘It is certainly a great idea for professionals, entrepreneurs and activists to enter mainstream politics. But for that they have to first understand and respect politics and also to accept the heat and dust, the hard work… that go with it.’

Out of the four candidates that Gupta has singled out, this advice might be apt for three of them who have taken a break from professional career and entered the rough and tumble of politics during elections, but J P Narayan has been in the thick of it for over a decade and as Gupta himself has pointed out, he has been ‘very effectively active in areas of governance.’

Like Narayan, there are scores of others who have given a large part of their active life to social service and have entered the fray as independents to creatively intervene in the political process. They may not be well-known names as they are not media savvy, but they are no less serious practitioners of politics. Take the case of Sunil Gupta, a JNU topper in Economics, who could have got a lucrative job anywhere in the world, but made his base in Itarsi in Madhya Pradesh and worked for the uplift of the people. Lingaraj, another bright JNU alumnus, who is spearheading the popular movement for protection of river water in Bargarh in Orissa is in the electoral fray to seek popular mandate.

All of them have been through the ‘heat and dust’ of politics for years. They have entered the electoral fray because they respect politics and they want to rescue it from the big bosses with the money bags who have the final say in most policy decisions.

They may not succeed for now, but there is no reason why they should give up the fight.

India Today’s social journalism

Originally Published on15-07-2008 in indiainteracts.com

The first aim of the journalist is to interest; of the historian it is to instruct – of course the good journalist and the good historian try to do both, said A. J .P. Taylor, the noted historian. I am not so sure of good history-writing, but there is a lot of good journalism happening these days in India, the kind of journalism that not only draws the readers, but also stimulates them for social action.

Last week’s special issue of India Today (July 07, 2008) is a befitting example of this new brand of social journalism. In the introductory note to the issue devoted to the ‘Spirit of India: 50 pioneers of change’, Aroon Purie, the Editor-in-Chief, wrote: “Every day, all of us in the news business find ourselves surrounded by bad news: war, terrorism, natural disasters, national tragedies, economic crises. Yet, in a world full of adversity and hardship, we also know that people everywhere respond, and respond with great positivity, to the smallest stories of human endeavour. In a world of bad news, it is as if these stories about change for the better, about small acts of goodness enable people to renew their own faith in the future. It is with this in mind that India Today has decided to launch a series of special issues in 2008 celebrating the Spirit of India. We want to recognize and celebrate perseverance, optimism and unsung achievements that are to be found in this country.“

Here, unsung is the key word. After all, India Today has had a series of special issues on the powerful people of India, which invariably featured the usual suspects: those who had made it big, often by illegitimate means. They have always been the toast of the media, because with their swank cars, designer clothes and night-is-young parties, they are the staple of interesting news.

It was not that India Today was the only one to follow this path; the Times of India (TOI), the country’s highest circulated English daily, had at one point of time embargoed any news item that had anything to do with the poor, the starving or the tribes or anything the like as its market research team was seized of the insight that a majority of the readers of this elite newspaper did not want depressing news on its pages.

For quite some time, the TOI tried to be interesting, without being instructional. Presenting information in an entertaining way became its buzzword. Laxman’s Common Man, continued to provide food for thought, but the sorrows and agonies of the man on the street were virtually banished from the paper.

This was a phase when the publishers of the Times of India raked in a lot of money; the paper’s circulation increased manifold, but, as it turned out, it became a soulless behemoth. And the owners of the Times of India were soon to realize it. And then began the metamorphosis. Its obsession with the rich, the powerful and the sleaze, which was central to the newspaper, was relegated to the sidelines, to its glitzy supplements. The main newspaper recast itself, grappling with the issues and concerns of the lay man (and the woman), propelling the administration to act on their behalf.

Some may say that this is not radical enough; but, anyway, radical journalism is not the stuff of the mainstream media. If a newspaper succeeds in informing, and thereby empowering, the deprived sections to lay claim to their rights, it is a great tribute for its calling.

The turnaround came about not in the Times of India alone. There are many others who followed suit. The India Today seems to have joined the league for practising what Taylor called good journalism. Highlighting the unsung heroes is a testimony to it; it has marked a departure from the elitist perspective that the journal pursued for decades.

But, at the same time, one is constrained to say that strands of elitism persist, even in this special issue. The first person to be featured, in the galaxy of the 50, is Abhayanand, a senior police officer in Bihar who has played an important part in the Super 30 success story.