Citizenship is a Soft Skill

The Times has two interesting editorials yesterday and today ("What Is to be Done?" and "We, The State") which highlight not only a possible divergence on the editorial board but express an embryonic divide between the conservative "Right" and the social democratic "Left" of the Anglophone classes. The first editorial excoriates the state for not doing its job viz. "governance," especially on terrorism, while the second bemoans the tendency to blame the state for everything, as if the state were anything other than a reflection of the society from which it springs. If the first editorial chides the state to "Be better!" so that the rest of the nation can get on with the business of becoming a superpower, the second calls on all of us to "Be better citizens!", to renew the "social contract" that distinguishes a democratic republic from a colony by practising everyday democracy. The latter is the more fruitful message by far, but it does not go far enough in either diagnosis or solution.

Our problems will not be solved by skirting around formal electoral politics, but to get us to "play our part" fully we need an education system that produces more than technical excellence. To put it in corporate vernacular, citizenship is a soft skill. If our education system is to produce the soft skill of citizenship, it needs to be well-rounded. Strengthen the humanities and the social sciences, and universities will produce well-rounded individuals with the civic and humanistic sensibilities required of a productive polity. Some of these individuals will then value formal politics enough to enter the electoral game and shake it up, creating the meaningful diversity in the polity that is required to produce a robust social contract and strong democratic institutions. Fix the universities by, inter alia, rounding out the curriculum, and you'll fix the nation.

The position of the "Right" predictably crows on about "governance" as if there were a menu of institutions that, if only our wretched politicians had the "political will" to implement, we'd become the mighty nation we ought to be. While admittedly a caricature, this description does indicate an ironic commonality that this position has with the Nehruvian socialists it loves to hate: both have a Plan, all that is missing is (another favourite catch-all term) execution. What the nation needs, therefore, is a CEO. This of course implies share-holder democracy, an institution whose naturalization of inequality is what makes this position conservative and dangerous.

Against this, the "Left" seeks to redefine the State not as something "out there" but as part of a robust quid pro quo that Society has with itself. It implicitly understands that, at the level of society, one cannot simply lay out a menu and execute it without executing democracy itself. While the "Right" would have no qualms about getting rid of democracy (as Sunil Sethi yelped after the Olympic opening ceremony, if democracy can't do the business, what good is it?), the "Left" rejects this on grounds of both principal and pragmatism. It understands that the social contract is not a thing but a process, the very process by which we get strong institutions. It is because this contract is broken, because "we" sit back and loath the state for its lack of will, because "we" have utopian dreams of benevolent authoritarians like good CEOs, that we all are in the present condition. "We" have failed to get our hands dirty with the process of practising democracy, and we all are paying the price.

Yet in pushing us in this direction, the "Left" concentrates on the practise in between elections, claiming that we pay too much attention to elections themselves. While it is undoubtedly true that a strong social contract must reach into the rootlets of everyday life for enrichment, and true that this level of democratic practise has been disastrously ignored, do we not compound our folly if we over-concentrate on the root rather than the trunk?

Elections are ritualized because it is the same set of people running the show, leading to a monopoly which the "Right" correctly sees as leading to criminal inefficiency. Yet the solution is neither centralized corporatization of the state nor simply a ramping up of civic sensibility. It is to enter the messy domain of electoral politics and enrich the process of democracy with a greater diversity of actors.

To examine this lack of diversity in our central political process, we have to disaggregate a little. Who is the "we" who prefer to concentrate on "pursu[ing] our individual fortunes and tend to our private corner of this land"? Clearly this cannot refer to the many thousands who are politically mobilized and participate in elections. The reference is plainly to a set of classes who have been locked out of the political process for too long.

The middle classes, people whose main asset is their human capital, are effectively disenfranchised in our polity. Politics is not a noble pursuit for these individuals. To merely engage in it in any form is to be tainted. Thus the highest expression of civic duty, representing your peers in the collective sovereign body, has been abandoned and indeed demonized by this broad section of society. What results is a debilitating political monoculture.

Now, I would not for a second blame people for demonizing the present political class; it has atrophied our public institutions to a truly criminal degree. But have "we" not left them to it? What prevents a broader section of the middle classes from seeking out politics as a viable and noble profession, I would submit, is not only the abysmal state of play in formal politics but a real problem with the supply side: our citizen factories, the universities, are broken. Without valuing politics as a civic pursuit, we are condemned to outsource it to gross opportunists. Without strong humanities and social sciences, we are equally condemned to a back-office economy. Fixing the universities by rounding them out will create the human capital required for both a strong economy and a vibrant polity.

