John Samuel
Politics plays out through multiple negotiations of power and
perceptions. Within the context of a
nation-state, the politics of the state is in constant negotiation with the politics
of the people, particularly in relation to the promises made, actual performance
and people’s perceptions. The legitimacy of a government often depends on the
organic link between the promises and performance and how perceptions are
created or managed to derive the legitimacy required to survive in power. This
social contract is based on the legitimacy of power, core principles of
governance, and the performance of the government. However, the principle of
the new social contract also includes accountability, transparency,
responsiveness, inclusiveness and participation as an integral part of
political legitimacy. When there is a disjuncture between the principles, promises,
performance and general perception, there is a crisis of political legitimacy.
This often plays out in multiple ways through the electoral process.
The recent election to the Delhi state assembly in many ways
indicates multiple shifts in the Indian political and democratic process. The electoral performance of a particular
party or a candidate is indicative of
the general mood or perception of a particular electorate within a
socio-political context. The nature and character of such verdicts also
indicate the possible shifts in the perception and power dynamics within a
given society at a particular point in time. In the last fifty years, Indian
politics and its democratic process have witnessed different shifts in the way
power and perception are negotiated through the electoral network and
performances.
What does the landslide victory of AAP in the recent Delhi Assembly
Election indicate? There have been hundreds of analytical articles and
perspectives offered after the rather unprecedented electoral performance of a
relatively new political party. The responses vary from jubilation,
celebration, and cautioned optimism, critical appreciation to scepticism, grudging
admiration and explicit dismissiveness.
While the traditional political parties and other fellow-travellers are
seriously trying to understand the new challenger on the horizon, the outward
posturing is that of bravado along with deep scepticism. It is expected that when a ‘credible’ threat
risks upsetting the core business of established political parties, there will
certainly be opposition to the new actor with a new political agenda competing
in the same market for power and perception. This is part of the reason that
many of the established political parties and their die-hard believers look
with a microscope to find fault with the AAP or anybody and its associates. Some are concerned about the lack of
‘ideological’ clarity and purity of AAP, while others are simply being
dismissive that such passing aberrations happened and disappeared in the past.
Some are sure that the AAP is not going to perform and are certain that the
party will slowly transform and become like any other traditional political
party. A large group are convinced that the AAP is actually a B team of the BJP
as a part of the Nagpur plan of RSS, while others are worried about the
‘upper-caste’ character of AAP and how it is not pro-women or pro-dalit
etc. All such responses follow the same
old expected pattern, though those who predicted the decimation and eventual
disappearance of AAP seem to be a bit concerned and worried about the potential
and possibilities of a new challenger to demolish the vote share and ‘electoral’
market of the established actors.
Politics, particularly electoral politics, is a messy affair.
Clean slates of fresh values, ideals or
rhetoric of lofty principles are attributes we expect of the people in a
perfect world, although in the real world of imperfections, electoral politics
reflects the tensions, compromises, aspirations, anxieties, prides and
prejudices of society. The relevance or irrelevance of a political formation is
within a given space and time. As such, its ability to negotiate with the diverse
perceptions and its relative competence to validate them relative to that of
other actors, remain in an ambivalent grey zone.
The rather unprecedented victory of the AAP indicates the politics
of despair as well as politics of hope. The politics of despair arises from the
wide-spread discontent against authoritarian tendencies, the increasing gap between
promises and performance, the big difference between rhetoric and reality as
well as a widely shared concern about the insecurities of minority communities.
The politics of hope was largely due to the positive agenda of clean inclusive
politics that promised more responsive governance, free of corruption. Politics of hope is also due to the promises
made to the poor and marginalised communities, particularly in relation to
water, electricity, schools and health facilities. While there are many sceptics and critics of
the politics of AAP, the victory of AAP has rekindled the hope in Indian
democracy amongst millions of ordinary people across India.
There are three underlying trends that indicate a shift in the
Indian political process and the emergence of a new generation of political
actors and leaders in the next ten years. These are:
a) Internal and external crisis of traditional political parties and
a marketisation of electoral politics.
b) The emergence of a new civic politics and monitory democracy.
c) The emergence of an aspiring as well as vulnerable new middle
class across India.
These trends need to be seen in the context of an increasingly
entrenched nexus between corporate business elites and political elites on the
one hand and the nexus between corporate driven media and political perceptions
on the other. While the process of governance is taken over by a new nexus of
bureaucratic –technocratic- policy elites, there is an increasing
marginalisation of poor and marginalised communities, covered up in the
rhetoric of ‘good governance’ and ‘development’. The emergence of new politics
is a result of multiple discontents in the traditional Indian political and
governance process.
