Are we ready for Intellectual Aristocracy?

                                            Are we ready for Intellectual Aristocracy?

A year and a half back, soon after the 2014 elections, I wrote a blog on The Still Sad Song of Congress, the Modern Prufrock. Eighteen long months have gone and the Prufrockian dilemma continues for the Indian National Congress as to how to work out a strategy to counter Moditva! Literally wiped out of the political space it had enjoyed for more than six decades, both while ruling and while sitting in opposition, the Congress party has yet to find its feet that are currently employed only to march to the Rashtrapati Bhavan to complain (like a little child complaining to its father against its little sibling)t hat the PM and his men (and women)are seeking to eliminate the Congress from  Bharat- the tolerant and secular country that it had left behind. The march to the President’s house is merely to demonstrate to the world that the Congress is still alive, though mewing. This is all the more needed after it failed to open its account in the last Delhi Assembly elections early this year and its subsequent abysmal showing in the state elections held thereafter. The recent results of the Panchayati polls show that the Congress has once again suffered a rout even in the two Lok Sabha constituencies of Rae Bareli and Amethi represented by its party president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi. Bihar results are awaited as no one can predict who will burst the crackers- Modi or Nitish.. As for the Congress it has been an “also ran” party tugging at the kurtas of Lalu and Nitish. If Lalu-Nitish emerge winners, Congress will get a modicum of satisfaction of being an insignificant member of the “Mahaghatbandan” (Grand alliance of JD (U)-RJD-Congress).

The total washout post-2014 debacle is evidenced in Congress not gaining even a toehold in the nation’s political arena. After the return of the Prince from his self imposed exile for purposes of meditation, a lot of filibustering, finger-pointing and Modi(BJP) bashing started. New phrase like “ suit-boot ki sarkar”- that caught the people’s imagination for a while was short lived when the crown prince repeated it  ad nauseam and made it sound like a joke. Every TV debate between Congress and BJP has become a saas-bahu war with the old Congress saas accusing the younger BJP bahu of spreading disaffection and hatred in the family while the bahu looks at the saas as the progenitor of all ills that impede it from running the family. Great fun to watch the TV fights(with ears plugged) with the alliance partners on either side throwing in their teeny-weeny punches.  The worst is reserved for the Congress as the anchors join the fun to lambast it for its failure to get even 10% of the 543 seats in the Lok sabha while the ruling party gleefully keeps citing the scandalous scammy events that happened over the last few decades to justify why the imbroglio persists  even after it has come to power. “Anything and everything, blame it on the Congress” is the strategy of the ruling party while “anything and everything, blame  Modi(BJP)” is the slogan of the Congress. Ultimately both through their internecine wordy duel show themselves to be the two sides of the same coin. Your riot vs our riot, your intolerance vs our intolerance, your icon vs our icon, your meaningless silence vs our meaningful silence, … “ tutu, mein mein” goes on endlessly bringing down the quality, language, tenor of the debates. Outside the micro space of the TV studios, in the macro space of election campaigning, political language degenerates further to lowly depths, full of  personal vituperative attacks without substantial discussion on any issue related to the welfare of the people. At best, there may be a few poll promises like bringing the moon to people’s doorsteps –promises that are no more than those written on water. Attack, attack, attack –the party pugilists belonging to different political parties have been trained to do even if they emerge out of the TV studios with bruised and battered minds and hearts. Some feeble voices by creative writers, artists and scientists protesting against the gradual spread of intolerance in the nation are promptly attacked as manufactured, disgruntled and envious voices who speak English and sip tea from China cups and who are genetically opposed to Modi and his party whom they look down upon as non-English speakers.

The reason is not far to search for this rapid descent to verbal anarchy and unbecoming behaviour all around us. Yata raja, tata praja. If the rulers can indulge in crass behaviour, so do the people. For all the PM’s talk and slogans (no one speaks today except the PM on  ‘weighty’ matters that are futuristic but not on the present atrocities)   the new broom stopped sweeping soon after the proclamation of “Swatchch Bharat”. The prices have defied the scientific laws on gravitational pull and continue sky rocketing without ever coming down. The Black money that was promised to be brought and distributed @ Rs.15000/- per each Indian household continues to be in a black hole and cannot be squeezed out. As for our neighbours, Pakistan cannot give up sabre rattling.  Despite India’s efforts to be pally, Nepal true to its name says to its big brother,“Ne(y) –pal” while Srilanka continues its love for  Indian fishermen. China looked diabetically sweet when the Chinese President sat on the swing with our PMlast year, but now one detects  ‘cheeni kum’ in our direction and ‘cheeni jyada’ towards Pakistan. Congress is adding its two penny worth to this chaos by attempting a repetition of policy paralysis for the new government  as its revenge for getting ousted last year on that score. Even corruption issues have not been obliterated as corruption of a different order is taking place. One does not hear about big financial corruption in high places ( except that which involved the trio, LaMo-Sushma-Vasundra or the Vyapam scam of Madhya Pradesh), but the aam admi continues to experience it at his level. The corruption of the mind and heart is evidenced in words and actions, in the loose cannons booming from different corners and in the heinous acts of rapists and trigger happy murderers.

