THE end of the year 2010 may appear to be a particularly inappropriate moment to assess the state of Indian politics. The context of near zero sessions in both houses of parliament in the midst of a fulsome national spectacle of political corruption is not designed to cultivate a discerning appreciation of the practice and practitioners of politics. The activity of politics and the institutional sites where this activity is carried out appear to be in an exceptionally sorry state.

There is something surprising and therefore systemic about the current state of politics. The UPA II government is at once legislatively more secure and politically more incoherent than most coalition governments of the recent past. A clean prime minister appears to be more debilitated in dealing with the muck that surrounds him than his predecessors. A regime that shows flashes of social conscience – real if short lived – simply cannot muster political will to give effect to it, even when the calculus of electoral gains happens to weigh on the same side as conscience. A ruling party that has started attracting back marginal social communities – by default rather than design – remains largely indifferent to their interests, unsure of what to do with this windfall. Far from being an effective agency for managing the collective interests of the capitalists, the state appears paralyzed by intra-corporate wars, vulnerable to predatory capital and unable to see the ‘big picture’ in the larger interest of the capital.

Something is clearly amiss here. This is not the story of politics that political science tells us about – political agents fail to realize their career objectives, parties do not move towards the median voters, regimes do not care for their political constituency, classes cannot see or pursue their ‘objective’ interests. Nor is it simply a story of individual stupidity, collective muddle-headedness, organizational confusion or suicidal political moves that constitute the everyday stuff of political gossip in any place or time. Perhaps we are witnessing a sharp decline of a crucial element in politics, something we have forgotten to name. What is amiss in the scenario described above could be paraphrased as political judgement.

This article suggests that the present moment, far from being particularly inappropriate, allows us to see more starkly a process of decline of political judgement that has taken place over a long period in post-independence India and has acquired a qualitatively different dimension after the turn of the century. An examination of some of the recent political developments brings out some attributes of this process. Lest these instances be seen as peculiar to the UPA government, this article looks across the political spectrum to find that this malaise is more widespread than would appear to be the case. Finally, it uses a long-term historical lens to understand the decline of political judgement.

 

The Kashmir policy is admittedly a difficult test to subject any regime to. If the two UPA regimes should be put to this test, it is only because they inherited a better situation than any other regime in the previous two decades. By the time UPA I came to power, Vajpayee had brought down the political heat, Lyngdoh had delivered fairly credible elections, Mufti and Mehbooba Sayeed had released a safety valve, and the Pakistani elite was busy digging its own grave. The constellation of political opportunities could not have been more favourable to the resolution of the six decade old dispute. Six years down the line, instead of a forward movement, we have definitely moved away from any resolution of the problem.

 

One day historians will tell us a fuller story of this spectacular disaster in Kashmir. But we can anticipate what might puzzle them most: it is hard to see any evil design of the rulers behind this disaster. No doubt there was considerable ill-will, suspicion and animosity from the foot soldiers and local political agents. But it is difficult to discern just what the Congress could have gained from playing the games it did in Kashmir.

Unless there is some staggering piece of evidence hidden in the archives for the historians, we can guess that their story would read as a story of the poverty of political judgement. The rulers in Delhi underestimated the high stakes in the Kashmir crisis, did not appreciate the need for a political bridge between mainstream politics and separatists, failed to take into account the accumulated resentment of the people of Jammu and, in effect, handed over the state to political actors and middlemen who played for their petty stakes.

The performance of the UPA stands in sharp contrast to that of the NDA government led by Vajpayee, which inherited a highly troubled legacy, faced a tougher cross-border situation and yet left behind a lot of residual goodwill, if not peace. Perhaps the future historian would see the UPA’s mishandling of Kashmir as a textbook illustration of why benevolence must not be seen as the highest virtue in politics.