1) Crisis of political parties and marketisation
of electoral politics
Representative democracy
largely operates through established multi-party political process. The health
of a democracy and political process is to a large extent dependent upon the
health of a political party system in a given country. In the first fifty years
of Independence, the main-stream political parties such as the Indian National
Congress, Left Parties, and regional parties and then the Jan-Sangh/BJP
negotiated the representational democracy through the institutional structures
and process of the political parties. However, when an established political
party became the power-establishment, contestation between individual interests
and the broader ideals of political parties became a primary issue. Those with the
resources influence and power (inherited or acquired) began to dominate the
political party process. Most of the
political parties began as membership based socio-political movements with mass
participation. However, now, with the
emergence of a neoliberal era, we see ‘market forces’ dominating public
policy, social choices, and the media, eventually dominating the perceptions of
the people. We see that politics itself has been reduced to ‘selling’ a
product/brand/ image in the market place for votes. Election campaigns began to
be less and less membership driven and started looking more and more like a
performance or an advertisement campaign designed to alter perceptions and thus
rope in the votes.
This ‘marketisation’ of electoral politics that was used for
manipulating perceptions and voter-choices began to undermine the traditional
structures of political parties at the grassroots level. Those at the
grassroots level became mere implementers of an “advertising” or “marketing”
based campaign strategy designed by the experts for the top-leadership. In
other words, the grassroots members of political parties were robbed off their
“sense of agency” and eventually “sense of ownership”.
The marketisation of electoral politics and top-down management of
political parties looked more ‘efficient’ and effective to keep the “electoral
competitive edge” of established political parties. However, marketisation of
any product or process or institutions requires funds and investments. And in
the neoliberal era, the big-time corporate houses or business interests began
to invest in elections, political parties, and leaders. The process that began
in the late eighties emerged as a well-oiled nexus, in the last twenty five
years, between the corporate and political elites.
While elections have become a
market exercise for influencing and capturing vote share, the media was reduced
to a negotiating agent used by political managers and business investors, and
political parties began to be dominated by ‘up-ward’ mobile career- politicians. In this sense, market, media and management
began to influence the political party establishments. Those with links in the
market, media and management began to dominate the structures and decision making
bodies of most of the political party establishments. In the last twenty years, we see that the
grassroots fund-raising or member-ship drives of most of the political parties
declined and the total budgets and funds from the corporate lobby increased exponentially.
Political parties themselves also found investors to launch media channels for
the party propaganda, and entertainment. This also meant that those with the
blessings of big businesses or major donors to political parties began to get
seats and acquire political clout in different parties. Millionaires could
easily buy themselves into seats in the parliament or even join a political
party at the very top. As political parties have become new “investment
vehicles” in the neoliberal era for “policy returns” and “tax-rebates”,
politics itself has become a ‘dhanda’ – a business. And ‘crony capitalism’ was seen as a part of the entrenched nexus
between few corporate elites and political elites. In the process electoral
democracy was made a ‘means’ for elite capture of the state. The intrinsic political ethics of democracy
got replaced by the instrumentalist market approach of using ‘electoral politics’ as
a means to amass power and wealth. This has cumilately undermined the political and social legitimacy of the
mainstream-political party establishment as well as the claims of ‘good
governance’, ‘economic growth’ etc wherein pro-poor policies were seen more as ‘populist’
or ‘freebies’ to contain dissent or to get votes.
