Our political parties have become lifeless and shapeless. They seem to have lost their way. This is true not only of the demoralised Opposition parties but also of the ruling Congress (I). The CPM is perhaps the only exception. What are the causes of this malaise in our party system?
“We are not democratic by temperament,” says Masani. Girilal Jain disagrees.
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GLJ: Minoo, I think we should first address ourselves to the question of the state of political parties. To begin with, let us briefly discuss what went wrong with the Janata experiment. This, in my opinion, is the most important political development that has taken place in the last three years.
MRM: I wonder if you are not getting hold of the wrong end of the stick. I see nothing unique about the failure of the Janata experiment. The disease or causes go deeper and so we must analyse the causes of the breakdown of the entire system, which is what has undoubtedly taken place. These causes are common to all parties and not only to the Janata.
The main cause I feel is the absence of a spirit of compromise which has made the two-party system or the two-and-a-half party system possible in Britain and in the United States and the three-party system in West Germany. This spirit of compromise is not there among us; the party in our country becomes an end in itself and therefore it goes on splitting and splintering; it is the ego of the various party leaders that creates problems. This absence of a spirit of compromise is what broke up not only the Janata but many parties before that as well.
Always In Office
There is another problem we face, the refusal of the Indian politicians to be in the Opposition. At any given time, a good party system demands that 60 per cent of the politicians be in office and 40 per cent of them be in the Opposition. But, if you examine the last 30 years, ever since independence, 90 per cent of the politicians have always wanted to be in office all the time and there were only ten per cent – fools like me – who were prepared to be in the Opposition. In other words, you can’t get a party system where everyone wants to enjoy the fruits of office almost all the time. And hence the malaise of defections.
Then, there is the absence of grass-roots organisation in our political parties. The parties float on top with nothing between them and the mass of the people; they are rootless. In other countries, grass-roots vigilance and voluntary action at the grass roots fill the gap between the individual citizen and the party and gives it its roots and life.
These are the basic reasons why the Janata had to fail and other parties have and will fail in the future as well. The problem that we face therefore is that of the party system breaking down and not only of one particular party.
GLJ: Minoo, I disagree. You say there has been no spirit of compromise among our politicians. But then how can you explain the fact that the Congress has gone on in one form or another for almost a century? There was, of course, a split in the Congress party in 1906. But from the time Gandhiji came to lead it in the early twenties to the split in 1969 there was no major crisis. Even the 1969 split turned out to be a relatively minor one. The party went on under Mrs Gandhi’s leadership until 1978 when it split again. In a sense this was a more serious one. But even so Mrs Gandhi has managed to build an organisation of some kind.
I also disagree with your other statement that we have not had grass-roots politics in India. It is true that even the Congress began as an elitist organisation. But in course of time it permeated to the smallest and the meanest hamlets in the country.
During the struggle for independence and thereafter, even in the remote villages you found people wearing the Gandhi cap and khadi clothes; and even humble people were attracted to the Congress party. So there has been a national party which has gone on for all these years. And within the party the people have displayed a considerable spirit of compromise and capacity for grass-roots activities.
In the past the socialists have been most vulnerable to the disease of splitism. Perhaps in view of your own socialist background – as a CSP man – Minoo, you tend to view this problem from your own experience. But it seems to me that ideologically-inclined parties, that is, the left-ideologically-inclined parties, have been more prone to this kind of intense factionalism than the broad-based Congress party.
I attach importance to the Janata Party and its break-up because here was an experiment in bringing people from different political cultures together on a national platform. If you look at the history of the Janata, apart from the question of dual membership, no serious ideological question arose in it. The party broke up because of the ambitions of some individuals, because of the temperamental incompatibilities and finally because of its failure to click with the people. As it went on losing its popularity, its capacity to hold together went on declining.
MRM: But what does this lead to, Giri?
GLJ: When we want to probe deeper into the causes of the failure of the party system, then we must first try to find out why this major experiment was so completely doomed to failure. Was it because of the persons involved in it or because the experiment in itself was defective?
