View: Grand promises on welfare and growth cut little ice with the voter, but politics will

Do election manifestos matter? The Indian voter is inured to the lure of grand promises made once every five years or so, because they struggle through the debris of broken promises every day of the intervening period before the next set of promises. Yet, manifestos reveal a party’s political intent, even if not in every detail. Their criticism by rival parties reveal the critics’ intent.

The Congress president chose to highlight five things in the party’s manifesto: the minimum income scheme NYAY, jobs, farm distress, healthcare, education. There is little to distinguish Congress from BJP on these, except in matters of detail & imagination.

Get Democracy Right..

It is, however, in some political commitments made by the manifesto that the party differentiates itself from BJP. The Congress manifesto promises to scrap Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with sedition. This is most welcome.

The Constituent Assembly debated whether to make sedition an exception to fundamental rights and vehemently rejected the idea. K M Munshi trenchantly criticised the use of sedition “to minister to the wounded vanity of the government”. Kudos to him not only for insight but also for foresight, the ability to see 67-odd years into the future.

The word ‘sedition’ does not figure in India’s Constitution, not because of careless omission, but as a result of considered debate. It lives on in the British colonial creation, the Indian Penal Code. The British dropped Sedition from its own statute in 2009. Courts have severely narrowed the ambit of the offence in the US.

In India, the charge of sedition is used against people for drawing cartoons, for criticising those in power, to label student protesters as anti-nationals and to nab tribal rights activists and deny them bail. It is a profoundly anti-democratic statute whose wanton misuse the Supreme Court’s repeated assertion that sedition subsists only in the case of an explicit provocation of proximate violence has failed to curb.

Congress has promised to review the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), to take sexual crimes and murder out of its ambit and to balance security with human rights. This falls short of the ideal of building up the local police to enforce law and order and using the armed forces only against external aggressors. India has to stop sending its troops to wage war against its own people.

In the case of Maoism, the Congress promises resolute action against violence while addressing developmental challenges in the areas concerned, enlisting the support of the people and winning over the Maoist cadre.

This is most welcome, as is the promise to implement the Forest Rights Act as originally conceived, to secure the interests of India’s most vulnerable citizens, the forest-dwelling tribes.

The party promises to put down caste or communal violence with a firm hand, apprehend the instigators and bring them to justice. “There will be no room for self-appointed vigilante groups and moral policing brigades.”

This is most welcome. Law and order is a state subject. The proof of earnestness would be a change in police culture in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the government has passed into the hands of Congress, but cow-centred politics seems barely to have budged.

…Growth Will Follow
Negotiating the socio-cultural pre-requisites of multicultural coexistence is something that Independent India’s leaders failed to carry out, as the embers of Partition violence smouldered on. The promise to retain the minority character of Aligarh Muslim University is a small part of the needed story.

The annihilation of caste must come back on the agenda, not just use of caste mobilisation for votes. Congress must take on the challenge, as no one else will, of asking India’s Muslims to seek their security in deepening Indian democracy, rather than in the patronage of some leader or party. This calls for some essential changes within the community towards patently anti-democratic elements of what has been viewed traditional rights under personal law.

Polygamy and practices such as triple talaq and nikah halala denigrate women and are against the principles of liberal democracy that underpin India’s Constitution and its promise of protection of minority rights. By seeking to shield misogynistic custom in the name of religion, Muslim community leaders weaken democracy and weaken their right to constitutional protection.

An election-eve manifesto might not be the best place to begin such a redemptive dialogue to renegotiate intra-community and, thereby, intercommunity relations. But such renegotiation and strengthening of democracy would contribute more to combating the politics of communal hatred than mere reliance on ready use of the police would.

It is in deepening India’s democracy, stunted and primitive as it is in practice, that Congress has to focus. Failure to do this in multicultural India will produce schism that spawns violence and chaos, amidst which prosperity cannot grow.