Sickness in Indian Democracy did not start with Modi

Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express


Three words that I got sick of hearing as the Karnataka drama unfolded last week were: democracy, secularism and Constitution. Nearly everyone who spoke them meant only one thing, and this was that the Bharatiya Janata Party must be kept out of Karnataka at all costs. Perhaps, by the time you read this, the BJP juggernaut will have been stopped from finding a toehold in southern India, but it is important that we remember that whatever happens, it will have nothing to do with those three words. 

It is important also to remember that the post-election drama in Karnataka had everything to do with the Congress party’s desperation to keep its own little toe grounded in the state they have ruled for five years. Without Karnataka, our oldest political party has only Punjab and Puducherry left, and this is very bad news. How will Rahul Gandhi continue to dream of becoming prime minister in 2019? How will there be enough funds to fight the Lok Sabha elections if one of India’s richest states slips away? So even the most humiliating compromise with a party derided by Rahul Gandhi as the B-team of the BJP is better than losing power altogether. You realise what a sham ‘secularism’ has become if you remember that during the campaign the (S) in the party’s name was mocked by Congress leaders as standing for Sangh and not secular.

Now let us talk about democracy. Even as B S Yedyurappa was taking his oath of office last Thursday, the president of the Congress party tweeted this: ‘This morning, while the BJP celebrates its hollow victory, India will mourn the defeat of democracy.’ He clearly forgot that if there was one conclusive thing that came out of the election results, it was that it was a mandate against the incumbent Congress government.

On constitutional proprieties the less said the better. They were stretched and moulded last week by most politicians and political commentators to make whichever case they wished to make. What can be said for certain is that the men who wrote our Constitution never envisaged a situation in which the verdict of governors would be challenged by violent thugs on the streets. Or that newly elected legislators would need to be locked up in fine hotels to prevent them from selling their souls for filthy lucre.

It is not as if they need the money. The Karnataka Election Watch and Association for Democratic Reforms analysed the assets of 221 newly elected MLAs and found that 97 per cent were ‘crorepatis’. Of these, 16 had assets worth more than Rs 100 crore. You do not need me to tell you that the main reason why Indians fight and sometimes kill for a ticket to contest elections is because there is no easier way to become very rich very quickly.

This sickness in our democracy did not begin after Narendra Modi became prime minister. But, it is this storyline that has been sought to be disseminated by secular, leftist political commentators in order to disguise their loyalties to the Congress party. It is this ‘secular’ caboodle that uses words like democracy and secularism most often. Sadly, they see the weaknesses in our democracy through tinted lenses. So what happened in West Bengal’s panchayat elections last week has been almost ignored by liberal, leftist commentators. In these village elections, ballot boxes were torn out of polling booths and thrown in ponds, and gangs of armed thugs wandered about violently preventing people from voting. These events escaped the notice of ‘secular’ politicians and commentators who moan endlessly about how democracy has died in the past four years. Rahul went so far as to say in Chhattisgarh that India has become a dictatorship.

To support this ludicrous charge, the Congress president has exalted disgruntled judges who actively harmed the Supreme Court by going public with their disgruntlement. Disgruntled public intellectuals have also sided with the judges and the ‘secular’ media has done its best to provide a platform for their views.

Having lived through that time when there really was a Dictator ruling India, I can report that journalists, writers and poets were jailed for speaking out. It was also a time when disobedient judges got the sack. So the Supreme Court obsequiously went along with the Dictator’s diktat when she ordered them to suspend even the right to life. When the Dictator’s grandson now makes reckless charges, he needs to be reminded of that one period of Indian history when democracy nearly died.

Modi is no match for the powerful elite who lost their vast influence in the public square when he became prime minister. So now when he appears to have lost some of his magic, they have taken charge of the narrative and their message is clear: democracy is doomed if Modi remains in power.

Sick of this market-driven world? You should be

The self-serving con of neoliberalism is that it has eroded the human values the market was supposed to emancipate

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 5 August 2014 21.05 BST

‘The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure ... whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers.’ Photograph: REX/High Level

To be at peace with a troubled world: this is not a reasonable aim. It can be achieved only through a disavowal of what surrounds you. To be at peace with yourself within a troubled world: that, by contrast, is an honourable aspiration. This column is for those who feel at odds with life. It calls on you not to be ashamed.

I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.

We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don’t.

Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.

Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.

At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.

The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren’t, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.

Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don’t stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined.

If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world’s richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.

All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.

The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.

The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.

The same forces afflict those who can’t find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.

These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.

Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.

The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it.

So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.