The Great Indian (non) Debate

The discerning Indian voter will suffer in this coming election, because his issues will not be debated. In any case, they will not be debated vigorously.

If one is interested in knowing why economics has turned flaccid and what will be done to make it roar again, what our relations in the next five years with America, China and Pakistan will be like, and how bits of essential legislation will be passed by the next parliament, one will not have answers from the election campaign.

The Congress party, which has had a bad couple of years, is moving the debate away from policies and performance. Its leaders, at the moment, appear more interested in speaking about the consequences of having Narendra Modi in Delhi, rather than revisiting their decade in power.

This is understandable because the Manmohan Singh government has more or less given up on its term and is coasting towards May 2014. The serial disasters that have visited it through serious allegations of corruption and incompetence had already deflated it by the start of 2012. We must expect little from it in the next six months. Though she may be well meaning, Sonia Gandhi does not have it in her, given her lack of education, to offer direction.

Manmohan Singh has, by the looks of it, given up and is waiting to leave office and retire. The Congress Party will likely play a negative game and hope that the Muslims will flock to them out of fear of Modi. The only Congress leader, who approaches issues through the fundamentals, is Rahul Gandhi. But he is, for some reason, seen as flaky and laughable and so most ignore him.

On the other side, in my opinion, Modi doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to engage with policy at a high level and certainly not at the level of legislation.

This is understandable given his education and exposure. He is better off doing what he does, which is offer broad criticism of Singh’s government. Modi’s great skill, and this must be acknowledged, is demagoguery. He is entertaining and forceful, but nothing more than that. It is true also that it is this sort of thing that voters are looking for. Manifestos in India are neither written nor read seriously. They are incidental.

Modi’s total dominance of his party means that even if there were people within the BJP, who could provide some intellectual firepower, they will remain in the shadows for fear of altering his narrative.

Both major parties are thus unlikely to provide much by way of quality. The regional parties in India are shallow and petty. They have never been part of the national debate and are uninterested in this beyond the things that concern them narrowly. They are flexible and many can attach themselves to either grouping, whether led by the Congress Party or the BJP, based purely on self-interest (meaning getting choice ministries). We can safely rule out anything of high quality from them.

The media in India, whether print or broadcast, has never been interested in serious policy material. It is said that the only place India’s economic reforms were debated was in the almost unread Economic and Political Weekly. The other elements of the media were interested in two other stories at the time. The Bofors arms scandal dominated news coverage before that critical election and the Babri Masjid after it. Both of which were ultimately irrelevant things. It is the economic reforms, not debated, which transformed India.

But the media is forced to follow the tabloid story over the substantial one. The reason for this is that the vast majority of readers and viewers are unengaged with matters of substance. Anything lacking in immediate passion puts us off and economic policy and foreign policy and strategic affairs are not, in any case, the domain of popular politics.

Given all of this, the debate will be tepid and uninteresting for those who are not attracted to passion. For those who are, of course, this will be the most exciting election in India since 1996 and perhaps, even since 1977.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 20^th, 2013.

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