Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: June 5, 2011
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/343566/India-cant-be-ruled-by-NGOs.html
The emergence of Baba Ramdev as the newest
anti-corruption crusader, after Anna Hazare, has unsettled the midsummer complacency
of the Congress-inclined Establishment. If the man BJP president Nitin Gadkari
cheekily dubbed the "rockstar of yoga" can extend his energies beyond
wellness and simple patriotism - the two recurrent themes of his discourses
- where, it is being asked, will the process stop? It was bad enough, they
say, that a slightly naïve Gandhian like Hazare allowed himself to become
the instrument of a small coterie of activists who presume to talk for the
whole of 'civil society'; will Ramdev now add to the distortion?
From a liberal constitutionalist perspective,
the fears aren't completely misplaced. Without prejudging the approach likely
to be adopted by the charismatic yoga guru, whose organised following is considerable,
some concerns need to be spelt out.
First, while there is always a place in a
democracy for extra-parliamentary movements, the responsibilities of governance
rest exclusively with an elected leadership. The Government can and should
interact with different interest groups, but the interest groups (whether
they call themselves NGOs or civil society representatives) cannot assume
the reins of Government.
Secondly, to prevent the misuse or concentration
of authority, the Constitution has created a system of checks and balances.
In particular, the judiciary exists to ensure the rule of law. The judges
can ensure that laws correspond to the 'basic structure' of the Constitution
but they cannot either become lawmakers or administrators.
Finally, since sovereignty vests with the
people of India, there has to be a periodic renewal of the mandate. People
must offer themselves for election as popular representatives to acquire the
legitimacy to govern, tax and pass laws. Without this electoral legitimacy,
renewed every five years, the assumption of political power is both illegal
and immoral. The Maoists believe in their version of 'people's power' but
this has no basis in India's Constitution. As such, they are rightly regarded
as usurpers and bandits.
The crisis gripping today's India is that
many of these assumptions on which society is regulated have broken down.
Nominally, there is a Government headed by a Prime Minister who enjoys majority
support in the Lok Sabha and can, if really pressed, also cobble together
a majority in the Rajya Sabha. At the same time, the moral and ethical foundations
on which the Government rests have developed deep and seemingly irreparable
cracks.
In normal circumstances, many Governments
often face a phenomenon that Marxist intellectuals of an earlier age used
to call a "conjunctural" crisis. In plain language, these would
be political turmoil created by bad leadership, unpopular policies or even
externally-induced turbulence (such as war or terrorism). Some elements of
the conjunctural crisis exist today in the form of the Government's mismanagement
of the economy.
Today's problems are, however, a little more
than a simple conjunctural crisis. A series of devastating scams involving
loot of public money has called into question the integrity of the Government.
In other words, the belief that the Government (however misplaced its policies
may be) is acting for the common good has been replaced by the growing conviction
that venality has become the defining philosophy of UPA governance. Such a
perception may not as yet be universal but there is sufficient evidence to
suggest that the middle classes - the de-facto custodians of the system -
are on the verge of an emotional secession from the system.
Even this would not have mattered had it become
clear that the Manmohan Singh regime was serving out time and that come 2014,
it would be replaced by something more wholesome. The tragedy is that crisis
of immorality has affected the entire political class in some measure. This
is something that neither the smug body of Union Cabinet Ministers nor the
smug Opposition appear to have fully grasped. In normal circumstances, it
should have been an Opposition front that should have been calling for sustained
protests against the 2G scam and the Congress' attempts to gloss over the
Commonwealth Games robbery. But the Opposition too is suffering from the same
erosion of its moral authority as the Government. It too needs to combine
internal cleansing with popular legitimacy.
It is this crisis of a political class that
has given the space to Hazare, Baba Ramdev and a clutch of insufferably pious
busybodies to hijack the public mood. But this is more than a simple hijack.
The conflicts in the drafting of a Lokpal Bill suggest that 'civil society'
now wants substantial powers of governance transferred to unelected monitoring
authorities. The anti-corruption crusaders appear hell-bent on creating a
parallel system of enlightened despotism to monitor the moral licentiousness
of democracy. Those familiar with history will see a parallel with the post-Reformation
Puritans who wanted to purge an established Church of corruption, superstition
and theological deviations, and impose their grim, austere vision of the faith.
It is the inherent anti-democratic tendencies
behind the attempts at moral cleansing that are disturbing. It is even more
worrying that this philosophy has begun to influence the judicial philosophy.
If the moral depravity of politics is substituted by the pious tyranny of
the self-appointed, it would be an equal disaster.
The only way out is hard for the Government
to contemplate. Yet, I can see no alternative to returning to the people for
conferring renewed legitimacy to both a Government and the whole political
system.
