Anti-politics machine

POLITICS is a preoccupation of free men, and its existence is a test of freedom. It is too much to expect people who went on television to grab whatever publicity they could, in the wake of the terrorist strikes in Mumbai, to read Professor Bernard Cricks mini-classic In Defence of Politics, or, for that matter, any serious work that bears on the subject. The anchors who invited them were of the same class. The people, exasperated at the lapses of the state, understandably responded to the shrill, sweeping denunciation of politicians and politics. They could not be expected to recall that the loudest among the member panelists was an ardent supporter of Indira Gandhi and the dictatorship she imposed on India.

The chatterati who decry politics are rank hypocrites. They themselves practise politics all the time in Bar associations, sports bodies, womens organisations, and wherever their own interests are at stake, in their offices and outside. In this, they will freely take the help of politicians, of course. Totally absent is the slightest effort to understand what politics is about; how and why it is debased; its relationship to the quality of politicians and to the temper of the people; the claims that can legitimately be made on those who practise the craft; and, not least, the limits of political action and the constraints of morality in the political process. In short, a serious, informed discourse.

Crick is no idealist. He knows that the politician lives in a world of publicity, calumny, distortion, and insult. He is often looked down upon by police society as being a mere fixer and an opportunist (though it is puzzling why this last word always has a bad meaning) and he is mocked by intellectuals for rarely having ideas of his own: a politician is an arse upon/which everyone has sat except a man, which is the whole of an easy poem by E.E. Cummings. And, indeed, the politician, beneath his necessary flexibility, will rarely be a man of less than normal pliability and ambitions. He will provoke such cheap mockery from spectators. But he will not take these things to heart. The successful politician will learn how to swallow insults.

A politician deserves scorn only when he is disloyal to his calling and fails to perform his duties as a politician. A free society has diverse interests with conflicting claims on power and the states attention and finances. The politician is an advocate as well as a mediator. He espouses an interest and meets with advocates of other interests to reconcile them peaceably and in an orderly way, whether in the legislature or outside. That is the only way a free society can function: by compromise, conciliation and reconciliation. It is messy, but it is unavoidable. That is life.

To be sure, the politician does not act purely from altruistic motives. He does seek power for himself. But it is a pursuit that is informed by a commitment to the public interest as well. That is what is known as honourable ambition, as distinct from that of the man who enters politics in order to line his pockets. The corruption of politics and the disavowal of politics form a vicious circle. Implicit in both is contempt for the political process.

These attitudes spring from a failure to understand the nature of politics and its role in the body politic. The prime concern of politics is the resolution of conflict between diverse interests. Conflicts are the concern of politics, but they are not its creation. They are inherent in any human society by reason of the diversity of interests. It is this basic reality that makes politics so ubiquitous. Be it a sports club or a womens organisation, the ghost of politics will stalk its floors because conflicting interests exist within its domain. Only a regimented society can do away with politics. No wonder that the most trenchant criticism of politics has come from dictators or self-indulgent hypocrites.

Portugals dictator Antnio de Oliveira Salazar said that he detested politics from the bottom of his heart; all those noisy and incoherent promises, the impossible demands, the hotchpotch of unfounded ideas and impractical plans opportunism that cares neither for truth nor justice, the inglorious chase after unmerited fame, the unleashing of uncontrollable passions, the exploitation of the lowest instincts, the distortion of facts all that feverish and sterile fuss.

Politics has other enemies besides the dictator. Both the revolutionary and the ideologue disdain it. The technocrat finds it exasperating. Judges loftily criticise it while practising their own brand of politics. Professor Walter F. Murphys work Elements of Judicial Strategy exposed its practice at the highest level in the United States Supreme Court. How low the highest can sink is laid bare by one of the finest judges who ever served in the Supreme Court of India, Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy, in his two books We Have a Republic, Can We Keep It? and The Judiciary I Served.

The less said about lawyers who decry politics the better. Men like Bhulabhai Desai and K.M. Munshi were not saints. But commitment to the national weal informed their politics. The standards have declined, and not only in India. Sir Hartley Shawcross, a brilliant lawyer, was known as Sir Shortly Floorcross. On some lawyer-politicians of today, comment and contempt are best withheld. Their shifting loyalties suffice to expose them.

