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Debate that is not on: Waiting for Godot

T. C. A. Ramanujam

With five States going to the polls on May 10, India is having a sort of a mini general elections where the issue is not the role of the Union Government but the performance of the State governments belonging to a variety of parties.

Surprisingly, there is no common thread in the election battles in these States. The Leftists would like to retain power in Bengal and Kerala. Way back in 1958-59, they created history of sorts by being voted to power for the first time in the world thro ugh independent ballot. Will they lose their last citadel in Free India?

What accounts for the failure of the Left to make an impact on the Indian masses? An English columnist, James Cameron, lamented those dear dead days when so many of us, especially in the universities thought we were communists or ought to be -- the gener ation of the mid- and late-1930s, moved deeply by the fear of Fascism and the horrors of war and also by such glories as the November Revolution, the Spanish People's Republic of the 1930s crushed by the usual coalition of social democracies of Bri tain and France, backed by the US and allying with Hitler, Mussolini till as long as possible and, of course, the people's struggles in China, India and elsewhere.

Hiren Mukherjee, recalling history, notes that that chapter has ended but the `bad old world' whose death even a sceptic philosopher like Bertrand Russell had predicted around 1925 in his Road to Freedom has come back to power. In a moving tribute to Ind rajit Gupta, the veteran Parliamentarian recalls how in 1987, in an international socialist meet in Moscow, he gave expression to the fear provoked by the ways of Gorbachev. The great leader of the African Liberation forces, Oliver Tambo, embraced Hiren Mukherjee and said, ``Comrade, we have to live with this kind of thing...''

All of them gave Gorbachev the benefit of doubt and did not anticipate that under the cloak of Gorbachev's Socialism, More Socialism, Always Socialism, counter revolution would soon be ``contrived by the conjunction of failures and debilities and laxitie s of the countries of real existing socialism with the relentless and never ceasing malignancies of the post World War II, neo imperialism'' (Fidel Castro).

``I confess,'' says Hiren Mukherjee, ``with all the simplistic noise about democracy, about democracy pure and undefiled as it were, which is a fiction, I feel weighed down, however much I try to be active, to keep going -- Epur si muove.''

The failure of the Leftist movement in this country is attributable at least in part in practical terms to the absence of rabble rousers who were omnipresent in the Dravidian movements till recently. The Leftist movement reflected neither the individual genius and character of the leader nor the National consciousness -- a National era, a mood, hope, a dread, a despair -- in which you listen to the spoken history of the time.

Houston Peterson suggests how orators capture their audience, change the vote or set in motion a new train of events. Today's speakers at election rallies come nowhere near all-time greats like Sun Yat Sen, Mao Tse Tung, Roosevelt, Churchill, Gandhiji or Nehru. The rostrum is crushed by the printing press and the speaker is stifled by the newspapers. All too many speeches have been weak in substance and badly delivered.

The audience is apathetic, sleeping people who have to be awakened; there are hostile audiences to be defied and conquered. There are alienated or sullen audiences that must be won back; there are frightened audiences that must be calmed. Of course, ther e are loyal affectionate audiences that must be further inspired. There are cool sceptical audiences that must be moulded into some kind of unity.

Cicero pointed out long ago that elections would not be necessary if truth were self evident. Unfortunately, it is not. Every individual voter is a complicated mixture of reason, feeling and impulse, with stores of knowledge and stores of ignorance, all wonderfully related, speakers who would move audiences must play on many strings, must appeal to hope and fear, anger, mercy, pity as well as to pure truth and the loss of logic. As long as human nature is what it is, eloquence will remain a double-edged sword to be used for noble and ignoble purposes but used inevitably.

Today, the Indian electoral scene can boast of no great orators. The poetry of the Prime Minister of the ruling coalition is withered by age and the oratory of the leader of the National Democratic Front in Tamil nadu is staled by custom. Leadership has fallen in the hands of shrieking women who have no time for economics.

How come that the Indian Bank scam nowhere figures in today's election battles? Can it be that the beneficiaries are to be found in parties of all hues and colours and so they would like to keep mum? No party highlights the difficulties faced by the midd le-class and the poor people in securing credit from financial institutions at a time when the captains of industry are allowed to get away with accumulated liabilities owed to the very same financial institutions. The free-market economy has been accept ed by all parties as the model to be followed and it does not give all actors equal economic space.

The main stay of the Indian economy continues to be agriculture but its share in National income is steadily falling though its share in employment remains high at 60 per cent of the economically active population. The rural economy is plagued with occup ational rigidity and discrimination in opportunity contributing to high levels of poverty. The proposed Electricity Bill, 2000 has put the commercial power beyond the reach of the poor and has taken energy security outside of State intervention and well into the ambit of international finance capital (incidentally, does anyone remember who finally okayed the highly controversial Enron deal hours before submitting resignation after a fiery speech in Parliament?).

Presenting the two years of market fundamentalism, the Alternate Economic Survey, 1998-2000, poses the question: ``If liberalization is an attempt to de-empower government, who would inherit this power -- community institutions or corporate house s?''

Globalisation has brought into focus, the conflict between the interests of the consumer and the producer. It has also reduced the opportunities for employment. None of the elections since 1991 brought this issue before the electorate. Instead, we are be ing fed with reels of paper on who would lead and who is more corrupt. Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer laid down the law that no one is an imperium in imperio in our constitutional order, not even the Election Commission. Untouched power is alien to our syste m.

The Leftists are at grievous fault in not highlighting the universally admitted fact that among all the Governments and parties that held sway in this country since 1947, it is to the credit of Leftist governments that not a little finger has ever been p ointed out against them about deviations from codes of conduct or accusing them of financial impropriety. It is also to their credit that they never played the caste card for deriving political mileage. They always combined a Machiavellian materialism wi th a millennial righteousness promising a future which would realise man's fondest dreams of equality, freedom and justice but to be attained only by following the utterly non moral laws of science.

Today, there is a dearth of leadership, a complete lack of talent in all political parties. Mediocrity is the order of the day. We have no leaders who can either be idealistic pragmatists like Napoleon, Bismarck and Disraeli or pragmatic idealists like L incoln, Gladstone and Cavour. But this is true not only of India but also of other countries such as the US, the UK, France and our immediate neighbours such as Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The electorate drifts and so does our polity gro ping in the dark amidst non-issues.

It is often said that the occasion finds the man and a crisis throws up a leader. The crisis has not arrived in India and the occasion has not arisen to throw up a leader of stature. Where is the leader who will feel in his heart of hearts that the worki ng people are the salt of our earth and to be part of their destiny is the greatest adventure of our time? We await the arrival of that leader. Will it be like waiting for Godot?