It is time for all political parties-in particular the two national parties- to reinvent themselves and rein in the slide towards crassness, insensitiveness, coarseness, vulgarity, intolerance and inhumanness if the country has to regain respectability in the world. The ruling party cannot defend their acts of omission and commission by taking umbrage in what the Congress had done eons ago. To equate today’s unrest with the three decade old Sikh riots of 1984 makes no sense. Two wrongs don’t make a right. To blame the previous government for all the ills that plague the nation is no answer as the new government has been elected only on their promise to cleanse the Aegean stables.  There has to be grace in acknowledging the killings committed in Dadri and Kashmir on matters that are beefy and in tendering apology for the innumerable acts of the mindless fringe fanatics that are tinder to communal fires. The ruling party has to rein in those divisive forces whose actions and words are a threat to the unity of the country. When there are full five years for the ruling party to carry out whatever reforms its ideology necessitates, why is it in a unseemly hurry to denounce all distinguished scholars and historians of the past as pseudo intellectuals driven by their leanings to the Congress and the Left? Let the new ideologically different historians attempt new writings that are well researched and authenticated by scholarly evidence to present a different narrative. The advancement of knowledge is to have parallel writings juxtaposed rather than replacing one by another. Truth cannot be forever hidden in a bushel; it emerges through the juxtaposition and parallel reading of two opposing contentions.

Congress is in dire straits. It has still to learn from its defeat rather than seeking pinpricks to puncture the present elected government. There has to be grace both in defeat and in victory.  The only thing Congress has done in the last 18 months since its banishment from the political corridors is to see ghosts where there are none and to scream and shout when they sight one. Congress cannot just go on criticizing because it gives the impression of sour grapes. Till todate, it has not a single plan in place except to remain a nagging and mocking opposition. If all its plans in the past had backfired and if it has nothing new to offer by way of a radical change, its dream of getting out of political wilderness will remain only a dream. Why only attack and not evolve a new strategy that is a plausible alternative to what it opposes today? Let Congress go in for an image make-over by ruthlessly casting aside any and everyone who is even remotely connected to one scam or the other till such time his/her name is cleared. Let it give up holding to the apron strings of Sonia Gandhi or to the kurta tail of Rahul Gandhi. A major problem with Congress is its problem of plenty as the party has  a good number of well educated, well read intellectuals  but what they lack is a strong figure like Modi who can integrate them as a team to deliver what each one is capable of. It is indeed an irony that the huge capability potential of the Congress failed to get inter-linked as each one of the ministers had a solid, but stand- alone idea, which did not gel with that of the other. The policy paralysis of Manmohan Singh government was the clash of intellectuals in the party. Rahul has not displayed any leadership qualities to harness the potential dormant in the Congress leaders. There has to be a real search for a Congress Modi (not a command –cum- delete Modi, but a command-cum- reboot Modi) and till such a time it finds one, it cannot even think of an increase in their present abysmal vote share.

Congress like the British Parliament should learn to function as a shadow government. It cannot keep harping on the trite and worn-out mantra of ‘roti, kapda ,makan’ without spelling out the means of how to augment these basic essentials. The new slogan should be education, electricity and environment. There has to be a clear plan to provide education up to class XII to everyone and the curriculum should be anchored on knowledge and skill. Mere skill development without basic knowledge will leave the country as it is-illiterate, inefficient and incorrigible. Knowledge without skill development will leave the country with unemployment and unemployable hordes of young men and women who will hasten the slide to anarchy much faster. One of the criticisms against Pt. Nehru has been that while he was the architect of modern temples of education, he did not bestow sufficient attention on school education. This has been the cause of decline in higher education as the feeder from the schools had been poor tending continuously to further decline. The subsequent clamour for opening higher education to all and sundry irrespective of their ability and inclination to pursue higher education has led to the crisis in higher education today. Streamlining school education after the X^th by introducing three types of courses like the vocational, professional and academic with emphasis on language skills, simple mathematics and computer knowledge will promote employability among the youth while it will raise the quality of  higher education and research with much less number entering universities for academic pursuit. After education, power is essential not only for development of industry and manufacture, but it is basic for rural development. Instead of smart cities, the effort should be directed at developing smart villages with good educational and health facilities so that the inflow to urban areas can be minimized. Environment is the only means of preserving our world for the future generation while enhancing our present well being and this has to be the third priority. The three together will translate PM Modi’s call for swachch Bharat, for ushering in concepts of hygiene and health and for enabling the rural folks to transform themselves  to live in a modern, clean, healthy environment. When education is given with emphasis on values, culture and cultivation of humanity, the golden era of a distant future will come alive. Whether it is the BJP or the Congress(the two national parties) , it is for them to chalk out programmes that are executable and follow the Benthamite philosophy of bringing the maximum good for the maximum number of people.

