Why V P Singh Remains Relevant

The Transition Man Praful Bidwai Rediff.com July 03, 2006

The real reason for Singh's relevance lies in his special, probably unique, role as The Transition Man, who has bridged or spanned many divides in India. Singh was influenced in his youth by Socialist thought, but joined active politics under the Congress banner. Yet, he quit the Congress in 1987 and became the biggest rallying point for non-Congress parties in the 1989 election. He has since continued to be a focal point in all attempts to mobilise Centre-Left forces on a broad anti-communal platform. No other person has offered so many links or bridges across different parts of the political spectrum.

Singh stands at another junction, marking India's shift from a leader-driver, top-down, manipulative system of politics, to a politics of self-assertion by the plebeian classes, which is more democratically accountable. It is not that leaders no longer matter -- of course, they do. But in relation to the period until the 1980s, the masses, especially subordinate groups like Dalits and OBCs, have become far more vocal and demanding. They want self-representation, rather than patronage-based indirect representation on their behalf by others.

This is altering the character of Indian democracy by increasingly reshaping it into a system that is seen by the people as capable of empowering them -- not just as a system of exercising power over them. The change has helped formal democracy, based on procedures such as representation and elections along with Constitutional rules and parliamentary norms, acquire a more substantive character. This shift makes India's current politics -- with its many flaws, but also with its robust, rambunctious and vibrant character -- qualitatively different from the anaemic democracies of numerous countries, including many developed ones. Singh is one of the leaders who catalysed this shift.

Singh forms another bridge: between public morality and politics, symbolised by Bofors and his resignation over the issue of lack of probity in public life. Bofors was not only India's largest corruption scandal until the mid-1980s. It was located at many crossroads: that between military and civilian decision-making, between foreign arms manufacturers and potential domestic recipients of bribes, and between them and middlemen like the Hindujas. The Bofors investigation by the media, and by official agencies, turned up an unprecedented wealth of information, rare in such cases. Equally unprecedented was the public outcry over the scandal. With Bofors, V P Singh too became a household name.

Equally important is the link Singh has formed through his work in the last five years or more between political parties, on the one hand, and people's movements, non-party political groups and NGOs, on the other. Singh has tirelessly worked to defend the rights of slum-dwellers, rickshaw-pullers and other informal sector workers in the cities, and landless workers, Dalits and victims of displacement in the villages. No political leader has done more for the Right to Information campaign in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh or Bihar than him. Whenever movements of the downtrodden and the desperately poor need help, he tries to reach out to them.

Only his amazing dedication to the underprivileged can explain why 12 years after he was detected to have a nasty cancer, as well as kidney failure, he continues to be extremely active among groups who are nobody's constituency. Every week, he addresses dozens of public meetings and activists' discussions in different cities and towns, taking a break only for his thrice-weekly dialysis. It's the energy that he gets from these flesh-and-blood people, the salt of the Indian earth, that keeps him going.

None of this minimises the importance of Singh's decision to implement the Mandal Commission report. This was done at a particular juncture partly to counter the growing influence of Kamandal or Hindutva politics, which was then making thrust after offensive thrust against the secular pillars of Indian politics. But the real significance of Mandal lay neither in this, nor in the circumstance that it opened 15 per cent of all central jobs for OBC recruitment -- barely 14,000 positions a year, or a drop in the ocean. Rather, Mandal's true significance is that the decision held up a mirror to society as regards entrenched discrimination and mainstreamed the principle of affirmative action.

Since 1990, wider acceptance and extension of affirmative action has become irreversible. Only a highly regarded upper-caste leader of impeccable reputation like Singh could have dared take such a bold step given that violent opposition to it was a foregone conclusion. It redounds to his credit that he did so knowing this would topple his government. As he himself dramatically puts it: "I scored a difficult goal, but in the process, I broke my leg irreparably!"