The Gandhi Connection in Today’s India and Political Legitimacy

Oct 04, 2014 Tushita Politics 0

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For the past 66 years, it’s been an annual affair every October 2 that Indians reminisce the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, who was born on this day in 1869, and slayed on January 30 in 1948. The time around the date often invokes debates and discourses on flaws and contradictions in Gandhi’s thought. But mostly, the day lays emphasis on non-violence or ahimsa. The youth today seems to be missing the Gandhian ideological concepts like ahimsa, swaraj and satyagraha.

Perhaps the Aam Aadmi Party should be credited for bringing the legend back to our minds with their dharnas and satyagraha-like demonstrations.  Or maybe it was Anna Hazare who first sparked the nostalgia and was also called the ‘modern Gandhi’. This regular summoning of Gandhi’s ideas, however, doesn’t mean that they are being followed too.

How relevant is Gandhi today?

Prime Minister’s Narendra Modi’s invocations of the Mahatma’s name are frequent, but not always convincing: Gandhi is either reduced to a parochial Gujarati figure, or shrunk to a formula and a cliché.

Not just Gandhi, but even Swami Vivekananda is trotted out one day, Sardar Patel another day, and Babasaheb Ambedkar when his name happens to suit a given purpose. The reality is that beliefs and ideas of each of these individuals, and their very different, often incommensurable contributions in the making of modern India, are of no relevance in an atmosphere of illiterate nationalistic jingoism and complete ideological vacuity.

But even though ideas like the dignity of the poor, the power of truth, and the difficult practices of moral courage might have become outdated fashion fads, Gandhi taught us, that remains as relevant today as it was during the British Raj. The lesson is about the true sources of political legitimacy, and how to recognise them, no matter what the architecture of a state is.

Gandhi taught the whole world that the ultimate legitimacy in politics doesn’t come from brute force, the state apparatus or from mechanisms of political participation, electoral choice and representative self-government. These are all limited and even fallible.

After all, the popular mandate of Hitler did not make Nazi rule legitimate. The benign despotism of the British in India did not make colonial rule legitimate.  Political influence indeed should not attain legitimacy merely because it is successful in capturing power on the basis of professed good intentions.

True political legitimacy has to be premised on popular will, on the desire for self-determination, and on the capacities and capabilities of a government, for sure. But in the end it exceeds and transcends all of these factors, and resides elsewhere, in a more subtle quality that has to do with the inherent morality of any structure of power that purports to rule a people in their name and for their own good.

Lessons from the recent floods:

A recent instance to prove the influence political legitimacy can be the devastating floods in Jammu and Kashmir in early September. The floods were an unfortunate sign of climate change, environmental calamity and the inadequacy of early warning and disaster management systems.

But as the weeks have passed, with houses still water-logged; telephone, radio, television, and internet services still down; highways and roads in a fiasco, and government infrastructure unable to come back up to provide even a hint of civic normalcy, it becomes clear that the real crisis in the Valley is a crisis of political legitimacy.

What shows the lack of political legitimacy is the failure on the part of the State government to:

1. warn and evacuate citizens as the waters of the Jhelum began to rise to dangerous levels after unusually heavy rains;
2. re-establish a basic quorum of ministers, legislators, bureaucrats, police officers and municipal workers who could operate out of private homes or makeshift offices while the government’s own buildings were under water; and,
3. marshal, collect and distribute relief supplies that were pouring in from all parts of India and the world at the Srinagar airport.

But the endless list of failures of the local government in the face of the biggest natural disaster that the State witnessed, is already accompanied by low credibility based on a track record of an indifferent administration, weak and faltering alliances, and the inability to put pressure on the Indian and Pakistani governments to resolve their long-running disputes and take concrete steps to break the perpetual political deadlock of Kashmir. The people of Jammu and Kashmir knew well before the floods that theirs was a government mostly missing in action.

Once the floods backed and water levels receded, even the pretence of law and order, administrative control, provision of basic services for the citizenry, disappeared entirely. And since the State elections stand to be postponed from December 2014 to next summer, there is no reason to expect that the appalling standard of governance will suddenly be raised now.

There are at least two positions on the electoral process as a route to political legitimacy in the State, especially in the Valley. Members and leaders of mainstream political parties like the NC and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) participate in State elections, enter into alliances with national parties like the Congress and the BJP, and form and run the State government if elected to power. Others like the Hurriyat leadership and their supporters do not participate in elections. Their contention is that Jammu and Kashmir is essentially not like any other State of the Indian union, and should not proceed as though it were exactly that, until such time as the overarching dispute about the status of Kashmir is settled in national and international fora.

The leadership of today:

The floods only profess the reality that it’s a pathetic choice between a leadership that can’t govern in fact and one that won’t govern on principle.

The terrible dilemma of the people of the State is that they have to choose between on the one hand, leaders who do participate in Indian electoral democracy and try to provide at least a semblance of representative self-government, howsoever interim its character — but then make a mess of their regime. On the other hand, there are leaders who don’t participate electorally at all, but don’t have the leverage to actually restate the problem and restart to the process of multilateral dialogue and conflict resolution from scratch. It’s a lose-lose bind.

In situations of crises, like a natural disaster, this quandary stops being abstract and becomes all too real. Neither a helpless Chief Minister wringing his hands on the Indian media sans his cell phone and his secretariat, nor a popular separatist personally delivering water and food to hundreds of stranded residents of his locality in Srinagar in a small makeshift boat, can present a viable answer to the question that has hovered over the Himalaya since Partition: Who really commands political legitimacy in Kashmir?

More than democracy:

To think of generally, if Gandhi had to give a message to Kashmir, the usual notion would be that it would be a message of non-violence. Militants should discard their weapons, fundamentalists should embrace their neighbours and everyone who has lived through the conflict should renounce anger and vengeance to chart a new path to freedom.

But in real in reality, if Gandhi was to give a message to Kashmir, and more so in light of the floods – which have washed away all existing structures of authority, such as they were — would be to table once more the question of political legitimacy. 

The path to achievement of political legitimacy:

If one seeks to embark on the path of earning political legitimacy in Jammu and Kashmir, the obvious question would be – how? And who can demonstrate having it?

From rebuilding Srinagar after the devastation, to repatriating Pandits, to putting in place enduring systems of environmental management, to demilitarisation, to resuming talks with Pakistan, to tackling corruption, to instituting processes of rehabilitation, justice and reconciliation for all those affected by 25 years of war — what needs to be done, and who will do it?

The nation needs to truly and urgently recall Gandhi’s achievement in forcing a subcontinent and later an empire to re-examine the very foundations of sovereignty. While in the north, the floods have left an entire regional population without any kind of government, whether popular or unpopular, down south, in Tamil Nadu, another electorally powerful and massively admired leader, Ms. Jayalalithaa, has had to forfeit her mandate in the face of corruption allegations.

Her democratically ratified legitimacy is nevertheless not sufficient to protect her from criminal charges in a court of law. And at the centre, a majority win for Mr. Modi and the BJP still leaves open the question of who this government really speaks for, who it represents and sees itself as representing, and who gets left out of its ambit.

In a fractured democracy like India, numbers alone do not tell the whole or the true story of legitimate rule. Legitimacy has to be earned the hard way, through good governance, transparency, probity, lawfulness, justice, inclusivity and the capacity to demonstrate, both every day and in a crisis, that a government really is not just by and of, but also for the people.

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• India Politics, Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Modi, politics, The Gandhi Connection

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