Articulation and understanding

Haven’t we often come across men and women, among our friends, acquaintances, relatives who do not find it comfortable talking about most matters of public interest and importance? Or if they are forced to do so under some circumstances (over which they have little control) like suddenly becoming a part of a media campaign, involving queries or a questionaire, opinion polls on the street or at the work place, they do it in an awkward, uninspired manner.

This becomes even more glaring as in most groups one finds quite a few voluble people who like to dominate any discussion – be it soccer or cricket, gossip about stars or starlets, apparently miraculous occurrences, latest cultural trends, politics or deeper social problems. These latter set seem to have an opinion – sometimes very clear cut and at other times nebulous – on practically every issue that may or may not concern them personally or professionally but may have some bearing on the community, society or the nation in a general way and the world in the case of the international issues.

The common tendency of self-projection discernible in the behaviour such as above in many among this latter category, is rather natural and in conformity with the general social nature of engagement of most people. There may be inaccuracy in the facts and inconsistency in the logical arguments they marshal. Sometimes there could be discordant notes or even violent disagreements among those entertaining quite different perceptions formed from the same set of real life observations. But by and large they reflect the dominant paradigm (including prejudices) of the community or the cultural milieu they belong to. In this environment of preponderant urge for self-expression, it is not easy, given the brevity of expression or relative inarticulateness in many people (actually they are, probably, in the majority), to interpret the implication of what they choose to say as much as what is left unsaid.

It is possible that some among this category of people may choose to be economic with their words as their understanding is genuinely not good enough, they lack clarity in thinking and are confused, or do not have the right words to describe what they have in mind. However, can lack of articulation or ambiguity in that, by itself and in general, be taken to be an indicator of lack of understanding ? 

As it happens, the opinion of such people, if any, often go unrepresented if not ignored, simply because they do not or can not express their point of view with sufficient force, flair and urgency which some of their fellow participants in a discussion muster with relative ease. A quiet leader, who speaks occasionally and only briefly at that and not forcefully enough might find it hard to carry friends, associates and followers along unless people get to see his mind in action, in terms of planning and execution of concrete deeds leading to positive results. In the realm of the current Indian politics, names of two politicians exemplifying the two contrasting categories - a super-articulate politician, almost a hustler and a bully to boot on the one hand and an erudite but reticent, almost a reluctant counterpart - obviously come to one’s mind.

The acrimonious debate on the economic development of our country vis-à-vis the care and the protection of the endangered environment is well known. Ideologically inspired people angrily and decisively arguing on either side of this divide may win the debate on the television or at a ‘social impact’ awards function. But the complexity of the ground reality that eludes them may be understood much better by many illiterate villagers, grassroots activists and even some local administration officials with hands-on knowledge. However, the opinion of most of them are routinely ignored or overruled by their superior officers in the capital and metro cities while presenting status reports and offering false diagnoses in national and international conferences.   

There are a number of known examples from the field of literature of an apparent disconnect between the deep understanding by an author, expressed through a body of creative work, say, plays, novels and stories, and his publicly articulated social and political opinions, moral and philosophical views. The well-known Marxist literary critic, Georg Lukacs, had extensively discussed and illustrated this dichotomy in several of his books, notably, in ‘Studies in European Realism’. For instance, Honore de Balzac in his cycle of novels ‘La Comedie Humaine’, writing on the French society during the first half of the nineteenth century, meticulously documented the real ups and downs of the various social classes – the royalists and the feudal landowners, the bourgeois or the new business and entrepreneurial classes, the cultural elites – and unfailingly indicated the decline of the erstwhile upper classes despite Balzac’s known royalist sympathies. He never flinched from a realistic depiction of growing dominance of money in the contemporary society, unscrupulousness and moral turpitude irrespective of his yearning for and espousing virtues of Christianity, especially, the catholic religion in his other writings.

Almost a similar detached noveist’s and a social historian’s judgment was delivered by Tolstoy in his novels and stories with regard to the failure of the Tsarist Russian aristocracy and the landowning noble classes (of whom he himself was very much a part) to be the vanguard of the emancipation of the Russian peasantry from their age-old misery and bondage and therefore these classes being eventually overtaken by the new and revolutionary social forces (at the time the anarchists) brewing in the mid-late nineteenth century Russia. Even his early fictional writings show that he was acutely aware of the growing chasm between the landowners and the serfs as a reality as much as the brutal role of the Tsarist state in maintaining the status quo. However, the expressed political views of the author were often critical of some of these new social movements (especially their proclaimed violent methods). On the contrary, during the later part of his life, Tolstoy propounded his Christian-anarchist and anarcho-pacifist version of a religio-social conception of morality and love (Tolstoyanism) that neither quite explained the diagnosis of the social and political changes in Russia nor its potential directions one finds glimpses of in his creative writing. 

