Ananya Vajpeyi,
The Hindu, October 4, 2014
While true political legitimacy has to be premised on
popular will, on the desire for self-determination, and on the capacities and
capabilities of a government, it resides in a more subtle quality that has to
do with the inherent morality of any structure of power that purports to rule a
people in their name and for their own good
Every October 2, for the past 66 years, Indians have
reflected on the legacy of Mohandas Gandhi, born on this day in 1869, and
killed on January 30 in 1948. This moment of reflection has sometimes gone by
in a haze of indifference, at other times sparked deep criticisms of the flaws
and contradictions in Gandhi’s thought, and on yet other occasions has been
observed as a day of ahimsa, non-violence. This year after the general election
and the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Gandhi Jayanthi feels like
a poignant crossroads. Young Indians seem not to have any particular attachment
to Gandhian ideals like ahimsa, swaraj and satyagraha.
Is Gandhi still relevant?
Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s invocations of the
Mahatma’s name are frequent, but not always convincing: Gandhi is either
diminished into a parochial Gujarati figure, or reduced to a formula and a
cliché. In the current administration’s rhetoric, Gandhi is not the
fountainhead of modern India’s political selfhood but rather a mere icon to be
monumentalised and trivialised in one go. Why just Gandhi, it could be Swami
Vivekananda who is trotted out one day, Sardar Patel another day, and Babasaheb
Ambedkar when his name happens to suit a given purpose. The particularities of
the beliefs and ideas of each of these individuals, and their very different,
often incommensurable contributions in the making of modern India, are of no
relevance in an atmosphere of illiterate nationalistic jingoism and complete
ideological vacuity.
But like with any thinker of such enormous and lasting
influence, Gandhi’s repertoire of ideas turns out to be more surprising and
more resilient than we might realise after many decades of having him be a part
of our default political furniture.
If ideas like non-violent sovereignty, the dignity of
the poor, the power of truth, and the difficult practices of moral courage are
not fashionable today, there is nevertheless a key lesson Gandhi taught us,
that remains as relevant in our own time as it was during the British Raj. This
is the lesson about the true sources of political legitimacy, and how to
recognise them, no matter what the outer garb of sovereign power or the
architecture of a state.
Gandhi showed Indians and the world that the ultimate
legitimacy in politics comes not from brute force, not from the state
apparatus, and not even from mechanisms of political participation, electoral
choice and representative self-government. All of these are limited, and all of
them are fallible. The popular mandate of Hitler did not make Nazi rule
legitimate. The benign despotism of the British in India did not make colonial
rule legitimate. Totalitarianism that enters riding on the coat-tails of
democracy, or imperialism that seems bent over with the self-inflicted burden
of delivering benighted natives from their ignorance and backwardness — neither
of these forms attains legitimacy merely because it is successful in capturing
power on the basis of professed good intentions.
True political legitimacy has to be premised on
popular will, on the desire for self-determination, and on the capacities and
capabilities of a government, for sure. But in the end it exceeds and
transcends all of these factors, and resides elsewhere, in a more subtle
quality that has to do with the inherent morality of any structure of power
that purports to rule a people in their name and for their own good.
Lessons from a flood
An illustration from recent events: the devastating
floods in Jammu and Kashmir in early September were on the face of it a sign of
climate change, environmental calamity and the inadequacy of early warning and
disaster management systems. But as the weeks have passed, with houses still
submerged; telephone, television, radio and Internet services still down;
roads, bridges and highways in a shambles, and government infrastructure unable
to come back up to provide even a hint of civic normalcy, it becomes clear that
the real crisis in the Valley is a crisis of political legitimacy.
The State government has next to no legitimacy because
it failed so completely to warn and evacuate citizens as the waters of the
Jhelum began to rise to dangerous levels after unusually heavy rains; it failed
to re-establish a basic quorum of ministers, legislators, bureaucrats, police
officers and municipal workers who could operate out of private homes or
makeshift offices while the government’s own buildings were under water; it
failed to marshal, collect and distribute relief supplies that were pouring in
from all parts of India and the world at the Srinagar airport; and it failed to
provide a modicum of on-the-ground support to the agencies most involved in
search, rescue and relief operations for the first few days — the Indian armed
forces, the National Disaster Response Force, and the informal and
spontaneously arisen Kashmiri citizens’ groups that worked tirelessly in almost
every neighbourhood in the deluged State capital, Srinagar.
