Rahul Gandhi: Congress disruptor or Modi’s gift to the nation?
, ET Bureau|
Updated: Dec 30, 2017, 10.40 AM IST
In Gujarat, the incumbent BJP's errors of omission and commission gave the Congress steam and made Narendra Modi sweat, to not lose in his home state. Its performance in Gujarat has given the Congress confidence that 2019 would be very different from 2014. But can the party merely count on the Modi government's mistakes? Does it have a positive agenda on which to rally popular support?
Being the alternative to the BJP will work, up to a point. But that strategy depends on how intense an anti-BJP sentiment the Modi administration works up. In other words, it is a strategy whose success depends on the BJP's failures, and the only variable under Congress control would be how imaginatively it exploits public anger against those mistakes. However, the BJP could correct some mistakes, as it did in the case of GST — for example, it could offer a liberal increase in support prices to assuage angry farmers, cut petroleum taxes further to make fuel cheaper and transfer money to Jan Dhan accounts in the name of some welfare measure or the other.
The Congress needs something positive to offer, different from what the BJP can. This is what could make Rahul Gandhi a true disruptor of Indian politics or leave him as the ready answer to those desperately crying, 'anyone but Modi.'
There are three elements to a new paradigm in Indian politics. The first one is releasing the polity from systemic dependence on the proceeds of corruption for funding Indian democracy. All parties mobilise the bulk of their funds covertly. They show income and expenditure that are tiny fractions of the actual figure. In the process, they hand out thousands of IOUs to the funders, who expect favourable treatment, if not quo for every quid. Collecting money as commissions from publicly funded projects or procurement or allocation of land or other natural resources entails suborning the civil service, and losing the political leadership's ability to hold the bureaucracy to account.
The Congress is associated, in the public mind, with corruption. One 2G verdict will not change this. There is something the new Congress president can do to both disrupt the paradigm of corrupt funding of Indian democracy and stop people undergoing word association tests from automatically saying Congress when they hear Corruption.
Crowd-source political funding
With digital payments routine across the country, if not now, definitely when the payment banks of Airtel, Jio and Vodafone-Idea start real competition for custom, anyone can make even a five-rupee contribution to a political party with an electronic audit trail. No need, anymore, for parties to say the bulk of their contributions came from people making small-denomination donations too numerous to account for. If the Congress can get every potential voter to give it at least Rs 5 a month, it can gather, openly and transparently, a huge kitty for spending on elections. People would feel involved, and feel generous to the party they have contributed to.
This would put pressure on other parties to also to gather their funds transparently. Of course, this would not end the practice of parties also collecting unaccounted money from large industrialists. To minimise the role of unaccounted money in politics, the Election Commission can take some proactive steps. It could mandate every party to declare, every month, how much it spent at the level of the polling booth, the ward, the panchayat, the district, the state and the nation. The number of rallies held, posters pasted, advertisements released, travels of leaders, etc can be tallied, and expenditure estimated.
These numbers can then be thrown open for contestation by other parties, independent watchdogs and the media. The EC can finalise an expenditure figure, hearing the challenge and the party's defence. Then, the party can be asked to show source of income at every level, for carrying out its revealed expenditure.
Champion democracy
The word secular has been drained of its salience. It is now a dog whistle for those who hate deracinated, rootless elites who fancy themselves as liberals, apart from for active communalists. Its hindi coinage, dharm nirapeksh is especially unfortunate: it suggests a clear distaste for morals and ethics. It is better to emphasise democracy, a term that subsumes secularism without raising hackles.
In India, where power is very unevenly distributed among the layers of caste and class hierarchy, democracy would mean siding with the subaltern to empower them and advance their interests. The tribes, Dalits, Muslims and Other Backward Castes can shed their social and political deprivation only through active participation in democracy and broadbased, globalised growth. The Congress can rejuvenate itself only when it mobilises these sections in a common, constant movement for democracy. This means moving away from wooing each group individually, by roping in a few leaders of the group and promising the group benefits that can be secured only at the expense of other groups.
Rahul Gandhi can learn a lot from revisiting Nehru's Muslim Mass Contract Programme of the 1930s. It got curtailed, in an attempt to build bridges with the Muslim League, which resented the Congress' attempts to mobilise Muslims. This, explains, in part, the lasting failure of the national movement to negotiate an internal consensus on secularism among Muslims.
