Understanding Popular Angst Against Politics
*Saumitra Mohan

The attack on Mumbai and its aftermath had resulted in a lot of drama and symbolisms with popular shock and disgust being experienced against politics and politicians. But, it needs no reiteration to say that no country can be run without a leader or many leaders at different levels howsoever they may be. Whatever political system we may have, the leaders shall always be required and so they shall continue to exist. This is more truthful for a democratic country like ours.

While much of this antipathy and revulsion may be seemingly justified, the same is definitely not wholesome for the health of our polity. After all, it is the political class or leadership from which are elected the peoples’ representatives who finally go on to form our government. A country without acceptable and responsible political leadership is actually an invitation to anarchy and chaos of the worst kind. While this revulsion seemed to be against all kinds of political leaders, this was actually targeted against a particular set of leaders who could practically be changed and replaced by the same people who have taken cudgels against them.

Have not the same people chosen and elected the leaders they are protesting against? The politics of a country is actually the reflection of the character of the larger society as our political class is actually a sub-set of the same. We get what we deserve. So, if we are not pleased with a particular set of leaders, it is well nigh in our hands to change and replace the same. The issue at hand is not of finding fault and pointing fingers, but that of finding and ferreting out problems and fixing the same.

This outrage against politicians is also an outrage against politics, but here again, the common man is on the wrong foot because we also cannot do without politics. Someone has rightly said, ‘whatever we may do or say, we may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in us’. And politics is not only about all the wrong things that we have come to identify it with, but it is actually about all the positive things we do not associate it with. Etymologically speaking, politics originated from the Greek word ‘polis’, referring to the ‘city-state’ of Greece. Hence, politics means activities or affairs relating to the welfare of the ‘city-state’. Now the same has come to be identified with the acts and activities pertaining to the welfare of the modern sovereign state. Ergo, politics is the very basis of our lives and we just cannot do without it. It is just so essential to our living.

Politics operates at every level, starting from an inter-personal relationship in a family to a business organisation to the political system as we have come to know it. We just cannot do without it. After all, it provides us the basic life-blood for organizing our community living by instilling a sense of order and regulation throughout our corporate and communal living. In fact, the people busy protesting against politicians, perhaps don’t realise that they themselves are indulging in politics by such acts of theirs. By leading hundreds of thousands of people across Indian cities and towns, they had quietly taken over the role of a political leader. And whether they accept it or not, their act was very much political.

In all this, the ‘Homo Politicus’ or the members of our political class also have to understand the sentiment lying behind these protests and hate campaigns against them. They too have a duty to take their cue and set their house in order. After all, modern liberal democracy is increasingly getting more complex and difficult to handle. Now the means of information and communication have penetrated the civil society so deeply that a citizen even in the remotest village is reasonably informed about the happenings in different corners of the country. Now, s/he is also more capable of culling and processing information and analysing the same to find out the truth in his/her own way. As Abraham Lincoln had said, ‘you could fool some people most of the time or most people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.

So, the time has actually come for our political class to come together to not only change the way things happen but to also change the way they have been doing their politics. The time has come to change the way they have been recruiting members for their organisations. Our politics and political culture still do not encourage young and promising men and women to plump for politics as a career. Politics, which throws up political leaders who eventually lead the country, is still not considered good enough to be taken as a career option. Still, the majority of political recruits are those who fail to make a mark academically or in other fields.

The reactions of some members of our political class in the wake of this revulsion and protest by counter-maligning these expressions of protests were also not in order as one would have expected them to be much nuanced and sobered than they actually were. After all, being leaders they are supposed to shape and lead from the front rather than coming out with another set of negatives as a counter to publicly-expressed sense of outrage. Politics, like any other thing, comes in a package. If you have loved the popular adulation and admiration, then you ought to be ready for the kind of revulsion and outrage as were noticed in recent times.

The tendency of a section of our political class to build the war hysteria is also not in order as that may not take us anywhere. It is more than true and established that a neighbouring country has been bent on ‘bleeding India through thousand cuts’. But the fact also remains that if we can set our own house in order, they could never do anything to us. After all, the terrorists who allegedly came from Pakistan came through our sea lanes, walked our roads, entered our hotels and finally executed their appointed tasks. And if they could all do these with ease, do not we ourselves have to blame somewhere.

