The Abysmal Decline of the Indian Political System - Part 2

 

The abysmal decline of the Indian political system – Part 2

                                                                                            Lalit K Kaul

The fall of V P Singh government that was formed under the banner of Janta Dal saw its splinter group Janta Dal Socialist coming to power with Sri Chandrasekhar as the Prime Minister. He was supported by the Congress party headed by Rajiv Gandhi. This was another act of opportunism that exposed the leaders like Chandrasekhar who had tooth & nail opposed Congress policies & emergency. However Congress withdrew support in less than six months even before he could face the Parliament. Thereafter he remained a care taker Prime Minister until elections were held in 1991.

No party got absolute majority in 1991 Lok Sabha elections & Sri P V Narsimha Rao of Congress headed a minority government. While the Kamandal politics had given the BJP 122 seats in the Parliament, the Mandal politics had divided the votes amongst various political parties each one claiming to be the messiah of the backward classes. The Congress government survived full five years after winning a no confidence motion that was alleged to have been won by buying the MPs of other political parties. So the Indian Parliament had come to such a sordid state of affairs that openly the MPs were purchased for casting a vote in the favour of the ruling party. Few years earlier to this sordid episode in the Indian Parliament, in the Haryana state the mass exodus of MLAs was engineered by Bhajan Lal of Congress from the other political outfit (Lok Dal) to form the government. Such MLAs came to be known as ‘aaya rams gaya rams’. From the state level political corruption the Indian parliamentary democracy had graduated to employ politically corrupt ways to usurp and retain power in the Parliament.

The fall out of the Congress party encouraging and implementing political corruption was that its two Prime Ministers were accused of corrupt practices for personal financial gains; Rajiv Gandhi in Bofors case and P V Narsimha Rao. Rao, the first Indian prime minister (in or out of office) to face trial on criminal charges, was found guilty in 2000, but his conviction was later overturned.

 

While the Indian society was being polarised on the lines of cast and religion, the sordid state of Indian economy (which had almost attained bankruptcy) no political party was interested in analysing the reasons for the same. There was no debate on this issue because more important than it was to decimate the Indian society to create assured vote banks.

 

The minority Congress government headed by Sri P V Narasimha Rao declared that globalization of the Indian economy and therefore its liberalization for integration with the world economy was the only way out to survive. So new regime was slowly but steadily put in to place and all kinds of foreign investments were encouraged and to facilitate that, many changes in the then existing rules and regulations were ushered in.

 

The slogan of globalisation and liberalisation was in fact a declaration that India is a beggar Nation because it is financially bankrupt; its mental faculties are also bankrupt because it on its own cannot envisage, plan for and create a socio-economic system that would be in keeping with the needs and aspirations of its people. The political ideologies were anyway the borrowed ones from the outside world and now the economics too was to be dictated by the economic perspectives of the world alien to the heterogeneous Indian society. What was in fact tantamount to subjugating our mind, body and soul to the dynamics of the outside world, was glorified to be an imaginative step in the right direction. This step was in fact the negation of all that the Indian independence movement had stood for and personified, because those who were to lead independent India never wanted to understand Hind Swaraj because they were over awed by that very World-view which had enslaved and brutally exploited the human and natural resources of the Indian subcontinent for nearly 250 years.   

 

This did not help the Congress in the 1996 general elections because the mushroom growth of BC leaders and Ram Bhaktas while covertly sailing with Congress in the Parliament, overtly registered their dissent not on the basic philosophy of the new economic model, but on its implementation. In addition to this the Masjid had fallen in the Congress regime. The message was sought to be sent to the gullible people of their respective constituencies that the Congress government was out to snatch their basic rights as safeguarded in Indian Constitution and was party to the demolition act of the Ram Bhakhtas. In addition to this nefarious political game played by all the political parties, the scams and rise in the number of cases registered with the Enforcement Directorate post globalisation and liberalisation also added to defeat of Congress party in 1996 general elections.

