communism.dead

The Times of India had this self-congratulatory piece today-

The Times of India’s Lead India campaign seems to have deeply impacted one of the world’s biggest-selling authors, Jeffrey Archer. Commenting on the front page editorial (“Before They Count The Votes, Make Your Vote Count”) this paper carried on the morning of voting in different cities across the country, Archer said, “I thought it was a very, very powerful piece at two levels. First, it was a very important message to the Indian middle class, one whose sentiment I agreed with 100%: No vote, no opinion. If they do not vote, they should shut up, they have no right to an opinion.”

“Second, it struck me that this was the kind of leader (editorial) required in Nazi Germany in 1935. Hitler won by a handful of votes because the intelligent middle class allowed him to. If they had stood up and been counted, things might have been different. India, too, has a highly intelligent middle class. It may be well worth revisiting this piece in 10 years to see how the middle class has participated in the political process,” he said.

Archer may be an excellent storyteller, but he hardly understands politics, or voting. Democracies around the world use voting as a means to decide ideologies, policies and laws, not their implementations. And that is the process’ biggest flaw. I quote Rand yet again-

A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device—within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action—for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.

There are some cases where voting is useful however, as a cry for help, or as an indicator of mass anger. Like the result in West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee didn’t have a positive agenda. But she, in combination with the Congress, did manage to offer a viable political alternative to the blood thirsty communists. And the people grabbed their chance. The signs were there, as John Elliott pointed out in a post/ FT article that I linked to some time back-

I’ve just been in a rural part of West Bengal’s Barrackpur constituency hearing devastating criticism of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), whose Left Front government has run the state for 32 years and is now being challenged in the general election by a local alliance of the local Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, and the Congress Party.

I have heard many allegations in the past about how the CPI(M) uses rough undemocratic tactics to fix elections, but have not before had a chance to learn first hand about the way that local people say its cadres control the state.

[...]

As word of our approach spread, women and men came out of their houses to the roadside to tell us they have been scared to vote in elections – echoing what we had earlier heard in a local town.

“Will I be able to vote?” asked Kiran Ghosh. “For the last many years we have not gone because when we go and put one foot inside the voting booth, the officials says your vote is cast, go away, so we come back home”.

“My [grown up] children don’t go to vote because they will be beaten up,” said Rekhi Ghosh, an elderly scheduled caste woman.

“They usually come at night a few days before voting and threaten us if we go to vote,” said Abdul Razzak. “They say they will cut you in two if you vote – and they poison the water”.

According to these and other stories, the CPI(M) has used such tactics to scare the poor into submission for many years…

The communists have received their comeuppance; they have been decimated in Bengal. The same thing should have happened to the Congress and the BJP in ’84 and ’02 respectively, but it didn’t, because it was not the Hindus who were slaughtered in their thousands, but Sikhs and Muslims. People only fight against terror when they are its victims. Otherwise, they “rationalize.”

But then voting “is” the root cause of the problem which voting is supposed to “solve.” When a huge “mandate” is used by politicians to do what they please, a West Bengal, and a Delhi, and a Gujarat is one of its side effects. As for Archer and Nazi Germany, an editorial would have done nothing. The Germans were fully aware of Hitler’s “plans.” They chose to close their eyes.

As far as I am concerned, West Bengal is “the” story of the election. As one commentator said on one of the news channels (I paraphrase) – before the elections, communism existed in three places in the world: Kerala, Kolkata and Cuba. Now it exists only in Cuba.

PS: While CNN-IBN got its projections “reasonably” right (I am being charitable), Yogendra Yadav did pull a rabbit out of his hat yesterday night – he correctly predicted that Jayalalitha will not “take” Tamil Nadu.

A noble lie

A commentator at Sauvik’s blog asks-

Do you not think that the definition of ‘socialism’ is completely subjective? I could just say that I define socialism as that system which is for the benefit of all and I believe that libertarianism is for the benefit of all. Why not just register a party and get on with campaigning?

(Read his post on why this is relevant.) In his reply, Sauvik says, among other things-

And why should we commit perjury just to enter electoral politics?

The problem here is not the lie; not all lies are bad – there is Plato’s “noble lie,” though that one is definitely not “noble.” But you get the drift. Or that we don’t have a liberal political party. The problem here is that we don’t have a “liberal people.”

The Libertarian Party in the US has existed for approximately forty years now. And it is “still” politically irrelevant. People are not interested in individual rights, and private property, and the right to free speech. They are interested in – depending on where they live, and their “sophistication” – free roads, free toilets, free television sets, free rice, jobs for life, bailouts, loan waivers… Who pays? Who cares? You don’t have to be dressed in rags to be a beggar. You could be dressed in a three-piece suit and still beg self-righteously; you wouldn’t call it begging though – that would be insulting. Then they are interested in religion, and forcing it down others’ throats; in various “causes,” and again, forcing other to adopt them. Who cares if these “others” are interested? If you don’t fix this, your political party will be just as irrelevant as the US LP. Then there is the question of sanction, or as Sauvik calls it, “a matter of principle.” By taking part in the electoral process in any manner – voting, standing for elections etc etc – you declare that you accept the process, and its outcome. Which you don’t.

