- Sanjay Kumar
A Congress rout and the AAP success are the most obvious results of recent polls. Both are spectacular, in their own ways. Even BJP’s landslide victory in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh pales in comparison, for these two open up new possibilities.
Why a party whose legacy of anti-colonial struggle had lost sheen generations ago, whose top leadership is in the grip of a seemingly disinterested and incompetent dynasty, that lacks any organised cadre, coherent ideology, social base, and whose average leader appears more of a wheeler-dealer, and scamster, should continue to get close to thirty percent of votes from Indians even in worst of times, is a genuine mystery. That the Indian social analyses, barring a few exceptions, have tried little to unravel this mystery, is not only an indication of their intellectual limitations, but also of their ideological biases. The enduring success of Congress indicates seamier side of liberal democracy in general, which bourgeois social sciences try more to paper over than explore.
From voters’ perspective elections under liberal democracy are an exercise in choice, but not in freedom. When people vote, they are not acting as citizens shaping their social world, but as little men and women facing pre-existing structures of social power. The magic of elections under liberal democracy is precisely this. They offer a choice, the choice is not fake, its collective outcome is uncertain, yet the choice is already pre-determined in ways that by and large reproduce pre-existing power structures. That is why, exercising franchise is not necessarily a marker of democratic exercise, and leaders of fascist persuasion are often the loudest votaries of compulsory voting. But that is not all. If elections were mere gears in a machine that simply revolved on and on, they would be quickly become a ritual, like those under state socialism in which the Party and leaders always got more than 95% approvals. Elections under liberal democracy in contrast provide flexible adjustment of state political functionaries to changing social conditions. They allow reflection of changes in public opinion, demography, gender politics, caste equations and balance of class forces, whose origins lie somewhere else, onto state politics. Punctuated adjustment with a time lag produces a sense of drama. Personae on stage appear as victors and losers, for voters there is enough stage space to allow their hope, vengeance or gratitude to play their part. For a time, and only for a time, the impersonal structure of state power becomes humanly palpable.
However, it does not take long for the alienation to set in; which pollsters tick as the ‘anti-incumbency’ factor in their calculations. It is indeed an irony that while the regimes espousing ‘historical material forces’ made their leaders and Parties permanent fixtures post revolution, the dialectic of electoral politics in liberal regimes, with its rich play of human emotions and drama, is inherently impersonal. Leaders and parties fail and succeed by vote swings of low single digits involving fence sitters. Pundits routinely declare these as ‘harbinger of fundamental change’, emergence of a ’new voter’, etc. But the fact remains a certain class of issues rarely enter electoral arena. For instance, why do numerically minuscule rich have such an overwhelming influence over state policies? Why are persons of questionable morality voted in by so many ordinary folks? Why do people at large know so little about the business of running government? How come state in India has become so business friendly in the past decade, without voters actually being asked to vote on the issue? Answers to these questions point towards those enduring structures of power, which the system of elections does little to reveal. This is also why the drama of elections is mostly so shallow, and momentous victories like that of Janata Party in 1977, and of Congress after Indira Gandhi’s murder are quickly forgotten.
All of the above appears to be contradicted by the rise of AAP. Here is a party that has characterised the entire political class as corrupt, which has made its funding transparent, whose election cadre by and large are not careerists hoping for returns for their labour, but genuine volunteers, archetypal aam aadmis, aam aurats, they really went to the people, for instance while formulating constituency wise manifestos during mohalla meetings. In most aspects AAP’s electoral practice was opposite of established politics. Does not its success mean a fundamental shift, emergence of a new culture of politics with great possibilities?
