Politics is a difficult vocation

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The Hindu Saturday, Dec 27, 2003

Outbursts against politicians are usually not very helpful because they unhelpfully moralise an institutional and social problem. We want to organise power democratically in a large society but are not very imaginative about how to do it. It is a commonplace observation that running for office requires tremendous resources and unless you have a private fortune at your disposal, politics is an impossible ambition. Instead of facing this problem squarely, our moralistic pieties created a system of perverse incentives where the only way politicians could raise money was clandestinely.

It is a symptom of our distance from politics that we underestimate what an extraordinarily difficult vocation it is. Reconciling a multitude of interests is a job for which we express derision only at our peril. And we ought in all fairness to admit that socially, politics is amongst the most open spaces Indian society has created. It is the one social space, where, when all is said and done, the dominant cleavages in society find representation. Politics mirrors our society more than the market, more than professional institutions, more than the government middle class. It has, with occasional lapses, allowed for a social mixing of different sections of society in a way no other activity has.

There is an obvious reason why we love to hate our politicians. It is the only way of avoiding misanthropy, hating most of our social world. Is there any class whose complicities in our predicament do not run as deep as those of politicians? Business that does not pay taxes even after rates become reasonable, teachers who do not teach unless it is for tuitions, doctors who are complicit in rackets for over testing, lawyers who will resist legal reform, journalists whose objectivity is compromised for something even less exalting than votes, bureaucrats who self abdicate responsibility even when there is no pressure, professional bodies that fail to self regulate, NGOs that often chase good money more than good works, trade unions that will do anything to protect their privileges, judges who will become punitive to become popular, are each in their own way, contributing to the pathologies we want to lay at the door of politicians. But the impurity of politicians allows us to feel pure, their crookedness affirms the uprightness of the rest of us, their actions allow all of us to behave as victims and their presence explains all our woes.

Any robustly functioning society needs, amongst other things, an imaginative institutional architecture, that sets the right set of incentives and a core moral consensus that can make the lines between right and might, opportunism and principle, clear. The pathologies of politics only reflect the fact that we are only partially successful on the first front, and as a society deeply confused on the second. De Tocqueville long ago rightly observed that politics can dance lightly on the surface only when there is a core moral consensus to restrain it. But this moral consensus can often be produced only outside politics: in families, in social organisations, in schools, in religious institutions.

But these institutions, with the very arguable exception of families, have largely failed in this aspect of their social function: organised religion is too compromised a moral force to be a serious locus of defendable values. Anyone would be hard pressed to defend politicians beyond the point, so much of their veniality is unnecessary. But a society that acquires habitual contempt for politics and politicians is not a society on the road to moral enlightenment; it is a society opening itself up to despotism. This contempt for politicians is usually high on emotion and short on analysis, and has become a convenient way of displacing responsibility. Politicians are the totem of profanity by which we all affirm our own sacredness.