Class is Thicker Than Communalism

Pratap Bhanu Mehta's impassioned plea for a genuine secular position in the polity is well received and sorely needed; indeed, this blog echoes his call, albeit for a position further to the left ("A Country in 40 Acres.") To my mind, he succeeds in trumping Omar Abdullah's "ridiculously feted speech" by showing how the political class fails to even attempt to alter the terms on which discussions like the Amarnath issue happen. They opportunistically cave-in to communal logic, even, ironically, if their own self-conception is "progressive," as Abdullah's no doubt is.

What is rather sad, however, is the accompanying editorial from the IE, "India's Identity." In trying to echo Mehta's statesmen-like posture, the editorial tries it hand at rising above the fray by calling for what Americans call "bipartisanship": reaching across the political divide to solve something that is of "national" importance. In this case, the Congress is being asked to reach over to the BJP.

Now, Mehta has already noted the emptiness of calling a position national rather facing the communal issue directly. While the editorial no doubt sees itself as avoiding this pitfall by pointing out the dangers of communalizing the Valley, it can't help but exude upper class anxiety at the spillover effects of communal violence. Bipartisanship is often the guise that class interest dons when its basic concerns are so threatened that petty squabbles between, say, the Congress and the BJP have to be put aside.

The same was called for by the IE on the nuclear deal, and the same has been the evidence with economic reforms, wherein a nominally swadeshi party has been happy to continue neoliberal reforms that are anything but. The parallel between the Congress continuing the BJP's nuclear jingoism in more palatable forms and the BJP continuing the Congress' economic reforms is really a clear statement of the common underlying class interest at work. The audacity to call this national interest not only occludes the communal underpinnings of the matter, it does precisely what the editorial either knowingly or ignorantly indulges in, namely the positing of a narrow interest at the national interest.

Flogging a Dead Dinosaur

The main impetus behind this blog is to try and encourage some diversity in mainstream political commentary. What is sad is that, with the decline of the left-nationalist position of Nehru, all we have for political options are from the blatantly neoliberal Right, which come in either CII/FICCI or BJP flavours. This is by no means to romanticize the utter elitism and naive scientism of the Nehruvians, but merely to bemoan the fact that the sclerotic nature of the dinosaur Left has seemingly poisoned the well of all Left-of-centre critique. This leaves the ground open for liberals of all stripes to feed their shallow triumphalism by repeatedly flogging an ideologically (if not, sadly, politically) dead dinosaur.

The latest rendition of this comes from Dhiraj Nayyar's Op-Ed in yesterday's IE, "Left Behind...by Kamal Nath." His contention is that on both grounds of dinosaur-Left concern, the state's immunity from special interest capture at home and Indian sovereignty abroad, liberal economic and political policies have done better than anything proposed by the Left's worn out ideology. Specifically, economic reforms have led to amazing growth which has in turn strengthened India's geo-political hand, as witnessed by both the nuclear deal and the collapse of the WTO talks.

This main indeed be true, but it is an exaggeration to claim that "[t]he fact — and again let’s face it — is that the biggest threat to the autonomous functioning of the Indian state comes from actors within the country, not outsiders. It is the push and pull of coalition politics, which extracts the heaviest price, in policy (concession) terms, from the Indian state." The solution, so sorrily predictable, is to scale back the state to the point where "interest group capture" is minimized into insignificance.

This standard Right-wing line, phrased in the faux common sense of all second-hand dealers in ideas, is based on some very convenient oversights. First, to reduce something as complicated as international relations to a "win" in the nuclear deal and a "win" at the WTO is simply boyish. There is little doubt that emerging powers have more leverage in international fora than at perhaps any time in the postwar period, but to go from that to a claim that the major blockages to autonomy are internal is to paint all elected opposition as enemies of the state! Surely this is a slippery slope to fascism? Neoliberals want a small state, but they want it to be their state none the less.

Secondly, economic growth has been radically unequal, and on the whole there has been little net job creation. Inequalities have consequently multiplied. It is precisely this growth in inequality that has given licence to such blatantly one-sided opinions. Therefore for Kamal Nath to pose as the champion of the farmers is more than a little rich. What Nayyar calls special interests are in many cases countervailing forces reacting to this rising inequality, despite the fact of expression in the venal idiom of Indian politics.

The state is the only mechanism the economically and socially deprived have to redress their condition; the market works for those with these assets. Indeed, for any size of state, the asset-rich will have disproportionate access to its resources. The smaller the state, the less access for everyone in proportion, which still means greater access for the well-off. It is to counter-balance these special interests that the Indian state has expanded to its current bloat.

It is not simply that inefficiency is the price of democracy, it is that access to the state comes from years of political mobilization. Access may have gone too far in the direction of inefficiency, but to call for a minimal state is to bat for special interests in a manner that would over-correct in the disastrously opposite direction. The call for a minimal state may either be an elitist fantasy or a strategy to ask for a Ferrari and settle for a sedan, but either way it avoids serious talk of reform. It also scores very cheap polemical points for a very narrow position by impaling the stuffed-shirt socialists on their own folly.