MRM: Let’s move on to another aspect of our discussion Giri. You’ve made a good point about compromise. It looks convincing at first sight. What you are saying is that Nehru held the Congress Party together for almost two decades without allowing it to disintegrate. And you feel that this could not have been possible without a spirit of compromise. I wish I could agree with you. I was a member of the Congress Party until 1952. Then I parted company and went into the Opposition. However, I know a little about the Congress. Let me tell you there was never any real spirit of compromise within it. There was always sycophancy and a cult of personality. If Nehru had not been Nehru and that “banyan tree”, as SK Patil once described him, had not been there, Congressmen would have come to blows just like these people in the Janata did. There was no love lost between the Congress leaders. They were held together by Nehru because he was the vote-catcher and the vote-getter; he knocked their heads together and they accepted him because he was so overpowering.
Indira’s phenomenon is the same. When a strong charismatic personality comes on the scene, then alone do you find politicians behaving in a reasonably disciplined manner.
The Indian temperament is one of not dissenting from the leader and accepting whatever the great leader says. We see the same in Indira’s party today. If Indira Gandhi was not there, how would the Congress (I) hold together? That is why I am of the opinion that really we are not democratic by temperament. We are not suited to a highly evolved form of democracy any more than many other nations in Asia. I am a little more pessimistic than you are, Giri. You find fault with the Janata Party. I find fault with the Indian political system which I feel has not taken root in this country. And now it looks as if we are going to say good-bye to it.
GLJ: Minoo, I don’t want to go into this question right now. Let us first deal with the charismatic personality you talk of. It seems to me that the appeal of the charismatic personality is mostly to the poor people in India. It appears that the backbone of the Congress party, in electoral terms has always been the 40 or 50 per cent of people who are below the poverty line or just above the poverty line. For the rest of the Indian people other loyalties and pulls are stronger – such as those of caste and class. I want to draw your attention to the fact that in two states where the caste system is not as strong as elsewhere, the Communists have done well, i.e. in West Bengal and in Kerala.
Caste – The Biggest Party
MRM: Yes, of course, caste is a major factor in our party system. Jayaprakash once said that the biggest party in India was caste. This may be a dramatic way of putting it, but there is no doubt about it that caste is a greater factor than ideology in Indian politics. The last party which had anything to do with ideology was the Swatantra Party (with which I was associated) and earlier the Socialist Party. But those parties have faded away. Today’s parties are really based on a combination of certain castes.
GLJ: What about the Communists? They are ideological parties. Why is it that they are doing well in Kerala and West Bengal?
MRM: There is a saying that “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. I would say that Kerala is a very good example of that. A little learning, meaning literacy without profound knowledge or wisdom, leads to lunatic fringes like the Communists. To me, as to Solzhenitsyn, communism is an unadulterated evil from which nothing good can ever come.
GLJ: We are not discussing communism right now, Minoo.
MRM: No, I am talking in the context of Kerala; where and how Kerala went wrong. It has literacy but no wisdom.
GLJ: Are you then saying that as literacy spreads the prospects of the Communists improve by virtue of their being an ideological party?
MRM: The prospects of ideological parties might have improved.
GLJ: What kind of ideological parties?
MRM: You see, literacy and poverty have been a very weird combination – a very revolutionary combination. I will give you an example. I went to Japan in 1963 and met the leaders of the Liberal Democratic Party, who have been in office since World War II, including Mr Takeo Miki who was Prime Minister last year. The Japanese leaders told me: “Mr. Masani, how can you hope to get away with a twentieth-century liberal programme in a developing country like India? In Japan everybody is affluent and literate. So we can have Western liberalism as our creed and we are getting away with it because we have a literate and affluent people. You have neither literacy nor affluence. Anyone who comes and promises the moon, as the Communists do and are bound to, have an advantage over you.”
I would say they were right in a way. We were being somewhat utopian in trying to preach Western liberalism in a poor country. And we failed.
GLJ: Minoo, I shall put two propositions to you. First, the people who made the tallest promises have not done too well. The communist vote has been around five to six per cent at the most. So the Japanese argument is not valid.
MRM: What about Congress demagogy and the slogan of “Garibi Hatao”? Mrs Gandhi also promised the moon like the Communists.
GLJ: No, whatever the slogan, by and large Mrs Gandhi has been very reluctant to make tall promises. There was just one such slogan – in the 1971 election. Since then she has not made any tall promises.
MRM: She must have learnt from experience.