I will reiterate what I said the last time round – “A republic can either be based on the principle of individual rights, or on the principle of not respecting such rights. India preferred the second alternative a long time back.” That’s what you have to fix to “sustain” liberalism in India.

Elections, Obama etc

Today was a good day as far as the quantity of news stories and op-eds are concerned. First there was Samajwadi Party shooting itself in the foot with its manifesto that I referred to in my previous post. Then – I didn’t notice this before but the Times of India has managed to publish the columns of a rightist (Dasgupta) , leftist (Akbar) and centrist (Swami) on the same page – Swapan Dasgupta mocks the snobbery of the elitists standing for elections-

If editorial approval, Facebook encouragement and celebrity endorsements can shape an election, Independent candidate Meera Sanyal will be the clear winner in battle for Mumbai South. Needless to say, the possibility of such an outcome is about as high as Sonia Gandhi making an extempore speech. The best that Sanyal, the “daughter of Mumbai South” who (in the spirited prose of Shobhaa De) has deigned “to get her hands dirty”, can hope is to save her security deposit. The same is true for Mallika Sarabhai who is taking on L K Advani in Gandhinagar on the strength of her illustrious surname and local roots.

They need political parties, he says. Then MJ Akbar, former editor of The Asian Age, says that Obama has committed his first howler-

If necessity is the mother of invention then politics is often the father. Barack Obama has invented a phrase that did not exist on January 20, the day he became president. Anxious to win a war through the treasury rather than the Pentagon, he has discovered something called the “moderate Taliban” in Afghanistan. Joe Biden, his vice president, has found the mathematical coordinates of this oxymoron: only 5% of the Taliban are “extremists”.

Welcome to Obama’s first big mistake.

He’s wrong. I have lost count of all the “mistakes” Obama has committed since he entered office – genuflecting before the Saudi king should probably be right up there – not to mention all the broken promises. Frost never said anything about that. As for “AFPAK,” its doomed from the very beginning and India should stay out of the whole mess. I suspect that’s why Holbrooke made the visit last week. Akbar makes eminent sense here-

Washington has a single dimension definition of “moderate”: anyone who stops an active, immediate war against the US is a “moderate”. Let me introduce him to a couple of “moderate Taliban”. They are now world famous, having been on every national and international news channel these past few days, stars of a video clip from Swat. Two of them had pinned down a 17-year-old girl called Chand Bibi, while a third, his face shrouded, lashed her with a whip 37 times on suspicion of being seen with a man who was not her father or brother.

Obama should record the screams of Chand Bibi and play them to his daughters as the “moderate” music to which he wants to dance in his Afghan war.

Then there was another edition of the daily political theater on TIMES NOW. Dileep Padgaonkar and Harish Salve proved their naiveté by asking how is it that the two major political parties cannot come up with a 1000 “non-criminal” candidates among themselves, or something to that effect. The Scindia scion proved that he is a great politician – the Congress couldn’t contain its glee while it was berating Varun Gandhi for his hate speech, but when Goswami asked him why it had not taken a position on the man-who-hasn’t-learnt-his-lessons-yet’s – Vaiko’s – threat of a “bloodbath” if the Tamil terror outfit chief Prabhakaran was hurt – he criticized-but-did-not-criticize. I think I now know which scion Ramesh Ramanathan was referring to when he wrote this-

After the Mumbai attacks, we saw many states going to the polls. I have seen some of the post-poll interactions among senior politicians, both winners and losers. One was with a political scion. This young parliamentarian told me disparagingly, “Your columns with their elegant ideas, all the media talk about a new wave of development and governance—all romantic nonsense. We are still working the same political equations on the same age-old formulae. I can show you one district where I spent months bringing development to the areas and we won just one seat. And another district where we played the most cynical form of electoral politics and we won a majority of the seats.”

I sincerely hope that Mayawati becomes the next Prime Minister of India – only then will the Indian people, and all the crooks running around come to know where their policies and politics takes them. “Louis XVI” and the “Queen of Hearts” will make a nice pair – the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest democracy can go down the drain hand in hand.

The Daily Noose: Socialist jerks etc

Take today’s Times of India and strangle yourself with it. That crazy.

