Business of politics is attractive in India

By: V Sundaram
March 11, 2006
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The unscrupulous politicians of India are declaring every day that private character has virtually no impact on governing character. What matters above all is a healthy economy and that moral authority is defined solely by how well a Prime Minister or a Cabinet Minister deals with public policy matters. If these arguments are allowed to become legal tender in the public realm, we, the ordinary people of India, would have validated them and all of us will come to rue the day we did so. We should all remember that these sordid and unscrupulous arguments define us down; they assume a lower common denominator of behavior and leadership than we Indians, as responsible citizens, ought to accept.

And if we do accept it, we will have committed an unthinking act of moral and intellectual disarmament. In the realm of Indian ideals and the great tradition of public debate, the high ground will have been lost. And when we need to rely again on this high ground, as surely as we will need to from time to time in the future, we will find it drained of its compelling moral power. We cannot allow our unscrupulous politicians to define public morality down.

The word `Judgement` is a word that seems to be out of favour these days, but it ought to remain a corner stone of our democratic self-government. It is what enables us to hold ourselves, and our leaders, to high standards. It is how we distinguish between right and wrong, noble and base, honour and dishonour. We cannot ignore that responsibility, or foist it on others. It is the price, sometimes the most exacting price, of citizenship in a democracy. Our civilised society must give public affirmation to principles and standards, categorical norms, notions of right and wrong. Even though many of our public figures often fall short of these standards, and we know and we expect some will, it is nevertheless crucial that we pay tribute to them. At the moment there is a moral bankruptcy and it is damaging our country, its standards and our self-respect. We as a nation should not fail to distinguish between Mahatma Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi.

The essence of democracy lies in all the people having equal opportunities. Democracy means that the humblest person could hope to rise to the top. But this can never happen in India. Indian polity and Indian politics are both bereft of any idealism and only those with bags of money or those who can mobilise money bags can ever contest the elections and hope to reach the top. How can paupers finance the election mela which is becoming more and more expensive? He only becomes a laughing stock pitted against these `imperial` financial frauds. The superstructure of our democracy is indeed founded on money power and its ability to master physical groups like caste groups, communal groups, religious groups, cronies, sycophants and followers and pay for them. With money, the leaders can buy others and with muscle, they can intimidate or even eliminate other opponents/contestants. It is therefore incorrect to say that all the Indian citizens have equal opportunities to contest elections. The solid concrete facts would clearly confirm that the contrary is the truth. My aim here is to give public expression to people`s private concerns.

Ever since independence, the same coterie of 15,000 people have controlled the levers and reigns of power. They only have represented the people, as nobody else could mobilise their resources to fight elections. Soon after independence, the Congress party under Nehru, who was a self-chosen stooge of Stalin and Communist Russia, piloted the Zamindari Abolition Act to abolish the system of hereditary land holders on a large scale. It was done on the grandiloquent principle of equity and natural justice! Indira Gandhi abolished the privy purses which had been guaranteed at the time of India`s independence to all the princes of India on the same principle which was quite unconstitutional and illegal. What was denied to the zamindars and the princes has been transferred through the instrumentality of Parliament to the Nehru family and Nehru clan and a few other clans. The laws of succession have freely operated even in the matter of filling up of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. Politics has become a hereditary avocation, worse than the caste system. Apart from the Nehru family which has strangulated the country for nearly two generations, many of the other equally clever men in Indian politics have evolved a hereditary lineage. At the top we have had the Holy Nehru Trinity, father, daughter, grandson. And now we have the transnational daughter-in-law; she is being declared as not only the daughter-in-law of Indira Gandhi but also that of (only pseudo-secular) Mother India!

Soon after independence, the Congress party created a fashionable cult to publicly proclaim about the exceptional and outstanding qualities of some of its leaders and heroes. By the orchestrated repetition of several such falsehoods, the Congress party created a make-believe nation. Nehru worship till 1962 was one such deliberate exercise. There was never any objective evaluation of Nehru, his ideas, his achievements, his contradictions, his successes, his follies and his failures. And of course there was no evaluation of the long-term impact of his catastrophic policies. Everything he did, real or imaginary, and what he failed to do were all camouflaged in a humdrum of raucous praises. The Congress party, after independence, converted politics into a sordid arena of business not only for the Nehru family but also for every leading member of the Congress party. This disease I call as AICS (Acquired In Congress Syndrome!). This is a dangerous infection worse than AIDS and this infection has spread to all other political parties in India. The worst affected have been all the Leftist parties.

The Congress style of politics has provided a Midas touch to all the aspirants. Most of the richest men in the country are the politicians with mostly unaccounted wealth, internal and foreign wealth. Politics is a business without any norms or rules of business regarding accounting or accountability to anyone. It is the only business that facilitates acquisition of wealth without earning at distress prices or for a pittance or the grabbing of valuable resources such as prime lands without any compensation to the owner or the government. This business of politics seems to operate with no taxation on income or wealth and no disclosure of sources of wealth or any fiduciary interests at any time. My observations should not be viewed as fiction but of solid facts borne out by irrefutable evidence and established precedents.

Exploitation is a normal pervasive style in this business of politics. It is a business with no code of conduct. There is no limit to the magnitude of profits or accumulation of wealth or the enormity of crimes. The only competition may come from different forms of organised decoity! It is an irony that under the Company`s Act, buying of shares using the capital of the company is prohibited. But there is no such prohibition or ban in the field of business of politics. The politician is free to stretch and dip his hand into the public office (by cleverly routing the business through some rules and procedures on paper to satisfy our dead and moribund courts of law!) and fill his private pockets and continue to amass wealth. All the enforcement agencies of the government of India will give a helping hand to every politician to achieve his objective of maximum wealth at no cost or minimum cost. Politics is the only business where our politicians are under no constraint to discriminate between public and private wealth, where his personal interests are involved.

It is a tragedy that the distinction between the public and private realms has altogether collapsed in India. The power and prerogatives of public office have been employed by all the politicians to satisfy their private desires. Most business activities carried on by politicians enjoy exemption from any kind of taxation, including income-taxation. The whole income from the business of politics is outside the purview of any scrutiny on account of the merger of personal and party funds. The most shameful part of the whole story is that all the paper tigers of the Income-Tax Department, Customs and Excise Department would show tremendous deference and consideration to every politician in office or out of office. Once Jagjivan Ram, one of the greatest international giants in the field of corruption in India after independence, shamelessly announced in the Lok Sabha that he had forgotten to file his income tax return by oversight for several years. His obliging Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came to his rescue by declaring that `Jagjivan Babu was so busy serving the nation that he totally forgot to pay the taxes`.

In our country we cannot take the words of any of our leaders for granted. Words have been deconstructed, promises emptied of meaning. Politics has been reduced to a mere game. It is all very straightforward: if a man`s word means nothing, it means nothing. It is folly to believe otherwise.

All the politicians have conferred upon themselves various privileges/ perquisites to pursue and thrive in their political business. While the political management in all our legislatures follows a set style, there is complete unanimity among all the parties on one fundamental aspect. They all agree that all the citizens of India will have to be kept in a continuous state of conflicts, tensions and ignorance, so that they are constantly under pressure fully occupied and completely at the mercy of these political overlords. The business of politics in India has become so attractive that many unscrupulous people from different professions, inspired by ulterior motives, are seeking the mantle of politics. All policies made in the country, all decisions affecting the people and all actions taken so far to implement the policies and decisions are traceable to the politicians. They have in no way laid the foundation for the progress of the country.

V Sundaram

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