New Delhi
28 December 2013
28 December 2013
On 17 December 2013, as Tunisians observed the third
anniversary of the self-immolation of a 26-year-old street vendor Mohd Bouazizi
in Sidi Bouzid that sparked protests in their country and triggered a wave of
similar uprisings across North Africa and West Asia, people of Delhi broke out
into celebrations for the second time in less than 10 days. A rank outsider,
45-year-old Arvind Kejriwal had just announced a referendum of sorts to ascertain
the people’s wishes on whether his Aam Aadmi (common man) Party should take the
lead for forming a government or not, after the fledgling party made a historic
debut in the recently concluded provincial elections winning 28 seats in the
70-member Assembly and coming second behind BJP and its allies (32) but far
ahead of the Congress’s tally of eight seats. Less than a week later, Kejriwal
had staked claim to form the government, bringing to a successful culmination
an unprecedented experiment in Indian democracy and bringing cheer to ordinary
citizens who had had enough of the corruption and inflation that had peaked of
late.
The contrast between Sidi Bouzid, a town 260 kilometres
southwest of capital Tunis, and a Delhi located 6,000-odd km away, could not
have been starker. Three years after the first stirrings of the Arab Spring,
Tunisia – much like the rest of the Arab world – is still coming to terms with
the contagion that was unleashed on an unsuspecting society and government
alike. But the Indian version of the Arab Spring that began with a
septuagenarian anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare’s fast at Jantar Mantar in
Delhi on 5 April 2011 can draw satisfaction from the many successes it has
notched up on the way. There is a sense of accomplishment in the air. The
spontaneous public movement that captured the imagination of men and women,
young and old, in cities and towns across much of India has finally paid
dividends. Not only does India today have a new Lokpal Bill that provides for a
nationwide anti-corruption ombudsman, Hazare’s one-time protégé Kejriwal has
turned a people’s movement for good governance, transparency and accountability
into a political party with a remarkable felicity of democratic expression.
That this was achieved without any blood-letting is a tribute to the virtues of
democracy in general and the sagacity and maturity of the Indian voter in
particular. Compare this with the less than two lakh people killed in the Arab
Spring, including, but not limited to, 300 in Tunisia, 1,700 in Egypt, 2,000 in
Yemen, 25,000 in Libya, 1.2 lakh in Syria and over 100 in Bahrain, all of which
are yet nowhere close to overcoming the challenges such as corruption,
unemployment, inflation and inequality that bedevils Sidi Bouzid as much as it does
Chandni Chowk. The events that unfolded in those countries brought home the
tragic consequences of choosing the bullet over the ballot.
The phenomenon sweeping across much of the Arab world did
not leave democratic societies such as the United States, where the Occupy Wall
Street movement gained traction, or India, untouched. No country was immune
from its reach. Social media ensured that the word spread farther and anger
travelled faster. It sprouted wherever it found a ground made fertile by
misgovernance. It spared neither the dictator nor the democrat. Five
governments were overthrown, including two in Egypt, just as the ruling
Congress party was ousted from power in the province of Delhi but, unlike India
and the US, the levels of disenchantment continue to remain high in the
democracy-deficit countries in North Africa and West Asia. The prevailing
sentiment in Tunisia, which has seen changes wrought by the Arab Spring, is
that people’s lives and their economic situation has improved only marginally but
it is not likely to improve any further in the immediate future. Tunisia is
likely to witness the approval of a new constitution and the holding of
parliamentary elections in 2014. In a recent study conducted by researchers
from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and the
University of Maryland in the United States, more than 60 per cent of the 3,000
Tunisian adults surveyed said that they are not happy with the current
political leadership and 86 per cent said that corruption is common. The
situation is worse in Egypt, which increasingly resembles a police state, or,
Libya, where militias run amok, throwing the country into further instability.
