“We the People” Need a Government That is Creatively Unstable
Only such governments which remain warily unstable, in actual fact, produce the best results for the downtrodden.
By Badri Raina
May 28, 2024
Source: The Wire India
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty via The Wire India
Let us pray that ‘we the people” have not voted for a brute majority to any party, followed by a ‘strong’ leader at the helm.
Governments born of such a combo, as we have seen repeatedly worldwide, and most of all in Bharat, work full-scale for entrenched vested interests and remain callously inured to public accountability, parliamentary and media scrutiny, hostile to criticism and salutary for the common weal.
‘Strong’ leaders who head such governments come to think of themselves as the sole fountainheads of what is right and proper. This invariably means catering to private ownership and monopoly behemoths, as well as their protection, against voices of opposition, using state-apparatus. It also means unleashing a fascist politics of othering sections of citizens as enemies, from whose so-called villainies the realm must be protected by hook or by crook.
That project, as we have seen, entails the worst forms of xenophobia and the suppression of every legitimate democratic right. This includes the constitutional prerogative of the populace to educate, organise and agitate for livelihood rights, an egalitarian economic order, equality before the law and a for a fourth estate that does not enslave itself to the corporate-driven executive of the day.
It was with these systemic dangers in mind that Kanshi Ram gave us one of the most intelligent and acute pieces of political-theoretical wisdom years ago. Namely, that only such governments which remain warily unstable, in actual fact, produce the best results for the downtrodden.
The instability of such dispensations obliges them to have always their ears creatively to the ground, since the internal democratic dynamic of such governments disallows their leaderships to disregard accountability to “we the people” and thereby their answerability to the constitutional institutions of the state.
Creatively unstable governments never have the luxury of fobbing off attention to the “common good’ by recourse to war-mongering, hate pogroms and religious chicanery.
Because the interstices between the conjoint political interests that constitute such governments allow for the intervention of public voices, their responsiveness to the electorates, per necessity, remains a living pre-condition of their continuance in office.
Looking back, it is not a fluke that the best results for the common good in our republic have, in the recent past, come not from strong leaders who head brute parliamentary majorities but coalition governments. All the way from the one led by the late V.P. Singh to the United Progressive Alliance dispensation, first and second, without – it is important to underline – any deleterious consequences for that fascist bugbear of “national security.”
Brute majority governments work for the upper classes; coalitions almost always work chiefly for the masses, although the nature of their class base may not suffer any revolutionary dent in the process.
The best result of the election, now coming to a close, would be one which brings together a conglomerate of parties around a progressive common programme of action – one that is designed to preserve, protect and defend the constitutional order, to orient economic policies to the good of those most exploited. It must be heavily against elements whose sole deflective agenda is to drown out the common need and the common good through calls to exclude and lynch.
How determined a fascistic politics of the entrenched can be to prevent such a circumstance has never been as rabidly in evidence as during the current electoral battle.
Shamefully, but not surprisingly, the so-lauded prime minister has led the way in bringing down public morality and political articulation into the sewer.
That his gross imaginings should have finally landed us into having to hear his raunchy reference to nautch girls – who, if only he knew some history, have had a unique place in our composite lives as carriers of deep cultural learning, poetic wisdom and enviable etiquette, often in excess of those who have had access to formal institutions of learning.
Let us therefore pray that India’s canny voters have seen through humbug of the most degrading and coercive kind, and opted to vote in a prospective coalition rich in creative instability.
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty via The Wire India
Let us pray that ‘we the people” have not voted for a brute majority to any party, followed by a ‘strong’ leader at the helm.
Governments born of such a combo, as we have seen repeatedly worldwide, and most of all in Bharat, work full-scale for entrenched vested interests and remain callously inured to public accountability, parliamentary and media scrutiny, hostile to criticism and salutary for the common weal.
‘Strong’ leaders who head such governments come to think of themselves as the sole fountainheads of what is right and proper. This invariably means catering to private ownership and monopoly behemoths, as well as their protection, against voices of opposition, using state-apparatus. It also means unleashing a fascist politics of othering sections of citizens as enemies, from whose so-called villainies the realm must be protected by hook or by crook.
That project, as we have seen, entails the worst forms of xenophobia and the suppression of every legitimate democratic right. This includes the constitutional prerogative of the populace to educate, organise and agitate for livelihood rights, an egalitarian economic order, equality before the law and a for a fourth estate that does not enslave itself to the corporate-driven executive of the day.
It was with these systemic dangers in mind that Kanshi Ram gave us one of the most intelligent and acute pieces of political-theoretical wisdom years ago. Namely, that only such governments which remain warily unstable, in actual fact, produce the best results for the downtrodden.
The instability of such dispensations obliges them to have always their ears creatively to the ground, since the internal democratic dynamic of such governments disallows their leaderships to disregard accountability to “we the people” and thereby their answerability to the constitutional institutions of the state.
Creatively unstable governments never have the luxury of fobbing off attention to the “common good’ by recourse to war-mongering, hate pogroms and religious chicanery.
Because the interstices between the conjoint political interests that constitute such governments allow for the intervention of public voices, their responsiveness to the electorates, per necessity, remains a living pre-condition of their continuance in office.
Looking back, it is not a fluke that the best results for the common good in our republic have, in the recent past, come not from strong leaders who head brute parliamentary majorities but coalition governments. All the way from the one led by the late V.P. Singh to the United Progressive Alliance dispensation, first and second, without – it is important to underline – any deleterious consequences for that fascist bugbear of “national security.”
Brute majority governments work for the upper classes; coalitions almost always work chiefly for the masses, although the nature of their class base may not suffer any revolutionary dent in the process.
The best result of the election, now coming to a close, would be one which brings together a conglomerate of parties around a progressive common programme of action – one that is designed to preserve, protect and defend the constitutional order, to orient economic policies to the good of those most exploited. It must be heavily against elements whose sole deflective agenda is to drown out the common need and the common good through calls to exclude and lynch.
How determined a fascistic politics of the entrenched can be to prevent such a circumstance has never been as rabidly in evidence as during the current electoral battle.
Shamefully, but not surprisingly, the so-lauded prime minister has led the way in bringing down public morality and political articulation into the sewer.
That his gross imaginings should have finally landed us into having to hear his raunchy reference to nautch girls – who, if only he knew some history, have had a unique place in our composite lives as carriers of deep cultural learning, poetic wisdom and enviable etiquette, often in excess of those who have had access to formal institutions of learning.
Let us therefore pray that India’s canny voters have seen through humbug of the most degrading and coercive kind, and opted to vote in a prospective coalition rich in creative instability.
Badri Raina is a well-known commentator on politics, culture and society. His columns on the Znet have a global following. Raina taught English literature at the University of Delhi for over four decades and is the author of the much acclaimed Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth. He has several collections of poems and translations. His writings have appeared in nearly all major English dailies and journals in India.
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