E D I T O R I A L

Democracy as a Sham

DO we want a healthy party-based democracy any longer in Punjab?  Two big parties now wrestling to win the minds and hearts of the people are actually behaving like thieves.  The ruling Congress is turning every stone to strike a mullah side by side appeasing each section. It has suddenly discovered cash and time to offer each section smoothies. Power is free for large sections and employees, majority of them sluggish and corrupt are having great fun with each of their demand being met. It is another matter that the agrarian crisis is forcing the farmers either to suicides or to hold noisy demonstrations and face the brutal police.

The challengers to Congress, the Akali- BJP combine is offering everything short of damsels from the paradise. As the combine moves to fill its coffers with funds, it wants the public to forget its earlier five years of misrule and corruption and remember only the immediate past. Please forget our misdeeds and enjoy your short memory and concatenate on the misrule and corruption of Capt. Amarinder singh harks back the Akali Dal stalwart former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal. “We shall hang every corrupt Congressman and officer by the first lamp post when we come to power”. Badal shrieks and shouts. “You could do this if you survive our onslaught,” yells back Amarinder Singh.

The elections that take place on February 13 would be the costliest so far in Punjab if the spending by the two parties during the last some weeks were any indication. They have spent huge money or rallies, advertisement campaigns and getting set for elections. As politics becomes a family affair and lucrative business, money is the least consideration. Tough election laws mean little to wily politicians. Otherwise too, money this time from within and outside Punjab would flow like water. And voters neglected for the past years could expect free flow of liquor, opium, bhuki and any other intoxicants. All possible corrupt practices would be on display as media managers rush to newspapers offices. Bigger parties struggle for cash while smaller parties do flourish, as money is hardly a problem for any serious contender during elections. It all looks surreal.

 Political leaders are partly culpable for the wildly uninformed cynicism that undermines democratic politics. Their managerial pragmatism is doomed as they try hard to present complex situations as very simple through the prism of the media.

Political leaders are partly culpable for the wildly uninformed cynicism that undermines democratic politics. As I have written many times, Tony Blair has made some colossal misjudgements as he sought to escape from the politics of the 1980s and lead a centreleft party with a doomed managerial pragmatism. But, boy, do we know about the errors. We hear about his culpability most hours of every day. The dangerously simplistic background assumption is that Blair and other wretched politicians alone undermine democracy. It is much more complicated than that.

Viewers of 24, the compelling and addictive television series, will know part of the appeal is that the hero, Jack Bauer, faces impossible choices in each episode. Quite often they come down to this: do I choose to save the world, even if that means my new girlfriend will be killed by her kidnappers? We sympathise with Bauer because we understand the agonies of the decision-making process.

With political leaders there is no wish to understand any more. Yet, like Bauer, political leaders face no-win decisions all the time. That is politics. They are in a continuing battle with political opponents. They face complex decisions that have to be agreed by their parties and then presented to the electorate through the prism of the media. The Bauer-like dilemmas are rarely highlighted.

The BBC's one-sided coverage of Blair's interview with the police last Thursday was a classic example. There was little attempt to explain, place the event in context or question what the police were up to. Instead the assumption was that the day had been simply another disaster for Blair.

Newsnight described the police interview as a "bombshell", although the exchange had been inevitable once the police inquiry had begun. It was a bombshell only in the sense that ChristmasDay is a bombshell to some young kids. Parts of the BBC had been waiting for this day so long that when it arrived they could not contain their excitement. The normally sober World Tonight ran an overexcited report followed by an interview with Roy Hattersley, who is a Blair critic, and then an interview with a columnist who is well-known for believing that Blair is corrupt.

That was it. At five o' clock News 24 ran several breathless reports ending with an interview with the MP Gordon Prentice, who has been a big critic of Blair's for years. Nowhere was there any reference to this fact. I am a great fan of Hattersley and the anti-Blair columnist, but they were never going together to present a full picture.