Telangana is not as tough as Kashmir, or should not have been so. Here the UPA’s handling had all the elements of a poverty of politics: bad faith, poor timing, indecision, shoddy choices and loss of nerve. After promising a second SRC (States Reorganization Commission) in its 2004 manifesto, the party slept over the matter as Chief Minister YSR found ways to keep Chandrashekhar Rao, leader of the Telangana Rashtriya Samiti, silent. It showed that the national leadership was not bothered to keep its word to the people of Telangana. The political drama over the selection of YSR’s successor, following his ‘accidental’ demise, exposed a national leadership that had at best a remote connect, not just with the workers but even the leaders of its own party. And finally, the flip-flop over the declaration of Telangana showed a government that had lost sense of direction and nerves.

While the Union government may hope that the Srikrishna Committee will help find it a way out of its own indecision, the state of Andhra Pradesh has already undergone an emotional and political partition. The story of Telangana resembles the fable of a man who opted to eat a hundred onions over getting a hundred shoe strikes as punishment, failed to eat beyond ninety-nine onions and then was subjected to a shoe beating as well. Barring a political miracle, the Congress appears to be courting a similar fate in Telangana as well as the rest of Andhra.

 

The government’s decision to go in for a caste census brings out yet another facet of a loss of political judgement. One would expect the Congress to be anxious to court the OBC voters, given that the party has finally started regaining some OBC support that it lost after Mandal. An OBC enumeration in the 2011 Census should have been an easy decision: administratively sensible, legally defensible and politically advantageous. But instead of working proactively for an OBC enumeration, the government adopted every trick to block, delay and deflect any decision on this matter. By the time a parliamentary consensus – which took the government by surprise – forced the government to change course, the concession looked like a surrender to political blackmail. The final outcome is thus the worst of all possible worlds: those opposed to a caste census feel betrayed, the OBC lobby feels cheated by the delinking of the caste count from the main census, and those with a policy interest in the caste census feel infuriated with the final decision that, given the two-stage process now adopted, serves no purpose.

 

The three instances here depict different types of errors in political judgement. The misjudgement in Kashmir was the result of a lack of fine-grained contextual understanding of what was going on, in and outside the valley, and a deficit of strategic acumen. The flip-flop in Telangana flowed from a poor practical sense or prudence, besides a lack of steadiness in judgement. The misjudgement about the caste census came from a lack of ‘synthetic’ judgement, an inability to combine a good principle of unmarked citizenship with the specificities of the case and the balance of other policy considerations. But there is one attribute that all the three misjudgements share: these were not caused by a common error of lack of dispassionate assessment; if anything, they originated from a lack of passion.

It is possible to agree with the story so far and yet not see it as reflecting a systemic trend. After all, the misjudgement of the UPA II government can easily be attributed to the peculiarities of this dispensation. It may be unfair to expect an exercise of political judgement from two leaders who have not risen from the ranks in the political process, who cannot be described as political animals. Besides the unusual split of the political executive into the prime minister, who plays chief executive in governance and the party leader, who has the final word in things political, is designed to produced discordance. Their misjudgement may, thus, not be anything more than a historic accident specific to the current government. Let us, therefore, shift from the level of government to that of the entire spectrum of party politics. Let us examine a crucial moment – how various political parties responded to the electoral verdict in the Lok Sabha election of 2009 – to understand the nature of political judgement that is clearly more systemic in nature.

 

The ‘victory’ in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 opened up a historic possibility for the Congress party. The opportunity was not so much to re-emerge as the one-dominant party and to rebuild the famous rainbow coalition of the Congress system. In systemic terms, the Congress had been given an opportunity to internalize and accommodate the political diversity that enriched Indian democracy in the 1990s. Equally, here was an opportunity to reconstitute itself as a political vehicle of the bottom of the pyramid.

Viewed differently, the real opportunity for the Congress party was to inherit various legacies of which it was not a natural heir. The legacy of ‘reaching out to the last man’ could be connected to the politics of garibi hatao in the early ‘seventies, when the party made an effort, however short-lived and instrumental, to renegotiate its relationship with the poor. Having missed the Mandal bus, the party had the opportunity of inheriting the second wind of Mandal by appealing to the social constituency of the lower backwards and mahadalits, among others. With political imagination, the Congress could have turned the windfall of 2009 into an enduring political asset.

