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EVEN as we preen in smug satisfaction about a third continuous year of high GDP growth and a Sensex that continues to scale dizzying heights, it may be time to set aside the celebratory mood and address issues that could rock the party. It is instructive that in a public discourse obsessed about the now seemingly stuck Indo-US nuclear deal, the implications of Moditva, or the body-blows to the CPI(M) over its misadventure in Nandigram, India’s slide-back on the Human Development Index has generated little comment.

True that our leaders, political and corporate, episodically highlight the need for inclusive growth or express concern about growing inequalities and unemployment, but there is little serious questioning of either our chosen path of wealth generation or the fractures that mar our institutional and social arrangements. No wonder, parties across the political spectrum appear clueless about how to respond to and handle the growing spectre of anomie and violence, in itself symptomatic of the increasing distance, if not distrust, marking the relations between the governing classes and the ordinary citizen.

The continuing disaffection and alienation of groups and peoples in our border regions is an old story. More recently, the concern has shifted to the Maoist inspired internal insurgency in the central Indian tribal regions. But little had prepared us for the explosive anger with which many groups – be it the Gujjars in Rajasthan or the plains tribes and tea plantation labour in Assam – have chosen to express their dissatisfaction. It is almost as if recourse to spectacular violence is the only way of being heard.

Is this in part because what for years was held out as modern India’s greatest strength – an open, competitive, multiparty democracy supported by an institutional system of free media and autonomous judiciary – seems unable to comprehend, much less handle the growing angst? All political parties appear in organizational disarray, each afflicted by a credibility and leadership crisis. Little surprise that in the face of an increasingly volatile and fickle voter base, they are finding it difficult to define issues and programmes, whether in power or without.

Take the recently concluded elections to the Gujarat assembly. Forget the result and go back to the campaign. Rarely have we witnessed as ugly a tussle for power, so obsessively focused on a single personality, Narendra Modi. Even granting that Modi is a statistical outlier in our political landscape, though it is useful not to forget a Balasaheb Thackeray, just trading charges with him only helped diminish the democratic process. Equally intriguing was the ease with which his opponents fell into his trap of converting the hustings into a referendum on Modi, despite their inability to best him in demagoguery.

For the Congress to charge Modi with aiding and abetting a communal carnage and then working to subvert the due process of law can hardly carry much conviction. Much as its spin doctors might aver, the Congress cannot deny its complicity in the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage or its culpability in the continuing inaction over the Srikrishna Commission report recommendations following the anti-Muslim riots of 1993 in Mumbai. Even in Gujarat, its leadership, local and national, tried its best to maintain a safe distance from the victims of 2002.

A similar problem marked its discourse on issues of terrorism. Harping on the role of Jaswant Singh in ‘escorting’ Mahmood Azhar to Afghanistan seems disingenuous when it has continued to play politics over the issue of carrying out the sentence on Afsal Guru, a prime accused in the Parliament attack case. With neither of the political parties being able to define a coherent policy on the handling of terror, a mere trading of invectives can only generate cynicism in the people.

Equally disconcerting was the debate on leadership. For a party which for decades has fallen short of minimalist norms of inner-party democracy and has willingly acquiesced to the undisputed primacy of a single family, to warn the BJP that in Gujarat it was in danger of being upstaged by an individual who had become larger than the party smacked of desperation. No wonder, the debate on everyday issues of governance, the degree to which the development process was inclusive, or whether the weak and marginal have any voice, soon got forgotten.

What is true of the Congress and BJP, and their views on politics and parties, is to varying degrees mirrored in all other political formations. It is hardly surprising that increasing sections amongst our young, and India is a young country, find not just parties and politics but, more disturbingly, democracy itself as an insufficiently meaningful engagement. Surely that cannot be good news for a nation that prides itself on being the world’s largest democracy.

Harsh Sethi