It was just two days back that I had this crazy idea of banning computers – it would have been fun to see people standing in long lines for everything like they used to do in the ’80s. Didn’t every employees union in the country indulge in such Luddite ideas in the past? Indians had lots of time on their hands in those days. And today’s edition of the Times left me speechless – Mulayam Singh’s Socialist Party has promised exactly that in its manifesto; well…not completely. Then he wants to abolish “expensive education in English.” If every one is uneducated, or ill-educated, something this move to completely nationalize the education system will ensure, no one will rise up to challenge his crooked ways. His English-speaking technocratic son can rule over us non-English-educated daily wage laborers who spend 8 hours doing something which a computer would do in five minutes. The rest of his manifesto is as big a joke as he is. Especially the move to impose Hindi; if its tried on the South, especially in Tamil Nadu, it will, to paraphrase Vaiko, lead to a bloodbath.

Of course none of it is going to see the light of day; Mulayam is a goner in this election – Mayawati will wipe the floor with his face. Even if he comes back – miraculously – he must be stupid (he isn’t) to believe that his manifesto will be acted upon. But such a manifesto allows you to see the feudal mentality and the moral bankruptcy of the party’s “leaders” including Sanjay Dutt. Mulayam Singh’s bicycle is broken. He should buy a Lexus.

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The Times reports two unfortunate incidents – some women and children died in a fireworks factory blaze, and an engineer died during a bungee jump. In both cases, the paper reports pointless details- “Cracker factory had no licence” and “The organisers of the bungee camp…had not taken a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the police to conduct such an event.”

The question is, would the license and NOC have prevented the deaths. The history of the “license raj” suggest otherwise – bureaucrats routinely issue licenses in lieu of bribes – that is its main function. The question the reports fail to ask is, how is it that the legal system doesn’t ensure quick justice – mostly in the form of compensation – to the victims? Accidents are not within our control – our reactions to them are.

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Another report. Farmers in Sangli have some news for politicians-

The waiving of loans has not solved the problems faced by farmers in the drought-prone areas of south Maharashtra. Instead, the farmers want politicians to address the root cause of the problem.

For the last 13 years, despite continued assurances by politicians that water would be brought to the parched fields, many of the irrigation projects of the Maharashtra Krishna Valley Development Corporation (MKVDC) are incomplete. The MKVDC was set up in 1996 to use the state’s share of 594 TMC water from the Krishna basin allocated by the Krishna Water Dispute Tribunal (KWDT),

“We need water to survive, not loan waivers,” says Bhaupal Patil, a farmer from Araag in Miraj taluka. Farming in the parched areas of Sangli depends on the monsoon. Many farmers have large tracts of farmland but in the absence of water, they have migrated to the cities to work as labourers.”

“A loan waiver will not help us in the long term. If the government is really concerned about farmers, they should complete irrigation projects and help us to survive,” says Sanjay Varute, a marginal farmer from Khatav.

If I am not mistaken, a similar sentiment prevailed in Punjab when it came to “free electricity” – the farmers wanted paid-but-assured-electricity, not free-but-uncertain-electricity. See? Not every one is an outright thief, however hard the politicians may try.

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In a case that leaps out of Michael Crichton’s last book on the horrors of genetics and laws surrounding gene patenting and liabilities – Next – a girl has sued a sperm bank because the sperm used to conceive her was “defective.” More legalese here.

Elections and professionals

I wrote most of what I had in mind in yesterday’s post, but then I read this Arun Maira article from ET’s Thursday edition. Most of it is irrelevant (to me), but this part is very interesting-

Ideally, those who wish to influence change must participate transparently within the official system — as the ‘professionals’ standing for election in India are. In the 1960s, Minoo Masani appealed to Indian professionals to come forth and join the Swatantra Party. The party fizzled out by the 1980s. Not only because many professionals did not join it, but because its views about economics and society had limited appeal amongst Indian people.

Two questions about the role of the professionals in politics that were asked to the Swatantra Party’s leaders 50 years ago, remain valid even today. One, are professionals electable? And two, how inclusive is their vision for the country? To get elected, these professionals must convince voters that they understand and represent what the voters want. Very recently Chandrababu Naidu told an industry association that he lost the election in 2004 because he was seen to be too much influenced by professionals — international consultants and CEOs. And that, to get elected this time, he would keep his distance from them and stay much closer to the people.

That episode is one of the nails in the coffin of a liberal India.

Maira, though, conveniently misses a small but vital fact in his narrative. I will quote what I wrote in a comment on a post on political parties and ideologies last July-

The word socialist is another millstone Indira Gandhi hung around our neck. It was during the emergency that she amended (too soft a word) the constitution and added the words socialist and secular to the preamble. Rajiv Gandhi went beyond that and taking advantage of the unassailable majority granted to him on account of the post IG assassination sympathy wave, he went ahead and decided that “any party not willing to ’submit itself’ to the Constitution of India ‘does not deserve to be recognized as a political party.’” These two amendments together killed any chances of a liberal party even contesting elections. (India’s socialist mandate to be challenged in Supreme Court). On the attempt made to remove the word “socialist” from the preamble, the SC said there are no hard and fast definitions, so the word shall remain.