In many areas of life and human endeavour, particularly those involving decisions regarding environment, social transformation and accretion of culture through creative work, all thinking is not necessarily and immediately actionable or possible to validate in terms of results visible in the short term. It is in such situations that the test of understanding and the long-term correctness of a judgment do not always lie in just a clear enunciation of certain inflexible premises and decisive actions based on the same. Sometimes certain ambiguities in the stated positions should not disqualify them for further serious consideration.

Postcript to the left front debacle in West Bengal

 

Two residual questions :

(a)    LF still polled 41% of the popular votes in an election that everybody agreed has been conducted in a fair and acceptable manner. The overall vote percentage all over the state has significantly increased. As usually reticent and even cynical voters might have exercised their votes this time, young newly eligible voters, without either the ideological baggage or a political opportunism, hatred and vendetta, carried their weightage too in a critical balance flipping game, did the LF at all derive any benefit out of this surge ? If not, this 41%, not a small number by itself, represents a solid unwavering support base for the left parties. What do they expect from the parties they had supported even under these hostile conditions probably at great personal risks (validated by the daily events of bloody vendetta by the ruling party supporters) ? The left parties should humbly reach out to this natural resource if they have to survive politically or otherwise.

(b)   To say that the vote against LF played a bigger role than the vote for TMC/Congress combine is no-brainer. However, there must have been some key expectations of both the traditional anti-left constituencies in the state and the sizable ‘adjustable’ segment of voters (who played the arbiter of the election results) from a new government formed by an alliance of parties and colourful individuals who were so far known for their demagoguery, hate speech and pandering to perceived persecution and injustice rather than articulating a coherent policy for the economic renewal of all sectors of the state. What are the changes these sections expect the government to initiate ? Accelerating liberalisation and industrial development (and not touching the interests of the peasantry ) ? Rejig the land relations in favour of the dominant farmers with political clout at the cost of share croppers and labourers, especially those painted with a colour remotely resembling red ? Replacing your favourite cultural and educational elites with a set of mine ?

Such questions must await detailed unbiased analysis of the facts and trends to be unfolded in future.

The spectacular demise of the left rule in West Bengal (India)

Like many others concerned about West Bengal (WB), one could not, in the context of the resounding loss of the left front (LF) in the May 2011 assembly elections, avoid pondering about the key factors that undermined the long standing left rule in WB.

Trinamul Congress (TMC)/Congress leaders, sympathisers as well as a host of commentators in the media have had a clear prognosis about the endgame since 2009 parliamentary elections. Nobody other than die-hard LF supporters was left in doubt about the rot and debility in the government administration and the despondency enveloping the party organization at various levels.

What were the roots of this malady and the trajectory of its growth ? Was it a post 2006 election development or rather a work-in-progress over the three decades of the LF rule ? Many commentators (e.g., Sumanta Banerjee, EPW June 4 2011) have pointed in that direction. But then how did they manage to stay in power this long despite growing anti-incumbancy ? Beyond TMC’s hell raising claims about electoral malpractice by CPM/LF, vote splitting due to non-alignment of non-left forces there must be some substantial reason for the remarkable electoral success of the left all these years and the spectacular failure this time. 

Urban votes were probably always more evenly partitioned between LF and non-LF categories. When and how did the rural vote banks of LF collapse ? If the rural masses (and even a decent section of urban voters) were ‘solidly’ behind LF even at the time of 2006 elections (their vote share was a little over 50%), what happened during the next 2-3 years to cause a tectonic shift in this support base (2008 Panchayat elections were the early evidence of this shift). Is it possible that the misadventure, mismanagement and miscommunication at Nandigram and Singur were like straws on the camel’s back pulling down this illusory and waning support base like a pack of cards ?

Have been thinking about the roots of the malady and the spectacular demise. Watch this space for more on this subject ...

Middle classes and the anti-corruption movement

Corruption affects most people, from all walks of life. How is it that the middle classes responded to the movement with alacrity though poorer classes bear greater brunt of the malaise of corruption ? How is it that they come to champion the cause ? Is corruption free India more in sync with their growing self image of hard working, honest individuals not having to indulge in corrupt practices (both at the government and the private interfaces) in matters of urgency in their daily life : residential property purchase, school admissions, utility connections, hospital admissions and medical treatments and so on ? Does having middle classes leading a global ‘anti-corruption’ campaign (where no-sectional interests are highlighted, say, not specifically dealing with or highlighting specific problems faced by minorities or dalits) detract from the movement ?

