A conservative turn - Excluding the poor

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1160118/jsp/opinion/story_64345.jsp#.Vpxml_l96M9

Mukul Kesavan 

The marginalization of the poor in local politics is a cross-party endeavour 

India's Constitution isn't perfect. No document drafted by committee can be. But it is a miracle. In the middle of the 20th century, against a backdrop of genocidal violence, the Constituent Assembly wrote the rules for liberal democracy on a continental scale. In the most unequal place on earth, the founders insisted that every adult had the right to vote and stand for election regardless of sex, education, status or wealth. In a stroke they made mass democracy the political norm, not a distant goal to be reached in baby steps.

They weren't magicians. India remained an ugly, hierarchical society riven by discrimination and prejudice. But at the level of political principle those prejudices were orphaned because the Constitution did not own them. It went further: it institutionalized affirmative action by reserving political, administrative and educational opportunities for Dalits and tribals, Independent India's most exploited and marginalized citizens. The Constitution was, in effect, a charter of political correctness, a blueprint for turning an old country into a new republic.

Political correctness is the term disgruntled conservatives use to snipe at civility and consideration in public discourse. The antithesis of political correctness is a conservative common sense that services the status quo by using arguments derived from tradition, culture and authenticity.

This could be your aunt sagely observing that it takes three generations of literacy for the 'low-born' to become fit for responsible white collar jobs. It could be a modern young professional barring the woman who cleans his lavatory from doing kitchen duties for reasons of hygiene. It could be a politician arguing that in a predominantly Hindu country it is reasonable to defer to Hindu sensibilities. It could be a sociologist claiming tribal people were best understood as primitive Hindus. Or it could be state legislatures passing laws to disqualify the uneducated, the indebted and the ill from contesting local elections because they were unfit to be leaders. All of these positions rationalize a conservative consensus where paternalism rules and the poor and marginal know their place.

It is a consensus that has never been hegemonic in republican politics, thanks to the radical inclusiveness of the Constitution. In a viciously unequal country like ours there aren't many institutions that nurture a sense of fellow-feeling that might bridge differences between the comfortable and the wretched, between people of one sort and people of another. Alone in the cultures of the world, India has no tradition of public places where strangers can eat and drink and talk. No cafés, no pubs, no coffee houses, no communal meeting places.

Which is why the great liberal moment when India's republicanism was forged was an exceptional time. The mass mobilizations led by the Congress, the inclusive rhetoric of an anti-colonial nationalism, created a sense of fellowship unprecedented in India's history. To be part of a great movement, to be jailed for your convictions, to know that men and women not like you had rallied to the same cause, was to be socialized into that great republican virtue, fraternity, before the republic was formally inaugurated. It wasn't broad enough, this sense of fellowship, to prevent partition, but it was strong enough to constitute an inclusive, scrupulously non-sectarian republic committed to mass democracy.

The great triumph of this Indian take on political correctness was that even sectarians were forced to use its vocabulary. Thus the 'integral humanism' of Deendayal Upadhyaya and the 'pseudo-secularism' of Lal Krishna Advani were attempts to ground majoritarianism in the terminological terrain of liberalism. The power of the idea of republican inclusiveness was perversely demonstrated by Advani's odd infatuation with Jinnah towards the end of his political career. And the idea of reservations as a way of creating a level playing field in an unequal society became politically sacrosanct, even for a right-wing party like the BJP.

But the election of Narendra Modi was both a symptom of and a catalyst for a conservative reaction against the republican virtues. Instead of liberty, equality and fraternity, we have, in recent years, been offered efficiency, respectability and paternalism. This is most obvious in the arena of local self-government, where state legislatures are allowed to frame eligibility criteria for contesting elections. One state government after another has tried to limit the participation of the poor in municipal and panchayat elections. While the BJP-led state governments in Haryana and Rajasthan have done this in the most systematic and thorough-going way, the marginalization of the poor in local politics is a cross-party endeavour. A variety of political parties have tried to disqualify the uneducated, the indebted and the sick from political office, on the vicious assumption that the poor are responsible for their poverty, that having failed to fend for themselves they can't be allowed to represent others.

The contempt for the vulnerable in these laws is medieval, especially the enthusiasm with which they exclude the ill. The legal scholar, Anup Surendranath, writes in The Indian Express that Odisha and Rajasthan disqualify people with leprosy from contestingpanchayati elections. Odisha bars those suffering from tuberculosis for good measure and, along with Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, prevents the 'deaf-mute' from local body elections. Rajasthan, according to Surendranath, takes this prejudice against the disabled to its logical conclusion, "...disqualifying anyone with a 'physical or mental defect or disease rendering him incapable of work.'"

It's interesting that the criteria used to disqualify the poor are 'secular': education, or a lack of it, debt, the absence of a lavatory, ill health. This is a classically right-wing agenda, aimed not at religious community or caste, but at a class, those who are chronically indebted, who can't afford an education or a lavatory, who can't pay a doctor's bills... in short, the poor. These laws won't prevent Dalits or women from getting elected topanchayati office because the seats reserved for them will be filled by women and Dalits who meet these criteria. They will merely exclude the poor within these categories. This is class war waged with election laws.

Remarkably, India's Supreme Court, so willing, otherwise, to intervene in matters of public interest, has consistently deferred to the right of state legislatures to discriminate amongst their citizens. Surendranath cites the 2008 verdict of the Supreme Court where it upheld Odisha's decision to bar those suffering from leprosy from contesting panchayat elections, ruling that this did not violate their right to equality. In exactly the same spirit, the court endorsed the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act 2015 that effectively excluded half of Haryana's rural population from contesting panchayat elections. The Constitution and its interpreters no longer seem to stand athwart conservative prejudice, saying 'stop'.

The BJP's decision to allow its governments in two states to exclude substantial sections of their adult population from political competition is a daring one. Both Rajasthan and Haryana passed their panchayat acts early in the life of Modi's prime ministership. It remains to be seen how this move resonates politically. It could backfire. With legislative assembly elections due in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, in 2017, this bill could be a gift for the Bahujan Samaj Party and its mainly plebeian support base. Its leader, Mayavati, could cite these bills as an upper caste BJP-led conspiracy to exclude the poor and the backward from the basic electoral processes of a republican democracy.

Alternatively, the BJP might succeed in rallying a plurality of votes around this paternalistic vision of governance by the respectable on behalf of the great unwashed. These laws and their endorsement by the Supreme Court have created an opening for an explicitly conservative politics; whether this can be consolidated into a conservative era depends on Modi's ability to do in Uttar Pradesh what he failed to do in Bihar: win India's poor heartland