Wake up fast
[This article appeared in the anniversary special of The Week, dated December 26, 2010. In a guest column, Shri. Shashi Tharoor, former Minister of State for External Affairs, rightly diagnoses what is wrong with the way politics is practised in India. I strongly believe this is something to ponder upon, this Independence Day. I couldn’t find an online version to link to, so I’ve provided relevant excerpts of the article below.]
Before I entered politics, one of my more frequent laments was about the abdication by the Indian educated classes of our political responsibility for our own destiny.
My generation grew up in an India where a vast gulf separated those who went into the profession or the civil services, and those who entered politics. The latter, at the risk of simplifying things a bit, were either at the very top of the very bottom: either maharajahs or big zamindars with a feudal hold on the allegiances of the voters in their districts, or semi-literate “lumpens” with little to lose who got into politics as their only means of self-advancement. If you belonged to neither category, you studied hard, took your exams and made a success of your life on merit - and you steered clear of politics as an activity for those “other people”.
But the problem with that approach - while completely understandable in a highly-competitive society where the salaried middle-class rarely enjoyed the luxury of being able to take the risks that a political life implied - was that it left out of Indian politics the very group of people that are the mainstay of politics in other democracies. Around the world, the educated taxpaying middle-classes are normally the ones who bring values and convictions to a country’s politics, and who have the most direct stake in questions of what the government can and cannot do. Across Europe, for instance, it is people from the middle-class who set the political agenda: they make up the bulk of the activists, voters and candidates for political office. In most western democracies, politics is essentially a middle-class pursuit.
(Please click the Read More link below to read more of the article.)
But in India, our middle-class has neither the time for activism (they are too busy doing professional jobs to make ends meet) nor the money or the votes to count in politics. The money flows at the top, and the votes, in our stratified society, lie at the bottom, where the numbers are. So members of the educated middle-class abstain from the process, and all too often look at it with disdain. They do not show up to vote in large nubers; whereas, in the US, the turnout in the poor black Harlem in most presidential elections (barring Obama’s) barely exceeds 20 per cent. In India, the poor turn out en masse to vote, spending hours in the hot sun to cast their ballots. They believe, rightly, that their votes make a difference, whereas the middle-class disempowers itself by its disdain. No wonder there is so much disenchantment with the process of our democracy, such cynicism about hte lack of principle amongst our politicians, and such surprise in learning of an honest politician (because we routinely believe the opposite).
[ … ] The result is that whereas 10 of the last 12 US presidential nominees of the two major political parties were graduates of either Harvard or Yale, the products of our best educational institutions rarely venture into politics. In the US, the commentator Michael Medved wrote that the skills and determination required to get into Harvard or Yale are in themselves indicators of suitability for the high office - “the driven, ferociously focused kids willing to expend the energy and make the sacrifices to conquer our most exclusive universities are among those most likely to enjoy similar success in the even more fiercely fought free-for-all of presidential politics.” In India, the kids who “conquer our most exclusive universities” would for the most part consider it beneath themselves to step into the muck and mire of our country’s politics. The attitude of most Indians is that if you are smart enough to get into a good university, you can make something better of your life in a “real” profession. Politics, it is generally muttered amongst the middle-class, is for those who are not able to do anything else. And the skills required to thrive in the world of Indian politics have nothing to do with the talents honed by a first-class education.
[ … ] So my message to the young middle-class Indians who actually have principles and ideals is this: not getting involved in politics is a cop-out. The nation needs you. Nobel laureate Archbiship Desmond Tutu, speaking of South Africa, once said he hoped his country would get leaders the people could look up to, “not people we have to keep finding excuses for.” If well-educated, middle-class Indians - the kind of people who are the mainstay of our professions - want a return to the era when our political leadership was full of people whom the nation admired, they will have to enter the fray themselves. Otherwise, all too often, we will have to pay allegiance to people we need to find excuses for.