It is one thing for a person to enter politics because he feels about the state of things and has something to say on the nations affairs from his perspective. That applies to all actor, industrialist, lawyer, doctor anyone, for that matter. It is another to enter politics for personal aggrandisement. To the affluent socialite, politics is a means of acquiring respectability and influence. Politics becomes a way of advancement of the socially excluded from the High Table of the great and mighty.

Ironically, democracy can be an enemy of politics and eventually of democracy itself. The majority of the day, fired by zeal, silences the minority. John Stuart Mills classic essay On Liberty warns against this danger. Such a majority rejects compromise and speaks in absolute terms. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the tyranny of public opinion in the U.S. If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority.

More recently, Tzvetan Todorov, philosopher and historian of ideas, vividly and accurately described the U.S. steep descent into the irrational after 9/11: What does come as a surprise, however, is that for nearly five years, it was possible to put a moratorium on truth in a great democracy like the United States. There is good reason to worry. Despite the pluralism of political parties and the freedom of the press, the population of a liberal democracy can still be persuaded that black is white, and white is black.

How can such a degree of susceptibility be explained? First, the majority of the population in any country blindly obeys politicians and the mainstream media (opinions from foreign countries are generally treated with suspicion).

From September 2002, clear-headed statements were heard from various U.S. politicians and publications, but these messages were not conveyed by prominent institutions like the Democratic Party, major television stations and leading newspapers. America was consumed by a patriotic fever, with truth relegated to the back seat.

Opinion makers discarded their duty to truth not because of evil intentions but because of the fear that gripped America after 9/11. Customary precautions were disregarded. Monitoring and assessing information, debating and reasoning were perceived as signs of cowardice and a lack of a sense of responsibility. That failing is not peculiar to America. It grips us, too, every now and then. Witness the comments of some after November 26, 2008, strikingly reminiscent of their comments after the attack on Parliament House on December 13, 2001.

No discussion of politics can be complete or honest if it does not cover the peoples weaknesses as well. Why do some love the corrupt and elect dons and history sheeters? Why, indeed, did Harlem shut its eyes to Adam Clayton Powells flagrant corruption and philandering at public expense and elect him repeatedly to the U.S. House of Representatives?

The peoples inclinations must be understood, not condemned. They prefer the corrupt politician who is solicitous because they feel neglected and marginalised by others. This can debase politics and imperil democracy.

As Mill pointed out, Of what avail is the most broadly popular representative system if the electors do not care to choose the best member of parliament, but choose him who will spend most money to be elected? How can a representative assembly work for good if its members can be bought, or if their excitability of temperament, uncorrected by public discipline or private self-control, makes them incapable of calm deliberation, and they resort to manual violence on the floor of the House, or shoot at one another with rifles? How again, can government, or any joint concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in anything, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail? Whenever the general disposition of the people is such that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things good government is impossible. The influence of defects of intelligence in obstructing all the elements of good government requires no illustration. Government consists of acts done by human beings, and if the agent, or those who choose the agents, or those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of government will go wrong; while, in proportion as the men rise above this standard, so will the government improve in quality (Representative Government, Mill).

This has been quoted at inordinate length, but for a purpose. It provides an unflattering mirror to our society in politics and other fields as well.

Democracy makes, not less, but far greater demand on qualities of leadership, not only in politics but in other spheres as well, notably in the media. It is dishonest to single out the demagogue in politics while ignoring his counterpart in the media the architect of dumbing down. The media and politics have a symbiotic relationship.

Hans J. Morgenthaus warning, delivered decades ago, is very appropriate today and bears quotation in extenso: The vital link between the intellectual awareness of unresolved issues and the resolution not to leave them unresolved is missing. The man in the street is no longer convinced that public issues will, or even ought to, yield to concerted popular action. They have become remote, unintelligible, and intractable. If the experts cannot deal with them, how can he?

