A politics to end politics

Guest Columns by Sauvik Chakraverti,

The Newindpress on Sunday, 2007-2008

A politics to end politics

Before saluting ‘democracy’, it might help if we understood ‘politics’, the stuff democracy is made of. The great Fabian socialist, Professor Bernard Crick, in his In Defence of Politics, takes us through the civilised life in an ancient Greek polis in order to understand that ‘‘politics are the public actions of free people’’. This quote from Sophocles’ Antigone is illustrative:

Creon: Can any voice but mine give orders in this polis?

Haemon: It is no polis if it takes orders from one voice.

Creon: But custom gives possession to the ruler.

Haemon: You’d rule a desert beautifully alone.

The civic politics that Crick idealises is an activity that is public, open and free. This should ring warning bells in our minds, since ‘politics’ in India occurs behind closed doors, and is ‘palace politics’ — a contradiction in terms. We have political organisations and they have their personnel, but these are ‘yes men’ — like Sitaram Yechury. They are not ‘free people’. Their politics has little to do with civic issues and they never uphold civic virtues. Instead, their organisations demonstrate political strength by assembling rural masses in the cities: rent-a-crowd politics.

Crick asserts that, instead of supporting democracy, as most people do, it would be better to defend politics — ‘‘for it is a more precise thing than is commonly supposed; it is essential to genuine freedom; it is unknown in any but advanced and complex societies; and it has specific origins only found in European experience.’’

Here, Crick issues another warning: free, civic politics originated in Europe. The Hindi word for politics is rajniti, which translates into ‘the ethics of kingship’. We do not have a word for politics as a human activity that occurs in cities as different opinions vie for public space. In European cities there is the public sphere with pubs and cafes — the busy haunts of men, where people meet. Revolutions have centred on them. It is from all this that the free press evolved — to keep citizens informed in democracies based on free, civic politics.

Crick issues yet another warning: for ‘‘although politics is a pearl that cannot be valued, to overvalue it would be to destroy it altogether’’. Once the Lord Mayor, the two Sheriffs and all the Aldermen had been elected, the rest of the citizenry went back to their shops and spent the rest of the year ‘‘minding their own businesses’’. It was the unfortunates that got elected who had to handle public matters and whose businesses suffered as a result. In London you were fined heavily if you refused to be Lord Mayor. It is said that Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, was ‘‘built from the money of those who did not want to hold the office, for the benefit of those who did’’.

Another lesson to learn is that there should not be any great spoils to reap if politics is to be kept pure. It is only from good politics that a good politician can emerge.

Crick asserts that free, civic politics is based on a ‘‘recognition of restraints’’ — that all the differences in the polis must be accommodated. The idea of a cosmopolitan city is such. With mass democracy as a means to offices of spoils in a centralised, socialist government, and a palace politics of political organisations devoid of civic roots, it is quite clear that we Indians have got the idea all wrong. The man to blame is Allan Octavian Hume, the ‘founder and father of the Indian National Congress’, who took upon himself the task, in the 1880s, of creating a means by which educated Indians could participate in British government — and thereby learn whatever was necessary in order to take over control someday.

Hume created a ‘political organisation’: he did not encourage thousands of educated Indians to participate in civic politics on their own steam. The INC that Hume created was firmly liberal in its early decades. The organisation gained brand equity and was then hijacked by socialists towards rebellion. In 60 years of power it has degenerated into a very peculiar kind of political organisation, for neither Sonia Gandhi nor Manmohan Singh are ‘politicians’. It has not achieved its goal of creating a ‘socialistic pattern of society’, and has succumbed to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’.

A ‘power elite’ rules India. We will never be equal. We can, however, fight to be free.

The idea of a ‘politics to end politics’ gets support from a liberal: Anthony de Jasay, whose Before Resorting to Politics offers us the path by which ‘‘politics can be compressed to a vanishing point’’. After all, the market came first, and will always be first. The ‘recognition of restraints’ so vital to civic politics occurs first in markets, where we happily trade with strangers. As cities grow, we live among strangers too. And we learn to accept differences. Jasay tells us why even ‘good politics’ is largely unnecessary: ‘‘it is man as a social being who has the least need to resort to politics, precisely because he commands the difficult civic skills and virtues of voluntary cooperation, of finding bargained solutions, of maintaining valuable conventions and keeping free riding within tolerable bounds… It is these skills that atrophy and vanish when politics takes over.’’

Politics as a means to using government action should be resorted to in only exceptional cases. There should be a list of what the government must do, and also a list of what it must not do — with no discretion whatsoever for the politician.

We in India need to embark upon ‘a politics to end politics’. We need political rule over our cities, and this should be our first goal. But this free, civic politics should be circumscribed to the basics (garbage, roads, police) and in each cosmopolis the citizen should find himself in perfect liberty to engage continuously and relentlessly in the processes of capitalistic exchanges. After all, the ancients said that the Four Ends of Man are dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Let us not add ‘politics’ to the list.

The writer is the author of Antidote: Essays Against the Socialist Indian State and its sequel, Antidote2: For Liberal Governance