But these multiple failures of the local government in
the face of the biggest natural disaster that the State has ever seen, are only
premised on its already low credibility based on a track record of an
indifferent administration, weak and faltering alliances, and the inability to
put pressure on the Indian and Pakistani governments to resolve their
long-running disputes and take concrete steps to break the perpetual political
deadlock of Kashmir. The truth is that the floods only provided an alibi for a State
government that has barely functioned for its entire term in office. That Chief
Minister Omar Abdullah’s National Conference (NC) was elected to power is a fig
leaf that scarcely covers how much the party and its leadership is disliked and
mistrusted by the people of Jammu and Kashmir, who knew well before the floods
that theirs was a government mostly missing in action.
After the floods, even the pretence of law and order,
of administrative control, of the delivery of basic services to the citizenry,
disappeared entirely. Given that State elections stand to be postponed from
December 2014 to next summer, there is no reason to expect that the abysmal
standard of governance will suddenly be raised now. Persistent flood conditions
and their aftermath, a looming winter, an impending durbar move to Jammu, and,
very possibly, a spell of Governor’s Rule make it unlikely that the very
politicians and administrators who abandoned their people will belatedly rise
to the occasion and do later on what they ought to have done for the past
month.
There are at least two positions on the electoral
process as a route to political legitimacy in the State, especially in the
Valley. Members and leaders of mainstream political parties like the NC and the
People’s Democratic Party (PDP) participate in State elections, enter into
alliances with national parties like the Congress and the BJP, and form and run
the State government if elected to power. Others like the Hurriyat leadership
and their supporters do not participate in elections. Their contention is that
Jammu and Kashmir is essentially not like any other State of the Indian union,
and should not proceed as though it were exactly that, until such time as the
overarching dispute about the status of Kashmir is settled in national and
international fora.
The terrible predicament of the people of the State is
that they have to choose between on the one hand, leaders who do participate in
Indian electoral democracy and try to provide at least a semblance of
representative self-government, howsoever interim its character — but then make
a mess of their regime. On the other hand, there are leaders who don’t
participate electorally at all, but don’t have the leverage to actually restate
the problem and restart to the process of multilateral dialogue and conflict
resolution from scratch. It’s a lose-lose bind. The floods only press home the
reality that it’s a pathetic choice between a leadership that can’t govern in
fact and one that won’t govern on principle.
In a situation of extreme crisis, like a natural
disaster, this dilemma stops being abstract and becomes all too real. Neither a
helpless Chief Minister wringing his hands on the Indian media sans his cell
phone and his secretariat, nor a popular separatist personally delivering water
and food to hundreds of stranded residents of his locality in Srinagar in a
small makeshift boat, can present a viable answer to the question that has
hovered over the Himalaya since Partition: Who really commands political
legitimacy in Kashmir?
Over and above democracy
It has been suggested that what Gandhi has to give to
Kashmir is the usual message — non-violence. Militants should put down their
weapons, fundamentalists should embrace their neighbours and everyone who has
lived through the conflict should renounce anger and vengeance to chart a new
path to freedom. But in fact the real relevance of Gandhi to Kashmir — and more
so in light of the floods, which have washed away all existing structures of
authority, such as they were — is to table once more the question of political
legitimacy.
How is political legitimacy in Jammu and Kashmir to be
earned? Who can demonstrate having it? From rebuilding Srinagar after the
devastation, to repatriating Pandits, to putting in place enduring systems of environmental
management, to demilitarisation, to resuming talks with Pakistan, to tackling
corruption, to instituting processes of rehabilitation, justice and
reconciliation for all those affected by 25 years of war — what needs to be
done, and who will do it?
Gandhi’s achievement in forcing a subcontinent and
later an empire to re-examine the very foundations of sovereignty urgently
needs recalling. Not only have the floods in Kashmir left an entire regional
population without any kind of government, whether popular or unpopular, but
down south, in Tamil Nadu, another electorally powerful and massively admired
leader, Ms. Jayalalithaa, has had to forfeit her mandate in the face of
corruption allegations. Her democratically ratified legitimacy is nevertheless
not sufficient to protect her from criminal charges in a court of law. And at
the centre, a majority win for Mr. Modi and the BJP still leaves open the
question of who this government really speaks for, who it represents and sees
itself as representing, and who gets left out of its ambit.
The writing is on the wall: in a fractured democracy
like India, numbers alone do not tell the whole or the true story of legitimate
rule. Legitimacy has to be earned the hard way, through good governance,
transparency, probity, lawfulness, justice, inclusivity and the capacity to
demonstrate, both every day and in a crisis, that a government really is not
just by and of, but also for the people.
(Ananya Vajpeyi is the author of Righteous Republic:
The Political Foundations of Modern India.)
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