In Yemen, attempts are still being made for a national dialogue and
reconciliation involving multiple stakeholders. “It is clear that the process
of Arab transformation will need decades to mature and that its success is by
no means guaranteed,” says Marwan Muasher, vice president for studies at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest international affairs
think tank in the United States. Muasher’s prognosis for some of the countries
affected by the Arab Spring is not encouraging. According to him, Egypt, which
can be expected to hold a referendum on a new constitution in addition to
presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014, “is not out of the woods
yet.” He sounds a warning for the Arab monarchies who have not succeeded in
tackling the underlying political, economic, and social challenges their
nations face. “Jordan will continue to feel that it has successfully ridden the
wave of Arab transitions without seriously addressing some of the key economic
and political challenges facing the country. And it will probably get away with
it, at least for now,” notes Muasher, who served as Jordan’s deputy prime
minister from 2004 to 2005 and foreign minister from 2002 to 2004.
At the same time, the Aam Aadmi Party’s ascension to the
front and centre of the political landscape and discourse is instructive for a
proud democracy such as India. We are seeing Kejriwal’s fourth avatar, this
time as a politician, after the engineer-turned-bureaucrat quit government
service to launch a non-government organisation (NGO.) He was in every sense of
the word an antithesis to the reticent and self-effacing Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, who for many had come to symbolise some if not everything that
was wrong with the government and governance. By any reckoning, the recently
concluded elections in Delhi that catapulted the Aam Aadmi Party to centrestage
had to be among the most secular electoral contests in recent memory because it
was fought on the twin issues of corruption and good governance, and these are
as secular an issue as secular gets. The usual considerations of caste, sect or
religion were trumped by the near universal outrage against corruption.
Contrast this with many of the countries affected by the Arab Spring which
descended into sectarianism, majoritarianism or plain terrorism; where people
still yearn for the rule of law and many of the personal freedoms and human
rights that many around the world take for granted. The Indian Spring also took
under its wing issues other than corruption, such as crimes against women. The
common man was once again at the forefront of the apolitical, secular protests
following the 16 December 2012 gang rape of a young woman in Delhi. The Indian
Street, similar to the Arab Street, had well and truly begun to take spape. The
unprecedented outrage forced Parliament to pass the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill
to tighten the legal framework against rape. Women have found the voice to
assert themselves like never before. It has led to the arrest of a magazine
editor on charges of rape and a retired Supreme Court judge finds himself at
the centre of a row over the alleged sexual harassment of a law intern. Having
said that, if the groundswell of opinion in favour of the Aam Aadmi Party in
Delhi extends to even some of the other states of Indian Union and/or the
mandate decisively shifts away from the two blocs led by the Congress and the
BJP to regional parties, then the 2014 parliamentary elections could throw up a
more representative government bringing in its wake certain implications for
the economic and foreign policies of India. Be it 51 per cent foreign direct
investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail; policies vis-à-vis Pakistan, Bangladesh
or Sri Lanka; National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC); or setting up of new
nuclear power plants, what cannot be overstated is that devolution of economic
or foreign policies to more stakeholders than what is currently assumed should
not be entirely unwelcome. In a federal structure such as India’s, foreign
policy in particular cannot be practised in a vacuum or in isolation or without
consultations with all stakeholders concerned, including, but not limited to,
the states, particularly those that share contiguous borders with neighbouring
countries and/or share ethnic, linguistic, cultural or geographical affinities
with them. A foreign policy drawn up in the corridors of the South Block in New
Delhi may have served India well in all these decades but contemporary
realities dictate that in a federal set-up and in an era of coalition
governments the views of the states are factored in at the time of formulation
of a foreign policy. The democratisation of policy-making and the salience of
the states in shaping it cannot be continued to be treated as an exception; and
the sooner New Delhi gets used to executing its foreign and domestic policies
in a coalition with sometimes competing political interests, the better it will
be for all the stakeholders concerned.
At the time of writing, protests reminiscent of the Arab
Spring are happening in Thailand, where at least four have died so far, and
Ukraine. The international community could draw the right lessons from the
Indian Spring, which spawned the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party. It has stirred
even a 128-year-old party such as the Congress from its complacency and put
others on notice. The three-time chief minister of Delhi, who had derisively
asked “Who is Arvind Kejriwal? What is [Aam Aadmi Party]?” on election day, got
her answer four days later when the votes were counted and how: Her party had
been trounced and she herself had lost the election from her constituency. All
of which can only mean one thing for political parties and governments
everywhere: Thou shalt not mistreat the common man.
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