February 9, 1998

If only our political leaders could actually make contact with the people.

By Tavleen Singh

Trudging from one election rally to another, I found myself marvelling at how unreal our politicians have become. No more real, in some ways, than the garish cardboard cutouts of themselves that tower over the rallies they address.

Security is the ostensible reason for their remoteness. They cannot walk in the streets, as they did in earlier elections, because their minders instil in them the fear that they could be bumped off by the very people they claim to represent. So they fly in and are immediately whisked off in convoys of bullet-proof cars to the safety of five-star hotels whence they emerge only to address a rally. Speeches over, they disappear into the rarefied atmosphere of their heavily-guarded lives. Their contact with ordinary Indians is so minimal as to be virtually non-existent.

In Hyderabad, when the United Front (UF) launched its campaign, the Krishna Oberoi was turned into a fortress to protect the chief ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Jammu and Kashmir, the prime minister and former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda. Security was so tight that even we hacks barely caught a glimpse of this stellar line-up. We had to contend ourselves with hearing what the leaders had to say through UF spokesman Jaipal Reddy. We may just as well have saved ourselves the trouble and watched the show on TV.

The UF is no exception. Congress and BJP leaders are equally protected from "the masses" and equally oblivious of life in the real India. They do not see the unsanitary ugliness of our villages or the pollution and squalor of our cities except through the tinted windows of their bullet-proof cars so they cannot even begin to understand how desperately people yearn for the basic necessities of life. A job, a home, schools, healthcare, clean drinking water, electricity. Some 30 years after Indira Gandhi promised to "Garibi Hatao", there are few signs that we are beginning to win the battle against poverty and even fewer signs that our politicians have understood that the average Indian has become cynical about the variations of that same slogan that are churned out at every election.

What goes under the nebulous description of human development is the most important issue in this election, especially in rural India where most of our voters live. If our leaders could actually make contact with the people, they would discover that a decent standard of living takes precedence over communalism, casteism, Bofors or the Babri Masjid.

They may also discover that it would not be too hard to provide improved living standards if we could have one government in Delhi that paid some serious attention to administrative reforms. The money is there for what is called rural development but it is channelled through such a vast and complicated network of officials that by the time a scheme gets implemented, most of it has already been spent on paying salaries to unnecessary babus. The result usually is that at the village level, all you really get are announcements of good intentions and a series of inspectors who turn up periodically to inspect how the scheme is faring.

There is no shortage of schemes. Jawahar Rozgar Yojana, Indira Awas Yojana, Rajiv Mission and a host of others that go by acronyms like ICDS and IRDP. Yet, election after election, when we columnists travel to the real India, we discover that it looks as bad as it has always done. Open drains, open-air schools, malnourished children, unemployed youths and misery on a scale that is hardly seen anywhere else in the world.

The tragedy is that our political leaders now live in conditions so removed from these shameful realities that they appear to be completely bereft of solutions or new ideas. So, we have seen Congress change to UF in Delhi without any change whatsoever in methods of governance and if it is the BJP's turn next time round, we will undoubtedly still see no change.

This is evident, sadly, from the fact that though the BJP's top leaders have made it a point in their campaign speeches to emphasise the shame of India still being desperately poor after 50 years of Independence, they have not bothered to tell us how a BJP government would go about changing things. The Congress, for its part, promises us yet again aarthic swaraj, gareebon ka raj. Economic self-reliance, the rule of the poor. What on earth does this mean? And what will they now do that they have not managed to do in more than 40 years of ruling India?

If all this sounds depressing and gloomy, let me tell you that it is not nearly as depressing and gloomy as the sight of our cardboard leaders making their meaningless speeches from behind their walls of security. Not nearly as depressing as the sight of Jaipal Reddy holding forth on the need for crop insurance in the air-conditioned Krishna Oberoi after more than 50 farmers have committed suicide because of the failure of the cotton crop in Warangal district. Perhaps, our politicians really do mean well, perhaps they really do want to eliminate poverty and perhaps all that has gone wrong is that they have somehow cocooned themselves on a planet on which people no longer exist.

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