Socialist Rahul !
Rahul Gandhi may be inexperienced in the art of mesmerising audiences…… but he is the newest flag captain of a powerful line of socialist thinking
Every election
produces its crop of smart Alec in political parties. One of them in the BJP,
which always has a surfeit of them, has compared Congress vice president Rahul
Gandhi with Rip Van Winkle, the fictional American Dutchman who slept through
the twenty years that included America’s independence, to wake into a changed
world with the portrait of George lll at the local inn replaced by George
Washington’s. Smart Alec’s quip draws from the fact that Rahul is allegedly
living in the world of his grandmother Indira Gandhi, and, like her, he is
making poverty alleviation the main plank of his election speeches. He says big
roads and ports and railways are welcome but he’d make sure that their benefits
travel all the way down to the poor labourers who build them. He asks the poor
to dream big, like thinking of his son flying in the plane that he now only
watches gliding across the sky. The opposition strategists are saying this is
rehash of Indira Gandhi’s garibi
hatao lines, aimed at the
Great Unwashed who can’t see the line separating grand promises from what is on
the ground.
Rahul’s
speeches are certainly not the best of his attainments. They are often
rambling, and have metaphors that tend to go off a tangent. But, with his
increasing public exposure, what is indeed visible is his consistent focus on
the Congress party’s unvarying socialist ideology. In this context, I’d
emphasise the word “socialism”. It was Indira Gandhi who got the word inserted
into the preamble to the Indian Constitution. When she promised to
eradicate poverty, she had action to match her words, like nationalization of
banks, coal mines and insurance and a massive expansion of the public sector.
But that was more than four decades ago. The poor of that era are no longer so
poor, and there is a vibrant private sector of the economy to match, if not
outgrow, the public sector. But socialism is a creed. It is a philosophy of
governance. It does not become outdated from grandmother to grandson. Be it in
the US or Europe ,
socialist thinking is accepted in the West as a non-negotiable principle of
governance. That’s the reason why the NHS in Britain
or Social Welfare in the US Britain
Between
Rahul Gandhi’s pro-poor stance, and that of his grandmother, there are
similarities as well as differences. Indira’s socialism was of an aggressive
kind. It had to demolish the legacies of colonialism, like banks that financed
only their owners, and coal mines that exploited labour. But neither Sonia
Gandhi nor Rahul promoted aggressive socialism. None of the four pillars on
which Sonia Gandhi’s Congress presidency rests—Right to Information Act,
MGNREGA, amended land acquisition law and Food Security Act—aims at dismantling
any existing institution. The underlying philosophy of such legislation is not
populist, nor even socialist in its classical sense; it is closer to the modern
European form of socialism which is generally about redistribution of wealth
and creation of a welfare state.
Rahul
Gandhi may be inexperienced in the art of mesmerising audiences with the
choicest invectives aimed at the political opponent, but there is no doubt he
is the newest flag captain of a powerful line of socialist thinking that has
marked the Indian political system after Independence. It left its mark on the
Constitution itself, despite the word “socialism” not being there in the
beginning, as I have explained earlier. But its wide popular support is evident
from the fact that the Congress has remained in power in all but 10 years since
the first general election in 1952. Nor was socialism challenged in the six
years of NDA rule under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His party, the BJP, in fact calls
itself a believer in socialism, of some kind.
Rahul,
in his speeches, is reassuring his people that the Congress under his
stewardship will neither move away from its historic brand-identity nor leap
backward in time when, to be a socialist, it was necessary to slay the demon of
private enterprise. When he talks of “dream”, he is not selling a fantasy;
instead, all he is doing is to urge people to demand that their dreams, or
desires, are realized. Some time back, when he described poverty as “a state of
mind”, there were outcries of protest from BJP trolls in the social media. They
should think again. Is poverty entirely measurable in calorific terms, or in
terms of daily income expressed in a constant currency? Certainly not, for that
would make the search for an equitable society quite meaningless once everyone
has been fed up to the required calorie mark. Even after everyone is adequately
fed, as in the Western world, socialism survives as there is need for
redistribution of wealth.
Rather
than worrying about Rahul’s speeches, smart Alec should now pay attention to
the threat to India