GLJ: In fact, even Mrs Gandhi’s popularity cannot be explained in terms of the promises she makes because she is outdone by almost every second politician in that respect.
MRM: Giri, tell me how do you explain her popularity?
GLJ: That is a separate matter and I will come to that later. Let me come back to the second contrary proposition I was making to you. When you say that liberal democracy is not suited to us, I cannot agree for I see no other system of government that is acceptable to the people of this country.
MRM: You mean to say which should be acceptable to this country.
GLJ: No. I am saying which is acceptable to this country. I will give you the example of the emergency. In the first six months, the emergency was fairly popular, even among educated people. But when people began to realise what the emergency really meant then their attitude changed. That happened when they felt the absence of the intermediary class of politicians who used to mediate between the administration, particularly the police, and the people. When this intermediary class disappears and the administration is able to do what it likes it is then that the ordinary people realise the value of politics and politicians and of liberal democracy.
Tallest Promises
Also, since we are a society with no continuous political traditions, there is nothing to fall back on apart from the imported or inherited liberal concepts of democracy. So if it is possible for any system to work in this country, it is only the liberal democratic system. I am not saying that this will work very well. All I say is that it is the only one possible and also acceptable to our people. Even if another system is imposed, as the emergency was, its popularity or acceptability will be short-lived. In course of time such a system will become dysfunctional in terms of results (as the emergency became in its second year). Would you agree, Minoo?
MRM: Should we not first define the term “liberal democracy?” It seems to me that you think India has been under a liberal democracy all this time. I do not agree. I think it has been under a very advanced form of state capitalism which is detrimental to democracy.
Let me explain. The amount of concentration of economic power through excessive controls in the hands of politicians in Delhi is entirely repugnant to liberal democracy, which believes in competitive free enterprise in a free market. The concept of national planning – comprehensive centralised planning – Nehru took from Stalin and the Soviet Union. It is not “indicative planning” of the French or the British or of the Western European pattern which is liberal. The excessive taxation which India has – both direct and indirect – is extremely illiberal. And finally the amount of nationalisation, ending with that of the six banks recently, is too big a dose for liberal democracy to swallow.
I am of the view that without a U-turn in economic affairs, liberal democracy cannot arrive in India.
I would like liberal democracy to come to India through the kind of economic reforms that Mrs Margaret Thatcher is carrying out under Professor Milton Friedman’s inspiration in England or what President JR Jayawardene has done in Ceylon. He has abolished the planning department. He has reduced taxation, he has encouraged free enterprise, he has welcomed multinationals. Now that is liberal democracy on the economic side. You cannot have liberal democracy in politics with highly concentrated economic power in the hands of the “new class” in New Delhi. I think what Milovan Djilas has talked of – a “new class” – in his book of that name has arisen in New Delhi. The corrupt politician, the corrupt businessman and the corrupt official are today holding the country to ransom.
Experiment In Democracy
GLJ: Minoo, I’m afraid you are contradicting yourself. But before I go into that, I want to clarify what I mean by liberal democracy. It means the rule of law, absence of arbitrary governmental action and by and large free and fair elections. The government might confer certain advantages on those who manage to cultivate it, either with money or through influence or whatever. That by itself does not make it undemocratic. Governments in Japan, the United States and Italy confer favours on their business houses and we cannot say that they are not democratic. If the judiciary and the press are reasonably independent, if individuals can pursue their activities without any undue fear of authority I would regard that as a reasonable experiment in liberal democracy.
MRM: I go along with you on that.
GLJ: Minoo, undue controls and attempts at centralised planning are not peculiar to India. I was reading some interesting figures the other day. For instance, in Sweden 62 per cent of the national income is handled by the government; in the United States about 32 per cent of it is handled by both federal and state governments. In India, despite all the expansion of the public sector, the percentage of national income handled by the government is around 24 per cent.
MRM: You forget that that is so because agriculture is in private hands.
GLJ: That is true. As I see things, whereas certain economic policies may be conducive to the promotion of liberal democracy, others – a certain measure of planning and controls – are not really so destructive of democracy, as you suggest. But the contradiction that I pointed out earlier in your argument is that while on the one hand you say that our people are not really fit for liberal democracy, on the other hand you argue that the policies that various governments have pursued in this country since independence have been detrimental to the growth of democracy. Now what is the weightage you give to these two propositions?
