Faith in the system

"... A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age, a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable."

IT is hard to believe that Kierkegaard wrote these lines back in 1847. Looking at the swell and sway of public life in India, they ring as true today as they perhaps did 150 years ago. To say this, however, is not to say that there has been no change in India in the last 50 years. Since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, our political leaders have changed political processes and institutions time and again. Despite what they believed, neither Indira-Rajiv, nor V. P. Singh-Deve Gowda nor even Laloo-Mulayam- Basu have enhanced the capacity of the Government to serve a dynamic young country in a really big way.

Instead, from Manmohanomics to Mandal, from the lowering of the voting age to the slashing of subsidies, the so-called "revolutionary reforms" have strengthened the advantages of the ruling party (or parties) within the political system. They have been revolutions, without any locally created revolutionary ideology or revolutionary public call to arms, even to other arm- chair revolutionaries.

True, the steady arrival of the tribal, Dalit and Other Backward Communities (OBC) leaders has transformed the working of the Parliament and the State Assemblies. But it is a transformation which has no vision, nor a grand agenda behind it. Naturally the outcomes displease the voters. If it is attractive to any, it is only to the bunch of ambitious young men and women with precious little idealism in their hearts, who seek to make a career for themselves in politics; not to enable the legislative bodies serve the interests of their voters.

As a result, we have today a system, in which all truly broad- based political parties, built from the ground up by tireless efforts of party-workers, energised and motivated by the vision of their leaders, seem to have turned comatose. But for the heart-lung machines supplied by the big business, they would be unable to breathe and function on their own. It is a system, where some of the best qualified and most talented people's leaders, such as Medha Patkar, Sunderalal Bahuguna, Chandiprasad Bhatt, Anna Hazare, Ela Bhatt and Baba Amte, have been so completely marginalised, that they not only do not expect justice from the State or the major political groups, but also refuse to seek elected office or accept political appointments.

This suits the system because, once the scene is purged of people's leaders with idealism and vision, who were trying to make governments more active, and pro-people, more and more policy decisions can be shifted from the most democratic institutions - the legislative and the executive - to the least participatory: the courts and the bureaucracy. Thus the green signal to the Narmada dam, and the dismantling of participatory programmes for rural areas such as Lok Jumbish or Women's Development Programme (WDP). The barrage of decentralised disconnected reforms that the successive governments unleash from time to time in vital sectors like health, bring only cosmetic changes in governance. Eventually they too go to feed a certain distrust of, and a disaffection for, the Government.

A salient example of this is the family welfare programme, known variously in its earlier avatars, as Family Planning Programme, Family Welfare Programme and Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Programme. Today 80 per cent of the qualified medical practitioners are in the private sector, and work largely for profit. The public sector health services, in both rural and urban areas, offer family planning services (read tubectomies and insertion of Intrauterine devices such as the copper T) to about 100 million poor couples. Of these, the maternity services offered are mostly run through paramedics (midwives or trained dais). At the same time, health expenditure as percentage of total government expenditure has shrunk from 3.29 per cent in 1980-81 to 2.63 per cent in 1994-95 to less than one per cent today. Of that too, more than 60 per cent goes to pay salaries of the employees.

It is not hard to see the kind of "help" they extend to the sick and the suffering who lack access to the private hospitals. So, on the one hand, we have the State's publically reiterated commitment to provide healthcare for all its citizens by the 21st Century, on the other (actually implemented) count, we see an alarming decline in overall public health spending, in the sector that provides 80 per cent of hospital beds for the average citizens. Obviously there is an urgent need to strengthen, restructure and reorient public health services, particularly vis-a-vis the weakest in our population, i.e. women and girls. But since the need remains largely unmet, we have a legal framework that specifically bans various abuses against women, from female foeticide to sati, but we also find that our women deficient population ratio is steadily becoming more adverse.

Likewise, our law may permit abortions, but our system has not even begun to empower women with an unqualified right to healthcare, let alone a right to access adequate, safe and humane services. It is no surprise, therefore, that backroom abortions by unqualified doctors lead to the death of many women. A question that haunts women, and indeed all sensitive citizens of the country, is under the circumstances, have we faith in this system? And most recent surveys reveal a disenchantment with all political parties; a bleak cynicism and erosion of hope in voters below 30 years.

If it wants to survive, the time has come for the political class as a whole, not just to work at making parties more electable, but to rethink the whole relationship between the State and its citizens. The Congress(I) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faithfuls may laugh and cheer the announcement of new pro-women, pro-poor policies, in the manner of the traditional Congress (I) and BJP faithfuls, but today it no longer convinces the people. And eventually it is not the parties that shall control the votes, but the voters.

MRINAL PANDE

The author writes in Hindi and

English and is a freelance journalist.

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