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1/ As India goes to polls, one thing is clear. Irrespective of political party, many elected will have assorted criminal records registered against them. Some handwringing will follow, statistics will be cited and moral outrage will be duly expressed.
2/ Irrespective, the numbers are still kind of astonishing. In last Uttar Pradesh Assembly election, 859 out of 4,853 candidates had disclosed criminal cases against them. Yet, soon such details are forgotten. A statistical roadkilll on the highway of democracy.
3/ Our oped pages however shall bemoan criminals in politics & absence of honest citizens. Yet ironically, when asked to choose between a conscientious citizen candidate & a criminal-politician candidate, often enough the electorate overwhelmingly vote for the latter.
4/ Amidst many regrets and displays of civic highmindedness on oped pages, what is forgotten is that the Indian electorate often has a radically different understanding than our intellectual class of the end goals of politics.
5/ In a recent study about criminal politicians in north India, the anthropologists Anastasia Piliavsky and Tommaso Sbriccoli document that these criminal-politicians are often seen as ‘doers’.
6/ In fact, they are often not necessarily seen as ‘criminals’ but as ‘toughs’ who protect society and provide public goods, stepping in when the state machinery creaks to a halt.
7/ In a way, this motif of a local hero who steps out of convention and the traditional canon to cater to immediate social needs reminds one of localised divinities who abound across India.
8/ These ‘small’ divinities — Aiyyanaar in TN, Jhunjharji Maharaj in Rajasthan, Jasma Odan in Gujarat — who are often removed from the ‘high’ philosophical traditions also accrue their worth in the social imagination as prol ific ‘doers’ who defend the social order.
9/ These localised divinities stand often in contrast to the larger, homogenising, and transcendental categories of belief that the state calls ‘religion’.
10/ What follows from such twofold valencies of belief — the local and the transcendental — is that individuals see little conflict in relying on two different ethical frameworks for evaluation of their lives.
11/ They evaluate the exigencies of social living in terms of efficacy, purpose, and performance, while on the other side, they think of their private lives in terms of the transcendental: what is duty, what is good, what is moral.
12/ This compartmentalisation of ethical frameworks is neither uniquely Indian nor modern. Machiavelli, for instance, was dismissive of early medieval Christian theologians who demanded politics be reducible to the personal.
13/ Instead, he demanded that leaders of societies ought to demonstrate ‘virtù’, a complex assemblage of potentialities which he described as spirit, force, ruthlessness, and an intent to get things done.
14/ The key metric in his calculus was efficacy of action. Machiavelli’s hero was a doer who doesn’t flag in energies, who bestrides the political scene not as a balm for our grievances but as a transformative presence.
15/ In contrast to this view, the great contemporary philosopher of ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre, thinks that politics is a means to arrive at what he calls ‘goods of excellence’ that are positive for all.
16/ This is in contrast to the practice of politics that maximises ‘goods of effectiveness’, such as money, prestige, power — goods whose possession may allow for greater efficacy of action but are not ends in themselves.
17/ Framed thus, Machiavelli sees the purposiveness of politics as maximising effectiveness of action to govern better, while MacIntyre, much like Gandhi, sees politics as a means for internal excellence.
18/ These two views have different locus of investigations: society and man. When our opinion pages reconcile heavy-heartedly to fiery presences like Yogi Adityanath to bemoan his politics as a defeat of India, what we see is a familiar clash of conceptual end goals.
19/ Our intellectual class views politics as a collective practice to produce citizens who value goods of internal excellence.
20/ Meanwhile, for many Indian voters, still struggling after decades of misgovernance, democracy remains a means to identify leaders with ‘virtù’ who will produce goods of effectiveness.
21/ Their locus of evaluation is not the individual in a society but a maintenance of social infrastructure within which individuals can thrive. This is an analytical framework that exalts ‘action’ and produces a mentality that seeks protectors of that infrastructure.
22/ Our tolerance for ‘toughs’ (goondas) in politics is directly tied to our collective imaginary that thinks efficacy of action — of getting things done — is a virtue in itself.
23/ A little understood aspect of modern Indian political history is how we’ve operationalized democracy as a means to return, after 3 decades of vibrant Gandhian movements, to a more ancient intuition.
24/ An ancient intuition that sees compartmentalisation of ethical frameworks as not just the natural, but the only, way to be in an heterogenous society. []