MRM: But, Giri, these are not contrary propositions; both point in fact in the same direction. The Indian people do not have the necessary temperament and the background to sustain a free society. You talk of Sweden and Germany. It is indeed true that in affluent western societies a certain measure, a very large measure, of public enterprise and public intervention has coexisted with a free society. I accept that. But the difference between them and India is that our capacity to bear that much of political centralisation is much more limited.
Let me illustrate this with a conversation I had with a labour leader, Herbert Morrison. I asked him how much nationalised industry the British system could bear without the parliamentary system being undermined. He said about 15 per cent.
I then asked: “Do you think we can have the same proportion here?” and he said: “My dear fellow, that would be lethal for you, for you have no Magna Carta, you do not have non- conformist conscience. In other words, your democratic roots are much more fragile than ours.”
Now that is my answer to you, Giri. What Sweden, Britain and America can get away with, we can’t. Professor Galbraith said the same to me in 1967 when I met him in Paris. He said: “I have a new formula which you will like – West of Beirut, democratic socialism; East of Beirut, good old-fashioned capitalism.” This is what I also believe in. In an affluent society, you can nationalise more, you can have more public welfare measures. In a poor society we cannot bear it, because the political structure is too weak, so I feel what I’m saying is not self-contradictory.
GLJ: It seems to me that you are greatly influenced by the ’50’s and the ’60’s when big investment was made in industrial undertakings in the public sector. Since then most of the public investment has taken place in certain fields to which you cannot possibly object. The biggest investment now is in irrigation; the second biggest is in transportation and the third in power. These three sectors account t for most of the public investment now.
Bloated Bureaucracy
But we have another problem, that is our bloated bureaucracy which is not effective in terms of results. Its size is completely out of proportion to our economic base; it has become a much bigger drag on the country’s progress than the public sector, however inefficient.
And as for planning, ever since the Third Five Year Plan i.e., since 1967, planning has been very ineffective in India. There has hardly been any planning worth the name. Plans have had to be jettisoned or they have had to be drastically modified; in reality we have had nothing more than indicative plans whatever the theory. We have not been able to find money for any new major industrial plant in the public sector. So this in my opinion is not the main threat to democracy. The biggest threat to democracy as1 I see it is from our rising population and a bloated, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy.
MRM: There I agree with you.
GLJ: Then the disruption of established society as a result of various kinds of developments – the introduction of adult franchise, monetisation of the economy, spread of poor quality education, the expansion of means of communication and transport – is also placing a great strain on our democratic polity because we cannot have a national consensus amidst social confusion. There are other factors too. But before we go into that I think we are broadly agreed that in India, a charismatic personality whether it is Gandhi, Nehru or now Mrs Gandhi is central to the political process.
MRM: Yes.
GLJ: I am at loss to understand how someone becomes a charismatic personality. Gandhiji became a hero of the people partly because he put off the Western garb, put on khadi and sat in the Ashram in Wardha. By that act of returning to the life-style of ordinary people in traditional India, he acquired the power to mobilise traditional India.
Nehru had a cultivated mind; he lived in some kind of style, spoke English with a British accent, was well-educated and took pride in it and gave us the concept of a modern India. In that role he became extremely popular in India.
Mrs Gandhi is modern in many ways yet not so modern as her father – as her repeated visits to temples show – but she is equally popular, although not perhaps with the same class of people. So we find ourselves in a peculiar situation. While we are critically dependent in our political life on a charismatic figure for the functioning of our political system, we cannot even find out what it is that gives the necessary charisma to a certain individual.
Buying Time
MRM: I suggest we turn from the past to the future, from analysis to prognosis. The outlook is undoubtedly grim. All the existing political parties appear to be almost equally useless. It is only too likely that what Walter Lipmann wrote in his book “The Public Philosophy” some years ago may apply to our own situation today.
He wrote: “If the people find that they must choose whether they will be represented in an assembly which is incompetent to govern or whether they will be governed without being represented there is no doubt at all as to how the issue will be decided. They will choose authority which promises to be paternal in preference to freedom which threatens to be fratricidal. For large communities cannot do without being governed. No ideal of freedom or democracy will long be allowed to stand in the way of their being governed….”