Mere empty slogans cannot and do not change the face of our nation. Such slogans have already shown how the nation has gone bankrupt in geniality, cordiality, politeness, courtesy and grace. New strategies have to be worked out with the help of intellectuals irrespective of their political affinity. We need governance shaped by intellectuals who are receptive to new ideas and who do not bank upon fossilized ideas that cannot serve us in the 21^st century. The world has moved far away from the time it elected popular leaders from among the celluloid, synthetic heroes like MGR or NTR or Ronald Reagan in US. People all over the world are becoming politically more aware and more conscious of their rightstoday than they were a decade ago. They want leaders who have both sight and vision- sight to see the slow emergence of chaos in today’s world and vision to shape that chaos into a new social and political order to sustain a large number of people. Though the chaos theory is the field of mathematics, it is seen as "a revolution not of technology, like the laser revolution or the computer revolution, but a revolution of ideas.” (James Gleick, author of Chaos : Making a New Science ) We need intellectual leaders who understand the theory of chaos whereby all ideas - no matter how complex they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and events can cause very complex behaviors or events-what is known as the butterfly effect. They are the ones who can see the interconnectedness between our eco systems, social systems and economic systems. We urgently need a new breed of visionaries with an objective and rational temperament to recognize the complexity of governance, the unpredictability and randomness of events, and to work out dynamic measures to bring the transition between disorder and order. A majority of our intellectuals unfortunately sit in ivory towers –more often far away in US and Europe and have no desire or inclination to be connected to their roots. Our Universities should be the bedrock of creating dynamic intellectuals who can feel the pulse of the nation and strategize ways to steer the nation from chaos and anarchy. In this era of inter-disciplinary studies, we should promote and confer responsibility on men and women who can infuse into politics the objectivity, clarity and rationality of science along with the sensitivity, aestheticism and humane values that characterize the study of Humanities. What we need is cooperative, collective leadership and not arrogant, narcissistic, egoistic, individual authoritarianism masquerading as strong and bold leadership.

Is this a utopian dream? Are we ready for intellectual aristocracy? I would affirm that we are ripe for such a leadership. From those halcyon days soon after independence when we were invigorated by philosopher-statesmen like leaders like Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Rajaji, and inspired by works of Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Aurobindo, Bharatiyar-to name a few, we have gradually slid down,  unable to rise up to the demands made by a rising, aspiring India. According to the theory of four cycles, we have reached the age of chaos from the age of the divine through the age of aristocracy and the age of democracy. Once we have reached the nadir, from here we can only rise and that can be facilitated if we have Wisdom leaders to govern us, guide us and shape us out of chaos. This change can come if the nation accepts governance by intellectual aristocracy. The rule by aristocracy should not be misinterpreted as the rule by oligarchy. Aristocracy is a refined version of oligarchy. Governance by aristocracy is according to Plato the best form of governance- as governance is in the hands of able and competent people while oligarchy is the rule of a few in the generic way and always ends up as the rule of powerful and corrupt people. In a democratic set up like ours, we should elect eminent citizens for their qualities of mind and heart. In India,   cutting across all political streams  we are fortunate to have a large number of highly qualified people from all walks of life who have the unique ability to think with the heart and feel with the mind. The nation can boast of  Ratan Tata, Narayanmurthy,Kiran Mazumdar Shaw,Raghuram Rajan, Arvind Subramanian, Sreedharan, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, outstanding scientists and technologists, writers and intellectuals besides young IITians and IIM graduates,who  recognize this  moment of transit “where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.” (Homi Bhaha).We have reached the boundary of decline, but as Martin Heidegger defines,”a  boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.” It is time to harness the services of intellectuals whose intellectualism has been in evidence in their willingness to accept, discuss and see other points of view. They have the rare quality to work for a consensus  to bring a new educated, cultured, civilized India . Are we ready for Intellectual Aristocracy? Time is ripe for India to rise up and say in one voice “Yes, We are.”