 

In 1996 general elections, BJP emerged as the single largest party, but could not muster support of any other group in the parliament and hence it survived for just 13 days. Thereafter many permutations & combinations were tried for India to see two Prime Ministers in a span of just two years, each one under different political arrangement. The division was not ideological because all the political parties had endorsed Congress party’s new economic regime and all had equally endorsed cast based politics. It was only politics of opportunism that had created such a scenario. While BJP had gone all out in polarising the society on Hindu Muslim line by demolishing what was called Babri Masjid, the other political parties sensing threat to their survival chose to isolate BJP and in fact it became an island party. Breaking a structure is much simpler than mobilizing an opinion for ushering in cast based politics because it has to deal with a huge mass with huge inertia. Therefore to ensure that a large scale migration to the Ram Bhaktas camp does not happen, the BJP had to be declared as pariah.

 

On the other hand the BSP chief Mayawati chose to become chief minister in 1997 and 2002 with outside support from BJP!  BJP which had not only been branded as communal, but also an upper cast party and in contrast BSP represented SC/ST and backwards & Muslims! Here was another example of how ideology can be given a go by for the sake of grabbing power.

 

BJP was no exception; it was always prepared to forget Ram for the sake of power. Post 1998 general elections, it managed   to put together a coalition government by putting Ram temple, Article 370 and uniform civil code on a back burner. The government of Sri Vajpayee lasted 13 months. BJP chose to make many alterations in what used to be their very hardened and considered publicly declared issues of national interests, for the sake of acquiring power at the Centre. So it chose to totally lose its identity by forsaking its avowed principled stand on certain issues concerning the Indian Nation and following the path of economic development as set forth by the Congress and approved by all the political parties. Thus it put up a bigger coalition and ruled the country from the year 1999 to 2004.

The 2004 & 2009 parliamentary elections, the Congress fought under Sonia Gandhi who was also its President. Thus the party declared that only a particular family can rule no matter what their nationality is. That the Congress party could not elect any other Congressman as its president and had to rely upon a house wife from Italian origin speaks volumes about the degeneration from being a grand old party to being the subject of a family.

 

Congress won both the elections & gave the people a government full of scandals & scams; the party who piloted this country on to the path of globalization & liberalization did not hesitate to use this very system to bleed the nation to its last drop.

 

Congress lost in 2014 parliamentary elections & for the first time in the history of Indian parliamentary democracy the BJP attained absolute majority on its own. BJP continued with the economic policies as started by the Congress party government and buried the issues of Article 370, common civil code & Ram temple.

The Supreme Court of India chose to adjudicate on the Ram temple issue as also on the issue of reservations to the BCs. Thus it endorsed the divisive political agenda of political parties & this intervention of the Supreme Court provided a highly frictionless escape route for all the Ram Bhakhtas parties and the Mandal parties to fool people on the issues of completion of Ram temple and enhanced quota of reservations for the BCs, by saying that every ball is in the Supreme Court’s court.

The farce of Indian democracy and its electoral politics glares at each one of us because if each political party had come in to existence because its philosophy of governance of Indian society was different from others then it made sense to have any number of them. Every political party agrees with implementing the ‘reforms’ as envisaged under the regime of globalisation and liberalisation; they agree with the political ideology of dividing the Indian society on the basis of different casts and pitching them one against the other for sake of vote bank politics. Even the communists do not have any philosophy of development that is different from others because if they had they could have demonstrated that in West Bengal & Tripura and set the example for others.

 

So this country in fact requires only one party rule!  If all the satraps could sit together and come to a common understanding about the tenure of each one & their generation next at the centre and in the states, they would at once agree to merge in to one party.

In a political regime wherein the very existence of political parties is questionable from the point of view of what useful purpose is being served by their being, that political regime is bound to degenerate because ideology gets confined to dustbins of different sizes and colours and power acquiring remains the singular aim.