Impotent Political System

By Gurumurthy
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Google Oneindia News

Is the Indian political process as it functions today capable of generating leadership on its own steam? Leave aside the great Mahatma Gandhi. Has the Indian political theatre the potential today to yield a Kamaraj or Karunanidhi? Or even a Mulayam or a Lalu? It seems not.

An appraisal of how the political process has turned so sterile is instructive. It was not so at the start. A virile Congress party was vasectomised by the very leader who headed the democratic evolution in India, namely Pandit Nehru. It is he who laid the foundation for dynastic succession by anointing his daughter Indira Gandhi as the party President when the party was abundant with senior and popular leaders like K Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, GB Pant, and Nijalingappa to mention just a few. This started the process of dynastic succession and its legitimisation by the premier political party. But this eventually resulted in Indira Gandhi becoming the Prime Minister in 1966 thanks to the Syndicate in the Congress rooting for her, for its own reasons.

At that time the issue of dynastic succession was debated in Indian politics. But, when after her tragic end Rajiv Gandhi became the Prime Minister by the most unconventional means, not a single voice protested. With that outsourcing of leadership generation to dynasty has become an accepted model for leadership emergence. What Nehru promoted and Indira legitimised has now ended up in the Congress party that fought foreign rule being led by a foreign born. Her off-spring provide further relief to the Congress assuring the party that future Congress leadership is in place. With Priyanka Vadra blessed with a child already and Rahul rumoured to marry a Columbian girl, the Congress is assured of leadership for the next three generations! But this is only one side of the story that led to dynastic succession.

Dynastic succession was deliberate in part because of the political vasectomy which turned the Congress party impotent even under Pandit Nehru. But later this was accentuated by the increasing bankruptcy of the political process to generate leadership. Undoubtedly, the political process is incrementally becoming impotent and infertile to yield leadership on its own steam. Yet the nation has not debated the transition in the mode of generation of political leadership. Political leadership incubates in the political process rooted in ideologically driven socio-cultural and political movements. The independence movement turned out a galaxy of leaders who provided leadership to free India. Later, socio-political movements like the Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu in 1950s, the Navnirman movement in Gujarat and the Bihar movement in UP and Bihar in 1970s, the Telengana movement of 1970s and the Jai Andhra movement of the 1980s, the Mandal movement in late 1980s and the Hindutva movement in the 1990s are illustrations of socio-political movements yielding national and regional leadership.

Generation of leadership rests on a complex process involving ideology, organisation and activity. While leadership is moulded by political organisation, the organisation is in turn shaped by leadership, both being driven by ideology. On the one hand dynastic politics renders the political process infertile to generate leadership. Equally, increasing impotence of the political process to yield results in dynastic politics is also the result of increasing acceptance of dynastic politics. With the result a bankrupt political process has ended up outsourcing the generation of leadership to the leaders' families and, as an alternative, to the celluloid world, as the south Indian political theatre demonstrates. In a way Tamil Nadu discovered that the process of generating political leadership is outsourceable. Till the advent of 'MGR', as M G Ramachandran the founder of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu was popularly known, the political process monopolised the generation of political leadership.

Political and social movements identified leaders and propped up leadership. But the way the MGR phenomenon, largely a product of the film world, stormed the political process and threw out established political leadership by the mass appeal of the leader made it clear that leadership generation is an outsourceable activity. With the mix of dynastic model it became clear that the political process has become bankrupt as an incubator of political leadership. In a way, the advent of MGR completely changed the complexion of the game of party politics. MGR divided the DMK votes between him and Karunanidhi and also took away the anti-DMK votes from the Congress and thus emerged ahead of both.

This model was successfully replicated in Andhra by NT Rama Rao who brought about a chemical mix by drawing the Congress as well as the opposition votes and rolled out the TDP. While MGR, having been in the DMK for long, was a quasi-political evolution, NTR was clearly an extra-political evolution. The advent of NTR opened another source of generating political leadership, namely the celluloid world, apart from the baby rooms of the leaders' families.

For long Tamil Nadu has been fatigued about the two Dravidian parties. But where was it looking to for an alternative? To a celluloid hero, Rajnikant. For long the question was whether and when Rajnikant would enter politics and relieve Tamil Nadu from the boredom of the two Dravidian parties. It is at this point that Vijayakant, the next most popular celluloid character in TN films, has entered the TN political theatre and has exposed the perceived longing of the people for an alternative to both. These evolutions clearly indicate one thing - the increasing bankruptcy of the political process to yield leadership or build organisations, both due to ideological scarcity in politics. Consequently, the generation of leadership has been outsourced by a bankrupt polity to the procreative capabilities of the leaders' families and to the celluloid world with perhaps just two exceptions to this process, the Communists and the RSS-inspired BJP.

More Gurumurthy Columns

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