Can the corruption in the Indian public life be correlated to the urge of the new ‘liberated’ entrepreneurial India, the ‘financially’ successful and impatient Indian middle classes to ‘get things done quickly’, ‘get what they want and feel they deserve’ by any means, fair or foul ? They wouldn’t mind breaking or bending a few rules, which, according to some of them, are archaic and deserve to be broken or bent. And in this endeavour, they are being ably helped and led by corrupt government officials and indeed the entire system of governance. Some people have seen in the impatience displayed by those associated with the Jan Lokpal movement about the parliamentary procedures a reflection of the same contempt shown by a lot of the youth and the upwardly mobile middle classes for the government systems and procedures they have to encounter in their daily life. Will this energetic upwardly mobile, aspiration driven middle classes forego their propensity to bypass rules, legal framework in their impatient urge to succeed against competitors ? Will they abide by rule of law even if others around them seem to be breaking the same ? It is there that their moral graduation will be put to test.

Demise of Soviet Union, sweep out of Left Front in West Bengal, India : some parallels ?

Found an interesting article in EPW trying a post-mortem analysis of the demise of Soviet Socialism in terms of a Marxian framework. The key point is that the soviet system, as it perpetuated itself over decades in a hostile international environment, gradually came to a saturation of the economic growth, stagnation, which worsened due to the arms race it was partly forced into due to the war and later soviet occupation in Afganistan. Within this worsening economic scenario, a segment of people, especially those wielding power in the government (the bureaucracy) and the communist party (central and regional leaders close to those running the government at various levels) have gradually come to acquire privileges that they found it legally and constitutionally perpetuate among their offsprings/relatives. Thus those saddled with the power and responsibility of the state – or at least a significant number of them – felt constricted in exercising their ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ in bourgeois/capitalist individualist sense (creating and amassing wealth in their private capacity and by extension ‘legally’ controlling the means of production) by the existing legal, economic and political structure. Though whether and when these masses of privileged people formed a ‘class’ is not clear, the author argues that it is this nascent ‘class’ of people who were the real gravedigger of the soviet socialist structure with generous moral, material support from the west.

An important parallel arises in the context of the electoral whitewash (May 2011) of the long running (perhaps the longest running, democratically elected) left front (LF) government in the state of West Bengal, India. In both cases the rhetoric of the opponents of the regimes concerned are about the same : ‘communism’, ‘Marxism’, those professing these ideologies have thwarted the basic economic, political freedom of the populace. Beyond the demagoguery, one needs to identify the real issues, real actors in an evolving historical perspective. There may be a case for the thesis that the LF government, in the first decade of its rule, did devolve significant economic power to the rural poor, but the development of the agriculture, though among the better ones achieved by several Indian states, was not keeping pace with the rising aspirations among the rural masses who were, ironically, unshackled by the half-steps of land reforms initiated by the LF. Add to this the issue of failure to evolve an appropriate dynamic political structure that could feel the pulse and mobilize the dynamism of the rural masses in a direction that would have benefited the left’s cause (if there ever was any) in the long run rather than pushing them to become abject followers by threats and patronage. A rare insight was provided by one commentator in a TV discussion before the elections. He talked about the stagnation in the economic growth and opportunities, both in rural and urban areas. To partly circumvent this situation on both governmental and non-governmental initiatives there was some spread of informal economies (“informalisation of the economy”) in many part of the state. Fruits of these initiatives were distributed, controlled at the lower working levels by the party and the distribution was based on the carrot/stick principle (patronage for those who would support the party, threat for those who wouldn’t). It was argued that for years this was one of the mechanisms behind the manufacture of the consent that sustained the government this long.

Parliament and the ‘civil society’ – why they may remain at cross purposes

Much as the moral stance assumed by the middle classes spearheading the anti-corruption agitation give an impression of an universal malaise of the present Indian society and polity, there are many deep fault lines in the latter (inequity, poverty and hunger, expropriation of the majority of Indians, destruction of the habitats and environment vis-à-vis rapid economic development benefiting much fewer smarter Indians), associated with the demands of growth-obsessed country (is it 8% or 9%, the argument continues), where from the prime minister down to many in the government and major political parties take pride in the liberated ‘animal’ entrepreneurial energies of certain sections of our people. If this inequity is not bridged, the parliament elected by the majority of the dispossessed or marginalized Indians may come to perceive the ‘civil society’ spearheading such anti-corruption movements inimical to its interest in the long term. The next call from Anna regarding electoral reforms (right to reject, right to recall) could be interpreted as a potential hijacking of the political rights of the majority who might be sidelined by the liberation-globalisation agenda ?

Did the movement really project an individual, his moral superiority competing with not-so-perfect individual players in the political space ? Is disaffectation against the politicians and ways and means adopted by the political parties a danger to democracy ? (ref. the ‘grammar of anarchy’ speech by Ambedkar, democracy incompatible with the mass adulation of an individual, howsoever saintly or commanding a great moral stature he may seem to possess). By asking for a greater scrutiny of the MP’s actions and speeches inside the parliament amount to undermining the supremacy of the parliament ?