Secularism cannot be limited to an absence of riots. Nor can Hindu generosity be its basis. It is citizenship of democratic India that guarantees the minorities certain religious rights and physical and cultural security, not patronage by one party or another. The stronger India's democracy, the stronger protection of minority rights; the weaker democracy, the less secure the life and liberty of the minorities.
Muslims have to actively choose democracy, to protect their rights. Democracy entails duties as well: to respond democratically to perceived threats to the religion, for example. Defending denial of democratic rights to Muslim women in the name of the Sharia weakens democracy. Raining fire and brimstone on those who, in some cleric's opinion, commits apostasy or threatening violence against cartoonists who have portrayed the Prophet violates democracy and harms the security of Indian Muslims derived from democracy. Muslims, in other words, have to mould their conduct in the democratic idiom. This message must be conveyed not in hostility but as part of their empowerment, along with India's other subaltern groups.
Working with, rather than talking down and offering benefits to subaltern groups, should be the goal of a modern mass contact programme, reaching out to all sections of society to strengthen democracy.
Inclusive growth
Democracy cannot sustain, if the democratic polity does not generate opportunities for material progress. Speaking at Berkeley, Rahul Gandhi spoke of enabling India's poor to take part in globalised growth. He got it exactly right. This message must be driven home. Broadbased, participative growth calls for enhancing human capacity and providing educated, healthy young people with the infrastructure to connect to the global division of labour. This translates into reforming the school system, creating healthcare that works for everyone, investing in all kinds of infrastructure and a cultural revolution that shatters the Brahmanical notion that knowledge is finite, pre-existing and pre-ordained as the preserve of a tiny elite.
Being a janeyu-dhari does not gel with the anti-caste essence of democracy and inclusive growth, needless to say.
Paradigm changes in political funding, democratic mobilisation and strategizing inclusive growth would give Rahul Gandhi a positive message that would truly disrupt Indian politics. Of course, he could hope and pray for the Modi Sarkar to keep making mistakes and seek to capitalise on these. That would be politics as usual, and might still bear fruit, if the Modi regime is kind enough to keep going a steady supply of egregious errors.
This article is part of disruptions that will change your life in 2018 . The views expressed are of the author
Being the alternative to the BJP will work, up to a point. But that strategy depends on how intense an anti-BJP sentiment the Modi administration works up. In other words, it is a strategy whose success depends on the BJP's failures, and the only variable under Congress control would be how imaginatively it exploits public anger against those mistakes. However, the BJP could correct some mistakes, as it did in the case of GST — for example, it could offer a liberal increase in support prices to assuage angry farmers, cut petroleum taxes further to make fuel cheaper and transfer money to Jan Dhan accounts in the name of some welfare measure or the other.
The Congress needs something positive to offer, different from what the BJP can. This is what could make Rahul Gandhi a true disruptor of Indian politics or leave him as the ready answer to those desperately crying, 'anyone but Modi.'
There are three elements to a new paradigm in Indian politics. The first one is releasing the polity from systemic dependence on the proceeds of corruption for funding Indian democracy. All parties mobilise the bulk of their funds covertly. They show income and expenditure that are tiny fractions of the actual figure. In the process, they hand out thousands of IOUs to the funders, who expect favourable treatment, if not quo for every quid. Collecting money as commissions from publicly funded projects or procurement or allocation of land or other natural resources entails suborning the civil service, and losing the political leadership's ability to hold the bureaucracy to account.
The Congress is associated, in the public mind, with corruption. One 2G verdict will not change this. There is something the new Congress president can do to both disrupt the paradigm of corrupt funding of Indian democracy and stop people undergoing word association tests from automatically saying Congress when they hear Corruption.
Crowd-source political funding
With digital payments routine across the country, if not now, definitely when the payment banks of Airtel, Jio and Vodafone-Idea start real competition for custom, anyone can make even a five-rupee contribution to a political party with an electronic audit trail. No need, anymore, for parties to say the bulk of their contributions came from people making small-denomination donations too numerous to account for. If the Congress can get every potential voter to give it at least Rs 5 a month, it can gather, openly and transparently, a huge kitty for spending on elections. People would feel involved, and feel generous to the party they have contributed to.
