Hand-Pumps & Highways

Hand-Pumps & Highways



With the departure of Comrade Jyoti Basu, a person that may have better merited Nirad Chaudhuri’s description of The Great Anarch; it brings to mind, partly in reflection of the spew of commentary on the subject, that there is a tiresome and pointless dichotomy between broadly Leftist and Rightist world views. It hogs public debate and reams of newsprint with its either/or dichotomy without once embracing both. And without once coming the slightest bit closer towards convergence.

All practitioners of ideology prefer to leave the matter of practical resolution to those who don’t possess, or perhaps refuse to wear on their sleeve, their own invigorating blunderbuss of idealism and ideology. The Left/Right badge-wearers give these doers no marks for their usefulness. Instead, they look down on them for their pedestrian preference for the expedient and the practicable. They are considered to be craven opportunists without principle, mainly for their flexibility, with scant regard for their solid contribution to all that works and is accomplished in our lives.

Meanwhile the pointless debate amongst the mandarins of ideology rages on. The Left-leaning ask what is the point of jobless growth? The Rightist says all growth contributes, and a richer polity can provide better facilities, even for its jobless. The Leftist asks what is the use of young, malnourished, and uneducated youth? The other points out that it is better than the same number of old, unhealthy and ignorant people, typically lacking in focus or interest about anything beyond their own navels.

The Left/Right armchair debate cliché indeed runs the gamut. Why should the rich indulge in paroxysms of conspicuous consumption- arguing just one big fat Indian wedding could pay for a thousand hand-pumps, or is it a lakh of them, to provide drinking water to the rural poor. The other face of the same cliché is depicted in the celebrated Mira Nair film Monsoon Wedding- the beneficiaries of a big fat Indian wedding are also many both near and far.

The paradox though, in failing to recognise the contribution of both leanings to the progress of the nation, is beyond sensibility and preference. It is as if the moral victory is intertwined somehow with its ideological underpinnings in whichever distorted or diluted form may ultimately obtain. And without this ideology to give a matter its tone, the suggestion is that it is somehow not worth having.

It’s especially interesting and not a little comic when the Left and Right seem to swap positions. Take the Nano versus BMW debate for example. Because, now suddenly, it cuts both ways. It is the Left that says the Nano will choke the roads and their own poor- loving breathing; with scant regard for its dramatic affordability for the many towards the bottom of the pyramid. And to justify their selfishness in this regard, they call for better public transport instead, including more like the bewildering BRT corridors in New Delhi, because the elitist traffic in cars be damned!

The Right, on the face of it, couldn’t care less, as long as there are enough highways being put in for it to glide around in said BMWs; and there are no Nanos clogging up the fast lane. There is also no Right-leaning guilt about paying the cost of which set of wheels could, theoretically, provide infrastructure for a small village. After all, one has to earn one’s BMWs.

One could go on with the examples on both sides of the fence, but in the interests of synthesis, it’s best to recognise that there is no case for a country on the way to prosperity with millions of poor people living in misery. But then, by the same token, there should be no debate on the righteousness of poverty alleviation. While theoretically and ideologically the Left and Right can agree on this, the irony of the process is that poverty reduces via the acquisition of riches involving a number of non-populist moves.

A no-growth poverty alleviation programme is impossible. An attempt to do so turns one into the Marxist ruled state of West Bengal; where the state has preserved its power edifice despite its general decrepitude, by looking after its thugs, those cadres of on-street and hands-on enforcers.

But then Stalinism and Maoism both resemble the Fascist Right. And no kudos for fascism Hitler and Mussolini style, despite the former’s autobahns and volkswagens, and the latter’s emphasis on running the trains on time. But sometimes, one professes the one while being the other. Take Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, a good example of a “Socialist” right winger, and you should see pictures of his palace.

In the interests of resolution therefore, there may be great merit in seeing things the other fellow’s way. Because then, hand-pumps and highways don’t seem so mutually exclusive. Besides, all practitioners of power are not as easily bamboozled by the contradictions and paradoxes of deviating from ideologically pure moorings.

It is therefore all the more necessary for the theoretical debaters to puncture their own ideological balloons. Otherwise, the gap widens between how it ought to be and how it really is, without enough effort going in to update, and thus narrow this divide.

We albeit get the Government, indeed the country that we deserve. So if nothing seems to be working like it should, the answer may lie in large doses of pragmatism and efficiency rather than in the arcana of ideology.

But while we split hairs, India’s politicians have been feeding off the dividing line between so-called communal parties and those which are purportedly secularist. But the fact is, neither are quite what the other side says they are, nor are they quite what they themselves profess to be.

To move on, it is necessary to rededicate ourselves to a new work ethic that judges efficacy by the results. Otherwise, like Jyoti Basu’s Bengal, we are in for an ideologically induced twilight that does not protect or satisfy even as it strangles progress. All that takes its place is a cynical calculation of raw power of absolutely no benefit to the masses.

At the end, we should come away with something better than the pointless mantra of Bihar born George Orwell’s satirical novella Animal Farm, in which the celebrated “Four legs good, two legs bad” commandment was not quite enough to plough the field of the proletariat’s dreams.

(1,055 words)


21st January 2010
Gautam Mukherjee