We have accepted and acknowledged the security and intelligence lapses which happened and we have to guard against the same if we are to ward off their recurrence in future. Our preventive and pre-emptive actions including our intelligence gathering and processing have to be better and more effective than they have been. The proposed setting up of the ‘National Investigation Agency’ and reinforcement of other relevant laws further are definitely steps in the right direction.

While we need to cautious all the times, the terrorist needs just a single opportunity or one oversight on our part to strike all over again. So, we can never afford to lower our guard. But even with all our resources, it is just not possible to man and police each and every inch of the length and breadth of this country. So more than anything else, we need a conscientious and responsible citizen who needs to be careful and cautious all the times. After all, these are not normal times. We can not only blame our political class or the Government and free ourselves of all our responsibilities that devolve upon us as a citizen of this country. After all, it is the people who are the real leaders in a democracy.

One feels that that concept of ‘Neighbourhood Watch’ and ‘Community Policing’ needs to be operationalized more than is done presently. The National Cadet Corps, National Service Scheme and our Civil Defence systems should be further reinforced and be made more broad-based. Their beefing up would mean educating and training common citizens for the purposes of reinforcing our internal security system. Having more watchful and responsible citizens should solve much of our problems. We also need to upgrade the basic security measures. It should be made compulsory for the crowded establishments including markets, malls, hotels, cafeteria, restaurants, hospitals and education centres to put in place basic security measures including installation of security gates, latest metal/explosive detectors, installation of close-circuit cameras and a system of identity check besides building a city surveillance system by the local police.

New Religion for New Times: Some Reflections
Saumitra Mohan

Even as India grapples with the after-effects of a raging economic recession, one very positive but significant development in the country has gone markedly unnoticed. This relates to the recent declaration and signing of a ‘fatwa’ against terror by the 6000 odd Muslim clerics under the leadership of Darul Uloom Deoband. This has been done with the intent to disentangle and dissociate terror from ‘Jihad’. That is a message for non-Muslims who are driven to a negativism about Islam by their misplaced identification of this faith with terror. This also sends a strong message to those of the faith who are not well up on the scriptures and, therefore, may be led into violence by the twisted reasoning of extremists who identify ‘terror’ with ‘Jihad’.

These 6000 clerics also seem to have taken a conscious decision to establish counselling centres for the Muslim youths to wean them away from terrorism. This act would significantly help tackle the so-called menace of Islamic fundamentalism, if at all such a thing exists. After all, fundamentalism of any genre cannot and ought not to be logically associated with any particular religion as that goes against anything and everything that a religion stands for.

The religious fundamentalism generally stems from a confused communalism which has really been a bane of our times. Here, by communalism one means ‘the tendency to associate oneself with the perceived welfare and promotion of one’s community by any means’, thereby enlarging the scope of communalism to also include casteism, regionalism, linguistic chauvinism and of course, religious fundamentalism among others. It is this pathological communalism of one or the other hue which usually informs the basic contents of politics and politicking of a significant section of the political class in our country. And one really feels that unless and until one can tackle and fix this aspect of our political culture, our nation building process remains endangered, to say the least.

Today, it is religious fundamentalism of one or the other genus which is the major threat to international peace and security as well as visualised by Samuel Huntington in his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. If Islamic fundamentalism within and without our country has been a major problem, then Hindu fundamentalism as a counter to the former is also no less of a problem to be fixed in time before it shapes up for uglier turns. At least, that is what seems to be the message from the latest revelations into the Malegaon blasts. As a country, we have been witness to the most hideous forms of religious communalism from time to time, be it during the birth of this country, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 or in 1990, 1992, 2002, now in Kandhamal in Orissa or at other times in the forms of smaller and sporadic conflagrations.

Caste, linguistic or regionalist riots have also been a routine, but cancerous fixture of our body politic which immediately needs to be surgically excised in the better interest of the health of our beloved nation. It is because of this negative, noxious and macabre quality attributed to religion that Karl Marx called ‘religion as an opium of the masses’ which a section of our political class has always found convenient to harness for their petty politicking as a sedative potion to numb the basic senses of hoi polloi to further their nefarious and incendiary agenda.

Philosophically speaking, it is believed by many that multiple mutants of religion germinated and grew in different parts of the world because of the fact that different societies developed in different parts of the world detached from each other. These societies desperately wanting to end the ‘nasty, brutish and poor’ Hobbesian state of nature needed something to regulate and regiment their daily lives with as also to explain the various questions, scruples, doubts and nature’s mysteries. It is to fill this void that religion came to be developed, but owing to absence of adequate means of communications and transportations among different societies, there developed different types of religions. Hence, the existence of multiple religions in our societies. And all these religions have been playing a role since then, often larger than one ever expected them to.