This abdication of political will on the part of the electorate is duplicated by the abdication of political leadership on the part of the representatives of the people. They justify that abdication by citing the political apathy of the electorate. Whatever the reason, whether apathy from above is responsible for the apathy below, or vice versa, or whether there is perhaps a common cause for both, the result is clear: there is apathy all around, and the great issues that demand solution are debated by the politicians, while the people mind their private businesses as though the great public issues were no business of theirs.

This lack of interest in public issues leads of necessity to the contraction of the public sphere. It results in the cessation of genuine political activity by the citizen, the encroachment of private interests upon the public sphere, and the relative shrinkage of national resources, human and material, committed to public purposes.

The citizen becomes so engrossed with cultivating his private garden that he remains a citizen only in the formal sense of enjoying political rights that he sporadically and lackadaisically makes use of. In the full sense in which citizenship means making the public business ones own, he ceases to be a citizen. The public business is transacted by technicians and administrators who render many and the most important of their decisions without the participation and frequently even without the knowledge of the citizens (emphasis added throughout).

Read this: A society conceived so as to find the standards for its thought and action only within itself becomes the sovereign arbiter of all things human. The objective criteria of excellence through which the civilised man has learned to distinguish a work of art from trash, craftsmanship from shoddiness, scholarship from pretentious sophistication, a good man from a scoundrel, a statesman from a demagogue, greatness from mediocrity those vital distinctions are blurred if not obliterated by the self-sufficient preferences of the crowd. Those distinctions tend to become altogether meaningless, and what the crowd desires and tolerates becomes the ultimate standard of what is good, true, beautiful, useful, and wise. What you can get away with, then, is morally permitted, what you can get accepted in the market place, to paraphrase the famous saying of Holmes, becomes the test of truth. Art is what people like; what can be sold is useful; and what people will vote for is sound. The honest man and the scoundrel, the scholar and the charlatan, the artist and the hack, the businessman and the racketeer, the statesman and the demagogue live side by side, and it is not always easy to tell which is which.

The objective standards which constitute, as it were, the moral backbone of a civilised society are here dissolved into the ever changing amorphousness of public opinion. What a man ought or ought not to do is here determined not by objective laws immutable as the stars, but by the results of the latest public opinion poll. It is suicidal to allow politics to be shaped by TV channels absorbed in the race for TRP (television rating point).

This brings us to the dilemma of politics which Bagehot resolved in a telling phrase a good Prime Minister must be a man of common beliefs and uncommon abilities. He must lead, and yet be not so out of step with public opinion as to render himself irrelevant. That he must be both competent and moral goes without saying. Except that we have wrong notions about both. What Edmund Burke wrote in his magisterial work Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents in 1770 is all too true: The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought to be the first study of a statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.

Sadly, India did not produce a Nelson Mandela after Gopal Krishna Gokhales death. Its leaders were narcissists who were remiss in what it was their duty to learn. Gandhi ought to have known that civil disobedience led inescapably to violence. K.M. Munshi wrote of the Quit India movement: Truth to tell, what they did was anybodys business. It was certainly not non-violent even at the start (Pilgrimage to Freedom; page 83). Gandhis support to the Ali Brothers on the reactionary Khilafat movement was crassly opportunistic. He needed their support to alter the Congress credo in 1920. In contrast, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was more realistic, as Sadashiv Vaman Bapat recorded: Tilak wanted the national movement of India to keep entirely free from all contamination with any theological or foreign political questions. He foresaw, as if by prophetic vision, the frightful consequences resulting from accepting the Khilafat dispute and he warned us all against it. To those Hindu nationalists who said that they did not believe a word of this Khilafat but still had agreed to agitate for it only to secure the friendship and active cooperation of the Muslims in our national fight for freedom, Tilak had only one reply that if the Hindus think that they will succeed in deceiving the Muslims, they will soon be disillusioned. Let us not, therefore, confound issues. Let us seek Muslim cooperation on the broad national question of Swaraj. In that, by all means, give them special privileges if these will satisfy them and bring them into the Congress fold, but never seek to introduce Theology into our politics.