 

It is no surprise that the Congress party has done little in the last year and a half to realize this possibility. Like the first UPA regime, this one too is shy of making ‘political capital’ out of its large welfare programmes like the MGNREGA and creating a long-term support base. Unlike in the first regime, there is no left to arm-twist the Congress into doing things which are, in the last instance, in Congress’ own interest. In the absence of any coercion from outside or pressure from within the party, it is left to a largely non-political National Advisory Council to connect the government to those who voted it to power. The ruling party appears to have convinced itself that its renewed talk about the aam aadmi had already made it a party of the aam aadmi, that it has already made a generational transition, that it has a vision for the future. It has misconstrued the weakness of its opponents to be its own strength. The Congress party, in so far as it is meaningful to talk about the party as a thinking creature, appears to have mistaken its fortuna for its virtu and is well set to squander a historic opportunity, which it had done little to earn.

The BJP has displayed little will and capacity to benefit from the Congress’ complacency. Working under a mistaken assumption – that the party had lost an election that it could have won – much of its postmortem of the 2009 defeat focused on short term and at best secondary factors. Since the implosion in the party happened to coincide with a transition in leadership, it was easy to conclude that the crisis was one of leadership. It could thus avoid facing the more fundamental issues of its political placement and organization. The 2009 election showed that the BJP’s ‘new social bloc’, the strategy of overdrawing from a smaller social pool comprising the upper end of the caste-class continuum, had hit a dead end. It failed to realize that this strategy was always vulnerable to small shifts of some key and historically fickle or unattached social groups – upper caste, middle class and lower OBCs. Moreover, it was dependent on the political fragmentation of the bottom of the social pyramid. The BJP could not use its six year rule to convert this loose and temporary coalition into an enduring political bloc.

 

The BJP’s inability to hold allies and to court new social groups was partly a function of its exclusivist political platform. The real challenge of the BJP thus was to expand the pool of its potential voters by readjusting its platform to appeal to the sensibilities of the centrist voter. Instead, a significant section in the party wanted to go the opposite way towards hard Hindutva. This erroneous response to its stagnation goes back to a fundamentally flawed reading of the BJP’s rise to power.

The party had gained in the early nineties through a coincidence of opportunity and adversarial mobilization – the post-Mandal social churning, the organizational decline of the Congress and an anti-Congress sentiment among the electorate – but read it as a purposive coming together of the supporters of Hindu nationalism. Hence, the temptation to fall back upon the hard Hindutva line. Even as this may pay some local and regional dividends, but at the national plane in today’s political context it is only a recipe for its further political marginalization. The latest victory of the Nitish Kumar led JD(U)-BJP government in Bihar is likely to push back this tendency, at least for some time, but it is not clear if it would push a rethink of a reading that reinforces the Hindutva line.

 

The left faced a challenge that was much deeper than a coincidence of the low point of the electoral cycle in Kerala and West Bengal. Its reverses in 2009 were largely unrelated to the farcical but limited attempt at putting together a ‘third front’ at the national level. The real problem was that the left did not have the language to make sense of and respond to the real political challenge posed by its electoral reverses.

Some of these challenges were not difficult to spot: the left was not gaining new voters and cadre in the younger generation or in regions where it did not already have an effective presence; it had suffered steep erosion in its robust base among the rural poor especially in West Bengal; its critique of the economic policies of the mainstream parties sounded full of duplicity and its claims of being different from other parties and their leaders appeared increasingly suspect.

Like the BJP, the left too faced a challenge of a shrinking social and political base. In the long term it faced the challenge of reconciling its revolutionary ideological postures to the political reality of being a left-of-centre democratic party. If so, adherence to pure ideology could be more a part of the problem rather than a solution. Last heard, the CPI(M) has planned a special meeting to educate its leaders into the party’s ideology.

The BSP’s problem was not that it faced a ‘crisis’ or a ‘saturation point’. Notwithstanding an inability to convert its victory in the assembly elections in UP in terms of Lok Sabha seats, the party continued its onward march in 2009 in terms of popular support across the country. Its problem was that simultaneously it created premature expectations of its rise to power in Delhi. Besides, the attempt at expanding its base beyond UP and supplementing its dalit social base, has not yielded the kind of dividends the party needed for consolidation.