This would put pressure on other parties to also to gather their funds transparently. Of course, this would not end the practice of parties also collecting unaccounted money from large industrialists. To minimise the role of unaccounted money in politics, the Election Commission can take some proactive steps. It could mandate every party to declare, every month, how much it spent at the level of the polling booth, the ward, the panchayat, the district, the state and the nation. The number of rallies held, posters pasted, advertisements released, travels of leaders, etc can be tallied, and expenditure estimated.
These numbers can then be thrown open for contestation by other parties, independent watchdogs and the media. The EC can finalise an expenditure figure, hearing the challenge and the party's defence. Then, the party can be asked to show source of income at every level, for carrying out its revealed expenditure.
Champion democracy
The word secular has been drained of its salience. It is now a dog whistle for those who hate deracinated, rootless elites who fancy themselves as liberals, apart from for active communalists. Its hindi coinage, dharm nirapeksh is especially unfortunate: it suggests a clear distaste for morals and ethics. It is better to emphasise democracy, a term that subsumes secularism without raising hackles.
In India, where power is very unevenly distributed among the layers of caste and class hierarchy, democracy would mean siding with the subaltern to empower them and advance their interests. The tribes, Dalits, Muslims and Other Backward Castes can shed their social and political deprivation only through active participation in democracy and broadbased, globalised growth. The Congress can rejuvenate itself only when it mobilises these sections in a common, constant movement for democracy. This means moving away from wooing each group individually, by roping in a few leaders of the group and promising the group benefits that can be secured only at the expense of other groups.
Rahul Gandhi can learn a lot from revisiting Nehru's Muslim Mass Contract Programme of the 1930s. It got curtailed, in an attempt to build bridges with the Muslim League, which resented the Congress' attempts to mobilise Muslims. This, explains, in part, the lasting failure of the national movement to negotiate an internal consensus on secularism among Muslims.
Secularism cannot be limited to an absence of riots. Nor can Hindu generosity be its basis. It is citizenship of democratic India that guarantees the minorities certain religious rights and physical and cultural security, not patronage by one party or another. The stronger India's democracy, the stronger protection of minority rights; the weaker democracy, the less secure the life and liberty of the minorities.
Muslims have to actively choose democracy, to protect their rights. Democracy entails duties as well: to respond democratically to perceived threats to the religion, for example. Defending denial of democratic rights to Muslim women in the name of the Sharia weakens democracy. Raining fire and brimstone on those who, in some cleric's opinion, commits apostasy or threatening violence against cartoonists who have portrayed the Prophet violates democracy and harms the security of Indian Muslims derived from democracy. Muslims, in other words, have to mould their conduct in the democratic idiom. This message must be conveyed not in hostility but as part of their empowerment, along with India's other subaltern groups.
Working with, rather than talking down and offering benefits to subaltern groups, should be the goal of a modern mass contact programme, reaching out to all sections of society to strengthen democracy.
Inclusive growth
Democracy cannot sustain, if the democratic polity does not generate opportunities for material progress. Speaking at Berkeley, Rahul Gandhi spoke of enabling India's poor to take part in globalised growth. He got it exactly right. This message must be driven home. Broadbased, participative growth calls for enhancing human capacity and providing educated, healthy young people with the infrastructure to connect to the global division of labour. This translates into reforming the school system, creating healthcare that works for everyone, investing in all kinds of infrastructure and a cultural revolution that shatters the Brahmanical notion that knowledge is finite, pre-existing and pre-ordained as the preserve of a tiny elite.
Being a janeyu-dhari does not gel with the anti-caste essence of democracy and inclusive growth, needless to say.
Paradigm changes in political funding, democratic mobilisation and strategizing inclusive growth would give Rahul Gandhi a positive message that would truly disrupt Indian politics. Of course, he could hope and pray for the Modi Sarkar to keep making mistakes and seek to capitalise on these. That would be politics as usual, and might still bear fruit, if the Modi regime is kind enough to keep going a steady supply of egregious errors.
This article is part of disruptions that will change your life in 2018 . The views expressed are of the author