Even more surreal, in each of the long BBC sequences there was a separate discussion on how outrageous it was that Downing Street had made the announcement on a busy news day, therefore burying bad news. This must have been the noisiest burial in history. Also imagine the alternative discussion in Downing Street: "Tony, why don't we hold the police interview on a quiet news day so we can be kicked around even more than we will be already?"

Finally, and with a bleak symmetry, on Thursday night the BBC review of the political week with Andrew Neil ended its programme with a long monologue from the actor Michael Gambon about how much he hated politicians. At first I thought it was a joke. Gambon can be a brilliant comic actor. But after a sentence or two it was clear he meant it, given pride of place as the climax of the programme: a sweeping attack on democratic politics, unquestioned and unchallenged. The anti-politics extremists would have given their thumbs up to that use of licence-fee money.

Of course, it is a big news story when the police interview a prime minister, even if it was inevitable and predictable. But the much bigger twist of the day was that he was interviewed as a witness rather than under caution. Here is the figure that leads the Labour Party and alone has the power of patronage. Surely the BBC could have raised a few more questions about what this tells us about the nature of the police investigation.

Could there have been also a bit more context as to what happened in the build-up to the last election, when the main parties were battling it out for funds in the equivalent of a naval arms race? Are the police behaving with appropriate propriety or are they leaking selected snippets of information? Uncritically, BBC reporters quoted "police sources" while criticising Downing Street for spinning the news. Why is the BBC asking no questions of the unelected police officers while describing without qualification the events for the elected Blair as one of his darkest days?

The BBC did the same with John Major. While I worked at the BBC I wrote a detailed essay on how it added to the turbulence around Major in the mid-1990s as well as reporting what was going on. The same is happening with Blair now. The BBC is not anti-Labour or pro-Tory, but unable to take a stand on policy issues, and, wanting to make waves, it has inadvertently become anti-politics. I know this to be a view held also by some senior Conservative politicians as well as those around Blair and Brown.

I stress again that politicians are culpable. Major ran a split, tired administration and there were a few crooks in his ranks. Blair has been a rootless political leader in which too often wily means were justified for what he hoped would be worthwhile ends. I stress also that I am not anti-BBC. I want a publicly funded media organisation to thrive. But I cite its thoughtlessly clichéd output last Thursday as symptomatic of the way as a country we have lapsed into a complacent view of politics, assuming the worst, unable or unwilling to understand the dilemmas politicians face.

On Any Questions at the weekend, the journalist Charles Moore got the biggest cheer of the night by arguing that it was outrageous of politicians to demand money from the taxpayers to help them fund their parties. Probably Moore spoke for Britain. But think about the implications. It is no longer possible for wealthy people to make donations without being regarded as crooks. Membership of political parties is declining fast, so they cannot rely on individual subscriptions. Yet Moore gets a huge cheer when he argues against state funding. So what is left?

Enter the charismatic extremists, unburdened by the apparently contaminated bigger political parties. Major left amid overblown claims of sleaze. Blair will leave with even noisier allegations. Slowly the stage is being cleared.

With political leaders there is no wish to understand any more.  Political leaders face no-win decisions all the time. That is politics. They are in a continuing battle with political opponents. They face complex decisions that have to be agreed by their parties and then presented to the electorate through the prism of the media. Enter the charismatic extremists, unburdened by the apparently contaminated bigger political parties. Badal had left amid overblown claims of sleaze. Amarinder will leave with even noisier allegations. Slowly the stage is being cleared.

But it leaves the people, the aam adami disenchanted and cynical. Indian middle class, the class that has the leisure to think, debate and lead in reforms is busy amassing wealth by all means is on spending spree. Its leisure time is devoted in the worship of philistine consumerism and ugly demonstration of its newly mostly ill-gotten wealth. The poor are lost in their harsh struggle to survive.

What India needs today to save its nascent democracy from being totally usurped by the filthy rich, corrupt and criminal is a heavy doze of electoral reforms like the list system or preoperational representative system where parties, programmers and development comes to the fore and money and corruption take a back seat. But is anyone talking about that. Not even our pious Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh.

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