It really is sad -

In 1994, the Swatantra Party, set up in 1959 to oppose Nehruvian socialism, filed a writ petition before the Bombay high court challenging the amendment to the Act.

On 28 June, Mint profiled the saga noting that the case has been pending since then.

“Socialism is a form of economic engineering. The grievance in our petition was that the country did not allow us to participate in the electoral process without telling a lie and we did not want to lie,” says S.V. Raju, member of the Swatantra Party, who is still awaiting the court’s ruling.

If the court rules in his favour, Raju will be able to register the Swatantra Party and contest elections.

If the court rules in his favour…it did not.

Some existing and defunct Indian liberal parties (I think all of them are dead)-
Swatantra Party (wikipedia) (the first Indian libertarian party)
Swatantra Bharat Paksh (wikipedia) (its successor)
Liberal party of India

This was in response to Abhishek’s lament-

Our constitution declares that India is a socialist country and all political parties are legally obliged to declare under oath their adherence to the constitution before they can be recognized. So every political party today is either socialist or guilty of perjury.

Sad, isn’t it?

So, its not as if an experiment in liberalism wasn’t tried in India. C. Rajagopalachari was the fulcrum, as Rajmohan Gandhi notes in this lengthy extract from his book, and the party disintegrated after his death-

In 1959, the elderly watchdog became a greyhound! Ignoring ailments and shaking off inhibitions, Rajaji, 80, decided to challenge Jawaharlal, who seemed to embody power, fame and vitality, with a new political party.

Events and his own analysis propelled CR. The Congress, he felt, was steadily corrupting. Though committing themselves, in 1955, to ‘a socialistic pattern’ and, later, to plain ‘socialism,’ its members seemed to be getting richer rather than more caring. In 1956 CR had publicly asked: ‘Congressmen look so well off. Have they taken up new avocations and earned money? Then how have they made money?’

‘Anyhow, somehow,’ was his answer at the time. Now, three years later, he replaced it with a phrase that would become central to Indian political debate for the rest of the century. It was the ‘permit-licence-quota’ raj, he said, that was fattening Congressmen. The socialistic pattern, where the State controlled, ‘permitted’ and farmed out business, was enriching Congressmen, officials and favoured businessmen and harassing the rest.

A realisation began to stir in him that if he wished to oppose State control of business he would have to oppose Congress itself. While he was thus cogitating, the Congress came out with a new agricultural policy. It had three prongs: government takeover of the grain trade; ceilings on land holdings; and co-operative cultivation of land.

To CR this policy represented a wolf that needed immediate chaining, and he barked at once and loudly. ‘Bureaucrats, he argued, would make incompetent traders. Land ceilings would be unconstitutional and would dry up the flow of grain into towns. And rural industrialisation, the soundest route to more jobs, would suffer if the bigger farmers were squeezed out.

Calling Nehru, for the first time, ‘the Congress dictator,’ CR also said: ‘The single brain-activity of the people who meet in Congress is to find out what is in Jawaharlal’s mind and to anticipate it. The slightest attempt at dissent meets with stern disapproval and is nipped in the bud.’

Two years earlier, he had spoken somewhat academically of the role a Right party could perform. Now, perceiving a threat of joint farming and the collapse of independence in Congress, he called for a Conservative Party of India:

Men do not feel any inclination to become wage-slaves, and peasants are least inclined…. A wide public is waiting to give support to an opposition formed on a sound basis, because the people have realised that one-footed democracy is no good and is not distinguishable from coercion and totalitarianism.

Read it and a vital chapter in India’s history is revealed. What is also revealed is that what plagued the “liberal party” was the same thing that has plagued every conservative movement in history – inconsistency. Another important factor is this – Indian leaders never understood the meaning of republic, or the functions of voting. Rand makes a very important point-

A majority vote is not an epistemological validation of an idea. Voting is merely a proper political device—within a strictly, constitutionally delimited sphere of action—for choosing the practical means of implementing a society’s basic principles. But those principles are not determined by vote.

More importantly-

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority.

Just like you don’t vote on whether murder is legal or not, you don’t vote on whether stealing X’s property is legal or not. That, our leaders forgot – on purpose.

So far as the Indian electorate is concerned, it has already rejected a liberal alternative once. The question is, what makes you think that they won’t do it again? An even more important question. If, as Maira says (and he is right), “[the Swatantra Party]‘s views about economics and society had limited appeal amongst Indian people, ” and such Indian people have been imposing their views on a minority, what does pandering to – genuflecting before – the majority really represent?

A republic can either be based on the principle of individual rights, or on the principle of not respecting such rights. India preferred the second alternative a long time back.