Today, religion has come to suffuse and infuse the major part of human ontology, often playing larger than life roles, really unwarranted for our times. One feels that as human society is more developed now, has resolved many of nature’s mysteries, overcome its many depredations and now that the means of transportations and communications have afforded us an excellent opportunity to cull out the best aspects and features of sundry world religions, the time has come to revise and modify not only the contents of religion, but also the roles it has been playing. It we don’t reinvent the religion to better suit the genius of our times then, it would be sooner than later that religion, which rendered yeoman’s service to humanity at different points of time, would not only prove to be a major impediment in the growth of the human society, but shall actually preside over the destruction of the same.

One really feels that religion has played enough havoc with our lives to deserve further continuance in the form in which it exists and subsists now. The sensible sections of our political class along with equally sensible sections of the religious leaders have a major role to play here. The way religion influences our day-to-day lives today, it is well nigh impossible to uproot and extirpate it completely, but it can definitely be shaped up differently to better suit our needs. The attempts have been made in our very own country by the ilks of Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Kabir, or other great philosophers including Bahaullah the world over, but all have succeeded partially because of one or the other reasons. In fact, all such attempts actually helped spawn more religions than reducing and telescoping different religions into one overarching metaphysical code for the human being.

We need to rediscover the religion, if not reinvent it in the form of a more humane and humanitarian tool to allow the human society to lead a peaceful corporate life. We ought not to allow, any longer, different religions to continue competing with each other for the supremacy and greatness of one or the other, thereby creating powder keg of a situation which could ignite a major conflagration to engulf the relatively young intelligent life on this Blue Planet. One does feel that one can not completely tear religion away from one’s life because of the inability of science to provide many answers and explanations and because of the purgatory and other functional roles it plays. For example, religion has a positive role to play in the way it creates and provides various social occasions for the adherents to come together to celebrate the beauty of human life. Such functional roles are important to promote a corporate and community living as well as to exercise basic regimentation and regulation over more than necessary deviant individualism and bohemianism in human societies.

But beyond this, if we allow religion to dictate and regulate even the secular aspects of our living, then it would start playing the kind of havoc it has been playing for quite some time, hence the need for its rediscovery. One really feels that the existence of numerous religions is not advisable and healthy for our times. We can very well combine and collate the best features of different religions of this world to have a single overarching religion. It would not only banish the need for religious bigotry and incendiary fundamentalism from our midst, but would also fix the many baneful complexities associated with it. However, doing so definitely does not mean immediately removing all the culturally and socially functional features including festivals that have come to be associated with different religions. In fact, they can very well continue in their improved and sanitized adaptations as parts of the new world religion.

Cooperative Globalism: Need of Our Times
*Saumitra Mohan

The raging economic recession the world over has shown and proven beyond doubts the dilemmas and pitfalls of unfettered globalization. Today, it is very much acknowledged and accepted that closed economy in a globalized liberal world is oxymoronic. So, more globalization is something which has been taken for granted. While all along we all thought that the Indian economy is well placed and inherently strong enough not to be affected by the US recession, but now we know that the complex economic independence a la Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane has grown intense and dense enough as to make it next to impossible to insulate one’s economy completely from being affected by the external factors.

What is surprising is the failure to recognise the fact that today a seemingly nationalist issue or a national crisis is not completely because of some internal factors, but is actually spurred and aggravated by the external factors which are often beyond our ken and control. Such crises provide the best opportunities to get our act together to put up the best policy responses. But the act of shutting one’s economy or closing up on more imports or framing stringent immigration policies is, in fact, prejudicial to the ethos of our times. Having liberalised and globalised our economies, we just cannot go back to the days of narrow nationalism.

The so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ around which the extant economic-financial architecture was constructed has actually been wanting in many respects. Western countries, who have been the principal promoters of the ‘open door’ neo-classical economic policies have themselves never been firm believers in their own ideology as reflected in their befuddled policy responses. While they have strongly espoused free movement of capital, they have always opposed free movement of labour. Again, while they have always promoted transfer of primary goods and natural resources from the South to the North, they have never been true votaries of transfer of technologies, as also reflected in their stringent patent laws. They desire unhindered access to our markets, but would not allow similar access to their markets and technologies, further mirrored in their different tariff and non-tariff barriers.