Corporatisation of Political Parties
As politics became a business establishment with the essential
corporate components of revenue, expenditure, investment, incentives, media management,
network management and branding, those with such skills and competence began to
dominate the political parties. The emergence of technocratic retainers and
managers in the 1990s is largely due to the shift in the business model of
political parties. Along with the corporatisation
of political parties and managerial
dominance in the decision making, most
of the political parties ended up becoming closely held private companies; either family owned private enterprises
operating in the public sphere providing a certain political service or publicly
held large enterprises controlled by a power-cartel or family-held managerial
clique. The ‘entrepreneurial’ approach
of political parties with business strategies, product, process etc in a way
de-politicised main-stream political
party establishments, as ‘ideology’ was either for profiling or branding and
the interests of the stakeholders began to take precedence over the the original ideals
of the party. Slogans no longer emanated organically from the grassroots
members, but were carefully crafted by PR agents in the bellies of a few advertising
companies. Leaders began to hire PR agencies and consultants to ‘manage’ their
‘image’ and profile in the media so that they could maintain perceptions and
thus maintain their vote bank. Political parties have become electoral networks
where ‘politics’ itself began to get ‘out sourced’; media
was managed through PR companies or hired professionals; party events were
managed by ‘event management’ companies; and election campaigns were managed by
hired staff. All these required immense monetary
power
While in the seventies and early eighties, election expenditure was
primarily raised from people and locally managed, from the 1990s, election
funds came from the top and the campaign strategies and advertisement campaigns
were centrally managed. So in the first thirty years of independence, being a
political activist meant giving up many comforts and the key concern was ‘how
can I or we contribute to the party or a cause’. But in the last twenty
years, there has been a perceptible shift at the grassroots as those who got
active began to ask the question: ‘what do I get from the party’. When
election campaigns imitated corporate advertising campaigns, or a reality show
on the TV studios, the grassroots workers of political parties refused to work
without clear ‘incentives’ and in elections this incentive meant
‘money’. Those who contested elections to the Lok Sabha and Assembly began to
pay for the workers ‘time and energy’ while also covering almost every other expense.
Volunteers and voluntarism diminished or
simply disappeared. Thus elections have become very expensive; much beyond the
reach of ordinary people or the aam- admi and aurats to contest. The success of
political leaders began to be seen in proportion to the funds and money he/she
controlled. Bigger the party and bigger
the leaders, the bigger were the need for financial resources and this also
exponentially increased the rate of legitimate and illegitimate ‘rent-seeking’
behaviour or corruption in the political class. The predominance of corporate
money, often circulated as unaccounted black money, subverted the quality of
democratic politics and political party establishments. Often, the money
collected through corruption was sent out of the country through ‘havala’ route
and a significant number of politicians or their kith and kin became investors
or highly paid senior staff of such companies. A part of such corrupt money got
back to the country in the pet-name of ‘foreign direct investment’ through
shell companies registered in Tax-Havens.
Macro-Governance and Local Governance as power-sharing arrangement
In the last twenty five years, there was a clear division between
macro-politics and ‘local politics’. With the enactment of the 73rd
and 74th amendments, there was an opportunity for a clear division
of a power-sharing arrangement. Local party workers and leaders got the
incentive of being elected in the local government institutions and local
government institutions too offered some amount of power paraphernalia (vehicles,
sitting fees, privileges etc.) and significant budgets to implement the
government programmes. The macro-politics of the Lok Sabha and Legislative Assemblies
were managed centrally and the decisions were made by a small group of people
and the seat distribution began to depend on ‘winnability’ , ‘user value’ or
‘loyalty quotient’. This power management within the political parties
reflected the new configuration and alignment between macro-power and micro
power in consonance with macro-governance and local governance. The policies were increasingly decided by a
bureaucratic-technocratic elites, the political parties were managed by a nexus
of political and business elites, and political party structures were filled
with loyalists of one kind or the other where votes were managed through the
caste/identity network While this division of power-arrangement between local
government and state/central government looked like an effective system of
managing power incentives within political parties, it also eventually killed
the volunteer base or mass base committed to the ideology, programme and
politics of a given party.
While there was a political
incentive for those local party leaders with loyalty to the top leadership,
there was no political or material incentive for the ordinary people for their
loyalty to a political party on the ground. And this loyalty at local level
began to shift to identity –networks based caste, creed, new religious/denominational
affiliations.. When the mass- volunteer base of many political parties
declined, they began to be increasingly dependent on the caste/identity networks or institutions
to reach out to the ‘vote-banks’.
When the rhetoric of policy promises and promised economic growth
failed to deliver on the ground and when the stories of corruption could not be
controlled in the era of the internet and social networking, discontent on the
ground among the ordinary people and masses has been increasing. Many of them
felt they have no stake in politics. They became simply voters and unsatisfied
‘consumers’ of services provided by the government.
It is this discontent on the ground among the common people and the legitimacy
deficit of the traditional parties that the new political formation the Aam Aadmi
Party (‘common people’s party) tried to mobilize and began to project as a
counter discourse in the method of party politics. They began to build the
volunteer base many political parties lost in the last twenty years; they began
to mobilize the ideas, expertise and imagination of a large number of young
people. They began to enter in to the grey political and social spaces vacated
by the Indian National Congress and BJP. Hence the victory of the AAP is also
indicative of the crisis within the political parties and also the crisis of
governance wherein a political policy and technical experts began to dominate.
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