Of all the non-Congress parties, the BSP had the best opportunity for creating a counter coalition of the bottom of the social pyramid. Yet, it seems that the party may be moving in the opposite direction. It appears to have read its reverses in Uttar Pradesh as a failure of the mythical dalit-brahmin alliance and become wary of the task of expansion. Worse, it has a leader ready to barter long-term national gains for immediate benefits in UP and compromise the political for the personal, and does not appear keen to take the decisions necessary for pushing the party towards realizing this opportunity.

 

Finally, while the obituaries of regional parties and the discussion of the demise of Mandalite politics were premature, the verdict of 2009 contained several serious lessons which these parties could ignore at their own peril. Clearly, the first wave of Mandal politics was nearly exhausted. While the parties that emerged out of the first flush of empowerment of the backward castes in North India were not about to disappear into thin air, they faced a challenge of retaining and consolidating their political inheritance. They needed to deliver outcomes in terms of better quality of government in order to retain their political constituency; a simple one-dimensional appeal to one’s caste was no longer adequate.

Similarly the prevailing strategy of stapling additional social constituencies on to the existing core support needed to give way to an appeal to a cross section of the citizens. The Bihar verdict of 2010 has reinforced both these messages of 2009. But it is too early to say how far the Nitish model will be adopted by other regional parties. Bihar also shows the opposite example of parties like the RJD and the LJSP that clearly failed to read the writing on the wall and persisted with a one-dimensional politics of caste and community.

The poverty of judgement at the level of party competition may not be as obvious or blatant as in the case of governance, but it is more ominous precisely because it cuts across parties and regimes. To be sure, each party misconstrues the electoral verdict in somewhat different ways. If the Congress overlooked the historic opportunity of building a winning coalition of the bottom of the pyramid, the BJP was inattentive to the disintegration of the social bloc that brought it electoral success. The left and the BJP have a tendency to go back to its ideological core that may have brought them to where they are, while the BSP and the regional parties have a tendency to stick to a social core that constrains their expansion. Across the political spectrum, we find parties either out of touch with their own social constituencies, or unable to reach out to their potential voters. There is a widespread inability to revise older tactics in the light of new realities. It is to be noted that most of these misjudgements arise out of a lack of intimacy with the ground level political realities.

 

In concusion, let me take a leap from the two levels we have examined so far and offer some general observations about the state of political judgement today, even if this essay does not offer all the necessary evidence.

We tend to think of political judgement as an attribute of persons or, at most, of organizations. An analysis of the decline in political judgement in contemporary India invites us to think of political judgement as a collective attribute, as a quality shaped by political and intellectual context and shared by actors within a political community. That is why the decline in political judgement is not confined to the quality of reflection in one or the other register of political thinking, nor to one or the other traditions of thought. Cutting across familiar political divides, political actors, organizations and institutions of governance are losing touch with ground reality, failing to ‘sense’ the public mood, are incapable of making political moves that secure their own long-term interest, and are increasingly unable to establish cause-effect relationships that guides their political action. This spills beyond the political arena and affects political judgement, or rather its absence among the social movements, the media and academia. The problem is clearly more structural, for it relates to how the relationship between ideas and politics is shaped.

 

Thus, the decline should not be seen as either accidental or temporary. Since judgement draws its resources from traditions of thinking, a significant change in the collective political judgement is obviously connected to the fate of the tradition called modern Indian political thought. A sudden discontinuity in this tradition in post-colonial India resulted in a drying up of the resources of political judgement. This rupture got further accentuated by a decline of bilinguality and the growing linguistic division of intellectual labour, which placed the world of theory and experience into two separate compartments. It is too early to argue this with some confidence, but this decline may also be part of a much bigger story of the decline of that specifically twentieth century Indian activity that we call politics.

 

* This essay is the beginning of an inquiry. It draws upon parts that I had developed with Suhas Palshikar and others and presented to the group on India’s Intellectual History at Wissenschaftkolleg, Berlin. My thinking on political judgment has benefited greatly from reading of and discussions with John Dunn and a reading of Sanjay Ruparelia’s unpublished paper on this subject.