While they have been busy polluting the earth all these years by way of unsustainable consumerism, they now want the Third World to shoulder the major burden in the proposed ‘clean-up’ act without also wanting to share the requisite technology or financial resources needed for the purpose. Not only that, while they have all benefitted from a reckless and feckless colonial and neo-colonial economic development policy, they now want us to cut our consumption and stop growing without in any way agreeing to lower their stinking consumerism.

The West actually got inebriated at the ideological victory of liberal capitalism in the aftermath of the collapse of the former Soviet Union as symbolised in the theoretical assumptions of Francis Fukuyama namely ‘the End of History’. The West never realised that the capitalism of today is not really the unadulterated capitalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but is actually its more tempered and sanitized self imbibing many features of communism and socialism. The best of the two systems have well harmonised in the form of democratic welfarism or welfare capitalism as it exists now in the so-called liberal capitalist societies. The recent economic crises of South-East Asia and the extant domino-like fall of big financial or industrial houses has further led some observers to point to the failure of the ‘State’ to play the role of an impartial and effective arbitrator to manage the anarchical world system though diametrically contrary views have also been equally stronger.

Today, the globalised world provides ample windows on rest of the world via demonstration effect to afford a comparative analysis and appreciation of one’s situation thereby arousing the sense of dissatisfaction and discontent among the not so privileged sections of the global population. While we have healthy, educated and economically well-off sections of the global society, we also have unenlightened, uneducated and very poor sections of the global majority. This also results in ‘development of underdevelopment’, something which the ECLA (Economic Committee of Latin America) school led by Andre Gunder Frank and his contemporaries identified long back. So, one thing that we all need to realise immediately is the fact that we can no longer afford the continued co-existence of islands of affluence and vast deserts of underdevelopment simultaneously as that opens the door to discords and disaffections. Religious terrorism, Naxalite extremism and separatist violence are examples of the same.

What one means to emphasise here is the fact that today the State is no longer a self-confident, self-reliant unit which can handle all its problems on its own and which can actually provide the proverbial security to all the nationals through its unquestioned monopoly over the use of coercive force. The ‘sovereign’ quality characterising the State has already come under severe attack from different quarters, so the very concept of ‘nation-state’ is on the retreat. Today, we have non-state actors within and without the state boundaries with many features of the State and who thereby severely compromise state’s capacity to secure its nationals, the basic purpose for which the citizens entered into a ‘Covenant’ with the State. Today, the inter-continental ballistic missiles, international organisations, international business organisations, international laws, global finance capital, multi-national and trans-national companies, internet and other sophisticated means of communication and transportation and many such factors don’t recognise national boundaries thereby severely denting the concept of sovereignty.

Against such a background, it is definitely not advisable to be unilateralist while trying to resolve one’s national problems. These problems are global in nature and have their origins in globalised external factors. They need global solutions rather than individualised nationalist approach as reflected in the protectionist behaviour of many countries. The penchant for unilateralist interventions in other countries internal affairs and employing a subservient United Nations to endorse the same is also unwholesome and calls for a change of attitude from those at the top of the international pecking order.

It is really high time that the North and the South got together to identify the core issues and problems facing the world today and come out with uniform approach for resolving the same. We not only have to ensure a sustainable development paradigm for promising a better future to the posterity, but also have to ensure that the same is done without encouraging unhealthy tendencies and forces as might necessitate the prophets of doom like Samuel Huntington to declaim a ‘clash of civilisations’ sooner than later. The West has long battened and fattened through colonial or neo-colonial policies and developed at the expense of the developing and underdeveloped countries. They cannot completely absolve themselves from their responsibility to shoulder the burden of providing the basic level of comfort and development for the underprivileged denizens of the South. Joseph Stiglitz has rightly identified the pitfalls of unfettered globalisation underscoring the need rendering it more humane, simultaneously also halting the dispossession of the poor and the indigent.

The truth remains that in an unequal world with unequal resources in unequal circumstances, we cannot ask different segments of global population to compete on equal footing. We have to guard against this misplaced egalitarianism and promote balanced development of the global society which results in the healthy survival of all without compromising the interests of the fragile environment. The corporate affluence of all shall mean enough purchasing power for all resulting in abundant demand creation and the resultant demand for supplies and thereby growth in employment opportunities. We need to appreciate that development of one is the development of all and the development of all is the development of one. One also feels that the time has come when we go beyond ‘statism’ or parochial ‘nationalism’ and move to genuine ‘internationalism’ in a spirit of cooperative globalism.