At this moment in India’s history, the lesser between the presidential and the vice presidential contests has become the more important one. It is not just a contest between two persons, or between two political coalitions, or even between two ideologies. It is, in effect, a battle between two ideas of what India aspired to be during its struggle for freedom and what India should be. Much indeed is at stake. If the contest for the President was mere tokenism — your Dalit candidate versus mine — the vice presidential contest, in contrast, is substantial since the choice is actually one between a politics of vision and a politics of hard-headed power play.
When the Office of the Vice President has little ability to impact politics, except in the conduct of the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha or when there is a vacancy due to death of the President, why is the ruling dispensation so fearful of making a gesture towards that other important strand of Indian politics, the dharmic path of public life? Politics, we have learnt from early Greece, is more than just the exercise of power. It is also public ethics. So why is Prime Minister Narendra Modi so scared of finding a consensus candidate who is not a party person and who, when the moment requires, will remind the government of the dharmic path from which it has strayed? Why is the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) turning its back on this important Indian cultural trope, at a moment when it is strongest, and treating the idea of dharmic path as a foreign concept? Was not the first Vice President of India, S. Radhakrishnan, a philosopher of Indian religion and culture? Is not the current Vice President a man of letters? So why choose a party loyalist?
Ethics, pragmatics, symbolism
Most of us regard such political decisions as describing a political calculus, a zero-sum game where the winner takes all. This, unfortunately, is politics in its lowest form. From treatises offered in the Arthashastra , to the discourses on dharma in the Mahabharata , through the debates in the Constituent Assembly, to the leadership of the Non-Aligned Movement and the global decolonisation process where we spoke of a new world order, the Indian state has regarded politics as more than just pragmatics. India reflected on and represented a richer model of politics where ethics, pragmatics, and symbolism (form instance, in the choice of the dharma chakra as our symbol) all combined, in their best moments, to give our politics a superior quality.
Mahatma Gandhi took on the might of the corrupt British Empire by combining such elements. He was the master-practitioner of the rich politics of ahimsa and satyagraha . That is why we got our swaraj . Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar and the many others who dreamt of a new India also strove to practise such politics as they fought the deceptions of the British Raj. In this fight, their weapons were fashioned from the ethical, the pragmatic, and the symbolic. Take khadi. It is made up of all the three. Khadi represents the material, but also the cultural and the political. To therefore reduce politics to only one aspect, to its pragmatics alone, as the NDA regime is doing, is to reject what India has stood for across the ages. Why have we sunk so low?
But then it may be too much to expect that those indoctrinated in the ideological camps of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will be able to imagine an expansive India, one where power does not flow from the danda (stick) but from the shabd (words). Ethical options, unfortunately, are not on the menu of a pracharak . The mental training in a shakha does not prepare one to see and value the finer and softer, but more powerful, aspects of political rule.
Earlier in this article, I had said that the vice presidential contest this time is the more important of the two contests even though so little at stake. Let me elaborate. The VP cannot hold up a bill by delaying assent. Nor can he reprimand the government or dismiss Governors when they incur his displeasure. The Vice President is only a constitutional safeguard when the President dies, a twelfth man. And yet, the triumvirate of Bhagwat-Modi-Shah finds itself unable to transcend the petty mentality of party politics and choose the dharmic path to seek a candidate who enjoys bipartisan support, who can be the conscience of the polity. It is this partisanship that has led me to claim that the lesser contest is the more important one.
When little is at stake, especially in such a conceptually rich civilisation as India’s, it becomes important for those at the helm to think beyond the exercise of power, beyond state capture and the imposition of a one-sided political will.
Great leaders build into their rule space for intellectuals, ethicists, poets, and artists. Dissenters are regarded as a vital element of good governance, for they speak what others are loath to utter. Akbar had Birbal, a Hindu, as his adviser. Nehru laughed along with the cartoonist Shankar at the cartoons that lampooned the Prime Minister.
No consensus candidate
However, today, the leaders find themselves unable to choose a consensus candidate who will embody the virtues that a polity requires, who will be seen by the people as non-partisan, who will represent the India that needs healing. Such gestures of genuflection towards a higher purpose produce in those watching a sense of that very purpose. Every polity requires such gestures and such acknowledgement, for a polity cannot survive on power alone. It will soon degenerate into tyranny and paranoia.
By its decision to reject the idea of a consensus candidate, the NDA has announced that the contest for the Vice President’s office is politically important. There are three possible reasons for such obstinacy. The first concerns the habit element: use this opportunity to show the Opposition that they will be not listened to.
The second is narrow-mindedness. Years of shaka training debilitate the mind. People are seen as either friends or enemies and hence the issue is not one of the nation but that of party politics. It is impossible to imagine a larger goal for which both parties will willingly accept a compromise.
However, it the third reason that is the most disquieting. Is this being seen as an opportunity to, once and for all, belittle the place of the Mahatma in our national imaginary? Does this mark a second Savarkar-Gandhi face-off? Savarkar lost round one at Independence. We now have a situation where the 57 MPs from Tamil Nadu and 37 MPs from Gujarat have to decide on a candidate who is the grandson of both Rajaji and Gandhiji. From their choice we will know the present status of the face-off.
Peter Ronald deSouza is professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Views are personal.