Jinnah hardly knew the Muslim psyche or, indeed, the Indian psyche. It was criminally irresponsible of him to propagate the two-nation theory in 1939 only to discard it on August 11, 1947, after it had spread its poison comprehensively. To establish a state on the basis of religion is to facilitate its own destabilisation by sectarianism. He sowed the seeds of secession in East Pakistan in 1948 by telling a mass audience in Dhaka, arrogantly and insultingly, that Urdu alone would be the national language of Pakistan.

Nehru prided himself on his Kashmiri ancestry, remote though it was. But he knew Kashmiris little. Else he would not have written to Sheikh Abdullah, in his note of August 25, 1952, that Kashmiris are not what are called a virile people. They are soft and addicted to easy living. Indira Gandhi knew no better. She wrote to Nehru as scornfully on May 14, 1948, from Srinagar: I feel that all this political talk [that India would lose the plebiscite] will count for nothing if the economic situation can be dealt with. Because after all the people are concerned with only [one] thing they want to sell their goods and to have food and salt. This outlook is shared by commentators who complain of Kashmiris ingratitude talking of azadi to a New Delhi that gives them good money. It is no different from the colonial Deputy Collector who ridiculed the Congress and said the Raj would keep the people happy. To Nehru, the communal problem was a preoccupation only of the upper classes. He ignored the sentiments of the masses and aggravated the problem.

Contrast all this with the realism of Acharya Kripalanis warning to N.A. Palkhiwala in a letter on June 19, 1975, a week before the Emergency was proclaimed: She [Indira Gandhi] appears to be in a desperate mood. If that mood continues she may decide to go the Mujib way in Bangladesh. I would not like you to be held responsible for that contingency. This may appear to you an imaginary fear, but these days anything can happen. If she decides to go the Mujib way, poor and ignorant as our people are, there may be no resistance. A year after the Emergency was imposed, the resistance was in a pathetic state. The likes of Charan Singh and Biju Patnaik were making overtures to Indira Gandhi. So were some others.

The politician must not only have his hand on the pulse of the people but also be skilled in statecraft. The good man who is ignorant of the nature of the political process can be a menace to society.

As Burke said, It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands, and requires, that what is right should not only be made known but made prevalent, that what is evil should not only be detected but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very rational account of a mans life that he has always acted right but has taken special care to act in such a manner that his endeavours could not possibly be productive of any consequence. He must not only be upright but effective as well.

Morgenthau put it more sharply: A good man who becomes an actor on the political scene without knowing anything about the rules of politics is like a good man who goes into business without knowing anything about it or who drives a car although ignorant about how to drive. Yet while society recognises the need to protect itself against the latter, it feels no need for protection against the former. Indeed the virtuous political dilettante has for it a well-nigh irresistible fascination.

It is as though society were anxious to atone for the sacrifices of the private virtue which the political spheres demand and to take out insurance against the moral risks of political action by identifying itself with the political leader who sacrificed the public good on the altar of their private virtues. Society has learnt to take bad men in its stride and even to protect itself against those who know the rules of the political game only too well and use them to the detriment of society. Society will have to learn if it wants to survive that it needs protection also against good men who are too good even to take note of the rules of the political game.

The politician performs a service if he appraises realistically the needs of society, picks the issues that demand an answer, and mobilises popular support behind him in the programme that he evolves. He becomes popular and acquires power. But he also serves the people.

There are, of course, cases when a politician has to reckon with the tide of popular fervour not because he wants to swim ashore to power with it but because there is a yet larger cause that he wishes honestly to serve some day by swimming with the tide now. This is the great problem of democratic politics and it accounts for the failures of intellectual brilliance and manifest idealism. Walter Lippmann condoned Fulbright for his stand on race. He had to be elected before he could severely oppose the war in Vietnam.

Neither politics nor the politician deserves sweeping censure. That is an abdication of public duty. That duty requires of all of us an unremitting, earnest, and serious interest in the affairs of the nation whether by participating in the political process or by informed interest and if possible public comment. Delivering sound bites to ignorant anchors is sheer self-indulgence and a debasement of public discourse. That, alas, is very much part of the widespread phenomenon of dumbing down itself a reflection of the decline of the public realm.