When the cookie
crumbles
International Labour Day celebrated on 1st May is
a worldwide holiday to salute the contribution of the working classes. It is a
good day to ruminate on what the Americans call “The state of the nation”.
When all things begin to unravel in a malfunctioning
democracy like ours, the ones who are meant to be naturally pleased are the
Marxists.It was Karl Marx who wrote with great, almost religious
conviction, about the inevitable “withering” of the Capitalist State,
eventually. That was more of a moral judgement than logical argument, however
just the cause of the proletariat; but of course Karl Marx did not think so.
And today, with the
economies of the developed world tottering on the brink, due to its excesses
rather than the effects of the Marxian dialectic, he does nevertheless seem
vaguely prophetic.
India, on its part, tends to be both fish and fowl
simultaneously, and so, we are probably at least as much Socialist as we are Capitalist.
In the TV series Mad
Men, episode 5 in the 6th season, Don Draper’s wife Megan, who is
American- French, speaks from New York to her Parisian father on the telephone.
The time is April 4th, 1968, the day Rev. Martin Luther King was
killed.
Megan Draper’s Communist father, on hearing Rev. Martin
Luther King has been shot in the face, says, “I applaud the acceleration of
decay,” echoing Marxist sentiment. And, believe it or not, in French, “acceleration
of decay” does not sound ghoulish or pompous.
After all Megan's father is in the Paris of the 1960s. The Paris
of the barricades that came to pass on May 3rd, 1968, just a month
later. And the swirling popular protests that followed- part student, part
worker, part trade union, part anarchist and adventurer, wholly utopian, and
not a little bizarre, as popular uprising tend to be.
That 1968 happening was the biggest ever eruption of working
class protest in the 20th century, within the confines of a
democracy, and with no overthrowing of the Government at the end of it.
In fact, the
whirlwind of protest came and went leaving only profound lessons in its
wake. Working class life did become
fairer, in France, and elsewhere. But, the baby did not go out with the
bathwater. The same Gaullist ruling
party was voted back to power, more strongly than before in the elections that
followed later in the same year.
But first, there were
pitched battles between students from the Sorbonne and elsewhere, trade
unionised workers, 11 million of them, 20% of the entire population of France,
and the police of President De Gaulle.
The photographs of that time, in the now defunct LIFE
Magazine, of the barricaded Latin Quarter of Paris, still resonate. Even if
Bashar Assad’s Government is using chemical weapons against the rebels in Syria
now. The fangs bared today are just far more lethal.
President Francois Hollande, in today’s France, in dire
economic trouble, must be thinking if only Socialism could cure the malaise.
Then the EU wouldn’t have to break up. But it is so bad that the EU is unlikely
to see 2014 in one piece.
But the Marxists globally have lost their chutzpah. Their vision has developed
cataracts. They can offer no relief from our travails. Fidel Castro is an
ancient shuffling ruin. Chavez is dead. Communists may be at the head of
rebellions, but they fail to keep their promises as always. And here in India,
the Communists have lost almost all vestiges of electoral power.
The watered down version, Socialism, has been taken over ,
appropriated, by the ruling Congress party and several of its regional allies.
It is thought to be a reliable vote gathering device. So there is always pious talk; of Pro-poorism, aam admiism, and other politically
correct lip-service. It stays iffy though,
a whistling in the dark form of politics, of non-performance, but tall on
promise.
But meanwhile, everything has been breached, compromised and
vandalised. Our war preparation plans are in the hands of the enemy while China
sits pretty in five tents 19 km inside Indian Ladakh. We say nothing to them,
but threaten Pakistan with nuclear destruction if they use tactical nuclear
weapons on us. Meanwhile Pakistan continues with its daily savagery as if we
hadn’t spoken.
The CBI has become
the Government’s own pet inquisitors. The intelligence agencies are used to
keep an eye on political rivals. The banks, the Reserve Bank, all do partisan
work.
The Lok Sabha, meant to legislate, is a fish market of
dissension and bad behaviour. The Rajya Sabha offers no respite either. Every
day ordinary people blatantly break the law and perpetrate inhuman acts on each
other. The country is riddled with scandals of every kind.
The judiciary too is not objective. Some say it is corrupt.
Certainly two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court stand accused. It has also
become more proactive as the executive has failed to deliver. Meanwhile its
back- log stays gargantuan.
But justice is no longer blind. It lets Mr. Sajjan Kumar off,
like a tight slap in the Sikh face after 25 years, when thousands saw him
directing murder and arson on the streets of Delhi personally in 1984. That was
an Orwellian year alright, steeped in Big Brother denial that persists to this
day.
The litany of woe is not just in the neglect and compromised
nature of our institutions but in the blatant subversion of every instrument of
the Government to suit its own strategic and tactical purpose.
It does not matter
what the citizenry want. It does not matter if it is good for the country. What
our political masters want to do, they do. They are all complicit in the “decay”.
Survival has meant a jettisoning of the true intent of the constitution.
We need a strong new broom to sweep clean, to
purge the suppurating body politic. We need our own Cromwellian figure. Oliver
Cromwell brought in representative Government and redirected power to the representatives
in parliament, and away from the Crown.
Our representatives, at state and
central levels, have power of course. But they use it to feather their own
nests and run the Government badly. What we need is governance for the benefit
of the people, a post-modern Cromwellism.
We can see such a man, Mr.
Narendra Modi, waiting in the wings, who
can deliver this. He must be given an opportunity to bring his brand of
politics and performance to New Delhi. And through him India can stem the rot
and begin to realise its true potential for probity and greatness.
(1,102 words)
April 30th, 2013
Gautam Mukherjee
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