Political parties have missed the plot in changing India

Can politics, the way it plays out in public, reinvent itself? The basic template of Indian politics remains grooved in the past. The idiom of political expression has hardly made a shift, while everything else around, including the audience it caters to, has moved on.

If the political class and their posturings are received with disinterest, cynicism, and even some disdain, it has to be about this lag.

When the Shiv Sena gets worked up over a book, it does not surprise anymore. It could be a desperate effort by a party fighting redundancy, or a deliberate exercise to maintain its recall value among the target population, either imaginary or actual.

Aditya Thackeray’s arrival on the big stage by ensuring a ban on Rohinton Mistry’s book looks incongruous in a decade preoccupied with upward social and financial mobility.

To be fair to the Shiv Sena, it is not the only party digging to find issues to connect. All major political parties have lost the plot in post-2000 India. Their pet issues have lost traction from overuse. Rahul Gandhi grabs eyeballs when he turns candid about the flaws in the political system, but his words are yet to translate into concrete deliverables.

His Congress, which embraces the market economy and the aam aadmi with equal opportunistic agility, continues to survive without any drastic innovation in thinking.

The BJP, constrained by its ideological limitations, has effectively pruned its own growth expectations. The Left’s obstinate obsession with theory has pushed it to the fringes of national politics.

New arrivals like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena have not come up with any fresh ideas that have a longer shelf-life. The apparent intellectual bankruptcy across the political spectrum is already threatening the health of the democracy. It may soon raise questions over the legitimacy of the political process.

In the post-ideology political India, the leaders — despite being more educated, younger, and techno-savvy than their counterparts in an earlier generation — have little to offer in terms of lifting the image of the vocation they are in. Worse, they keep harking back to the modes of political expression which have gone largely
redundant now.

Let’s face it. The chasm between politics and people is becoming unbridgeable.

Why is it so? It could be the inability to read the post-1990s mindset. With the process of individual growth and mobility in the fast forward mode, courtesy the new economy, group identification is getting marginalised. A person is more likely to empathise with another in the same economic and status bracket than his social group in his village.

The traditional monolithic institutions have come to acquire fluidity and lost their unique strength, unity, to put across a bargaining proposition. No wonder, vote banks are being busted across the country. A decade or two from now, they may be too weak to influence individual choices. The political class is yet to look beyond the traditional groupings and find a blueprint to tap the energy of the individual and groups that are more class-centric.

The youth constitute more than 60% of our population. Some 41% were below 34 years of age, according to the 2001 census; add to that people in their early 40s, who still come in the youth bracket.

This is the group driving economic change. Where is the effort to tap this chunk of the population and articulate their problems? Obviously, political disinterest is more pronounced here.

The concept of leadership, too, has undergone a shift. The day of the undisputed, charismatic mass leader is passé, simply because the mass is fragmented and is no more driven by any singular larger goal, unless it is wartime or a time of great national emergency. It’s the time of the efficient manager, the person who is smooth at managing paradoxes and contradictions. Rahul Gandhi’s appeal lies here.

It’s interesting to watch the representative of the party that unleashed the forces of capitalism and changed the contours of fringe India, talking the language of the tribals in Niyamgiri in Orissa and the disenfranchised elsewhere.

Frank admission of weaknesses in the system and promising a more active role for youth is one thing, but the real test is in the delivery. His ability to do so has not been tested yet.

It does not help that the media, more active now than in any phase of the country’s history, goes on reinforcing the stereotype. The mismatch between the hype generated in the media over the Ayodhya verdict and the reactions of laymen on the ground is a clear pointer that things ought to change.

The country has moved on. It has been stated enough, but the gravity of the situation is yet to sink in.

Is it possible to devise a new political template for the 21st century? Ideology may no more be a potent instrument to mobilise masses in a society driven by self-interest and individualism. But ideas can be a strong binding force for the like-minded and a tool for positive intervention. Can the political class find them?