This is all very sad for me, since I was a member of the Constituent Assembly of India and had a hand in the drafting of our constitution.
GLJ: Minoo, I do not share your pessimism to the same extent. The situation is serious, perhaps even critical, but it is not beyond hope. We can certainly buy time if Mrs Gandhi manages to do reasonably well and thereby ensure that the chasm between the people and her party, such as it is, does not become unmanageably big. The danger is there, as we see in Assam and the rest of north-east India. But it is not unavoidable. The future of Indian democracy rests on one individual. It is without doubt a slender hope but it is there.
I sense another danger. If Mrs Gandhi’s government does not perform and the impression grows that she is planning to revert to some form of emergency, a large section of the intelligentsia may turn to the CPM for hope. This can produce a polarisation and aggravate the crisis which is already on us.
MRM: Giri, I could not agree with you more. Above all, India needs discipline without dictatorship. It also needs a ‘U turn’ towards a more pragmatic economic policy. Unfortunately, it does not seem likely that Mrs Indira Gandhi, in her present company, is likely to deliver the goods by solving India’s basic problems which are population control, increased productivity and modernisation. If this fear of mine is justified, then a dangerous vacuum will develop in course of time.
There are two alternative ways this vacuum can be filled. The first is the ideal one, namely, a liberal democratic party should come into existence as an alternative to the present government to do for India what Mrs Margaret Thatcher is doing in Britain and President JR Jayawardene, who is winning all the by-elections, in Sri Lanka. Such a development, though highly desirable, is somewhat unlikely to materialise.
If this solution is beyond our reach we may have to put up with the second alternative and try and preserve as much of a free society as is possible, as is the case in Singapore and many other countries in Asia. I for one, responded to a statement made by Mr NA Palkhivala in Delhi some time in 1974 that he would like to have both a free society and political democracy but, if driven to choose between them, he would rather have a free society without elections than elections without a free society.
GLJ: Minoo, I could not disagree with you more. A free economy is not a free society. There can be no free society without accountability of the rulers to the ruled and it is meaningless to talk of accountability without elections. Of course, democracy cannot survive without economic growth. But absence of democracy is no guarantee of growth. Look at Latin America and Africa and closer home we have Pakistan. They have not had either democracy or growth or justice. Right now, another problem is worrying me. I find that the intelligentsia remains very critical and distrustful of Mrs Gandhi and that it sets up unrealistic utopian standards which our system cannot live up to. The critics have an inadequate understanding both of our own society and of the history of the West whose ideals and value systems they wish to copy.
Negativism Undesirable
MRM: I, for one, am not guilty of that attitude. I do not believe in giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. I have all along pleaded for Mrs Gandhi to be given an opportunity to show what she could do and suggested that we should keep an open mind and our fingers crossed. I must confess, however, that the first three months in office of the present government have been disappointing. Neither have law and order been restored nor is there a pragmatic economic policy. On the contrary, the nationalisation of six more banks shows that the dead hand of the past lies heavily on the shoulders of this government. I would reserve judgement till we see the Union Budget which will be introduced by June this year. If it is in line with the budgets in past years, I would be inclined to abandon hope.
GLJ: Minoo, I must confess I, too, am not impressed by the Government’s performance in the past three months. But we must remember that the objective situation is adverse what with an unprecedented drought, the continuing rise in prices of oil, industrial raw materials and the equipment we import. Other factors include the recession in the west making its governments less willing to help developing countries like ours and the agitations in Assam and other north-east Indian states. All this calls for skill on the part of the government, and patience, and understanding on the part of the rest of us. Negativism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
MRM: I am glad we agree that a purely negative attitude is undesirable. If the present government fails, the country will suffer. It is in the national interest that we should hope for the relative success of the present government.
The last word on the subject was said by Winston Churchill when he observed: “Of all forms of government, democracy is the worst – except all the others.” People like us should therefore be engaged in a holding operation to keep green some democratic oases in the authoritarian desert in the hope that someday the desert may recede and the Oases spread.
GLJ: I am glad that despite your general pessimism we are concluding this discussion on a somewhat optimistic note.
The Times of India, Sunday Magazine, 25 May 1980