Fifth Column: Who Cares?

India Today, December 7, 1998
Dec 7, 1998

FIFTH COLUMN
Who Cares?

People are fed up with polls and broken promises.

Tavleen Singh

It must be something to do with the fine speeches our political leaders make on the hustings. Invariably when elections are in the air I see things momentarily with fresh eyes. So although it's a street I know well, while walking down it this time I looked at it anew. I saw a young boy from Bihar who was barely into his teens and had come to the city looking for a job. His eyes filled with fear when I asked him where he had come from. He seemed to think I would send him back. He said he had no relatives in the city, no skills of any kind. But he had been told it was easy to find work. Besides, there was nothing in his village to go back to.

I saw a family from somewhere in southern India. There was a scrawny young woman with three small children in rags. When she saw me she sent the children along to beg. They made whining noises, scratched their unwashed hair and rubbed their distended stomachs: "Khana khayega memsahib (We want to eat)." There were other children. Malnourished, barefoot, ill-clad. They positioned themselves at traffic lights so that they could use cleaning windscreens as an excuse to beg. They competed with older, more skilled beggars who had learnt the art of whining and limping instantly on sighting a soft target.

These are India's average citizens. These are the people whom elections, democracy and the fine words our politicians spew forth are really meant to help. Yet elections come and go and their lives remain just the same. Everyone knows the figures but its worth remembering them in election season: 52.5 per cent of Indians live on less than a dollar a day; 71 per cent have no access to sanitation; 19 per cent have no access to clean drinking water; 15 per cent have no access to health services. Over 35 million of India's children in the 6-10 age group do not attend primary school.

Is it any wonder that most Indians are beginning to be weary of elections? Once upon a time, elections evoked excitement in India. There was a festival quality about them with everyone sharing the thrill and drama of this celebration of democracy. But judging by the lack of interest and ennui that were the main emotions aroused by this past week's assembly elections, it's clear things have changed.

When you ask people why they seem so indifferent to the speeches our political leaders have been making and to their new set of promises, they tell you they have heard everything before. The remark most commonly heard from the "average" voters I talked to was: "They're all the same. It makes no difference who wins."

There isn't disappointment with Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Government specifically -- although the price of onions united common people and the chattering classes this time -- there is disappointment with all politicians. More disturbingly, there is disappointment with a democratic system which only seems to throw up governments that can't govern.

Where you notice special disappointment with Vajpayee is in the fact that there were many who believed the BJP would be able to do better than the rest. In retrospect, it's hard to see why this impression should have got around since the BJP had shown no special qualities while governing states like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. But the belief persisted long enough to turn now into bitter disappointment. Six months of BJP rule at the Centre have made it clear the party never had an agenda for governance. No economic policy. No political insights. No plans for administrative reform. No nothing. The result was when the BJP took power in Delhi it was content to merely do what it thought every other government had done before. It went through the motions of governance instead of really governing.

Had there been someone, just one person, in the BJP's plethora of think tanks who had been working on a proper agenda -- instead of tongue-twisting slogans: swadeshi, swawlamban, swaraj -- it would have been noticed a long time ago that Congress' ideas of governance have failed. Specifically, they have failed in areas like healthcare, sanitation, literacy and rural development. Once this realisation dawned it would have been quite easy to recognise that these were the areas for the BJP to focus on.

It would also have been realised that the Congress' vaunted economic reforms amounted mainly to ending industrial licences and making foreign investment easier. After this, P.V. Narasimha Rao did nothing. If the economic think tank had consisted of economists rather than Hindu nationalists with inferiority complexes Vajpayee would have had an agenda of reforms to work on. Instead he has had to rely on grandiose schemes -- like a highway from Kashmir to Kanyakumari -- which appear to have been conceived in desperation, alas again by people who have no idea of what it takes to build a road.

It is fashionable in Delhi these days to say the BJP has been unable to run a proper government because of pressures and pulls from its coalition partners. This is a silly excuse. Vajpayee's Government will start to function perfectly the day he works out what exactly he wants to do. Which bills, for instance, does he plan to pass in the next session of Parliament? What does he plan to do about healthcare and population control? If primary education is being made compulsory, which classes will this scheme cover? If the superhighway is to be built, then where is the money going to come from and when will it be ready?

Meanwhile, elections will come and go and the average Indian will become increasingly indifferent to who wins or loses. Because in his heart he knows "they're all the same. It makes no difference who wins".

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