Now's the time for positive politics

We have arrived at the very end of 2022 and routine ‘best wishes’ for the new year will soon fill the social media and our personal communications. But are we really poised for a better life?

We live in perilous times. Two things stand out very clearly – this is a period of great income inequalities, with their consequences both social and moral; and we have mainstream politicians who seem at best inept at solving problems or, at their worst, are complicit in the debacle that we are witness to.

The solution to both, from mainstream politics, has been to approach the misery and trauma of the people by dishing out dollops of sectarian and emotionally charged rhetoric on nationalism, religion, and obedience to the nation-State, even as the working classes and the middle classes have lost real income, jobs and access to quality education and healthcare. The result of this political approach has grave consequences for democracy, and it is no wonder that the ideal of democracy is in peril all over the world.

In India, the State has steadily withdrawn from welfare activities and has merrily handed over the life-transforming elements of society such as education and health, through which the poorer sections have historically made socioeconomic gains, to the market, on the political belief that the market has the best solution to the distribution of resources and collective wealth. This discourse is not exclusive to India. It is entrenched in the neo-liberal structure of governance globally.

Read | Poverty has fallen, but India's social inequality increased: Report

One of the inevitable consequences of celebrating the market has been the rapid and meteoric rise of right-wing populism all over the world. Their political rhetoric, borrowed from Maggie Thatcher, has exhorted the individual to rise above the problems of everyday living through extreme individualism, on the supposed assumption that the penury and poverty that the individual experiences are a consequence of not trying hard enough. Interestingly, the liberal Barack Obama did a variation of Thatcher’s “my father got up on his bicycle and went out in search of work” by talking about how the individual can make it if s/he tries – a telling commentary of how liberals and conservatives are divided only by a thin line of economic thinking. The consequent loss of political choice has only encouraged the right to infuse the polity with the rhetoric of recovering the glory days, much like Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) or Narendra Modi and the populist harking back to a ‘glorious past’ as a way to make the present miseries disappear.

The rhetoric of this “rise by looking at the past” is, of course, not empirically borne out. Income inequality and the coming to prominence of a gig economy have been enormous problems for the recovery of the health of societies and states all over continents. Rampant unemployment and declining economic growth have severely dented income and social mobility. The research reports of scholars and think-tanks have been particularly alarming. Oxfam reports that the top 10% of the Indian population holds a whopping 77% of the total national wealth and that 73% of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% of the population. The growth of billionaires in India has been relentless – we now have 119 of them, up from 9 in 2000.

The majority of the population has moved in the opposite direction. Oxfam says that 63 million ordinary Indians have been pushed into poverty annually simply because they have not been able to meet rising healthcare costs in a country where the current income disparity is such that it would take the average wage-earner 941 years to match the annual earnings of the average corporate executive. The upshot: 263 million people in India could be facing extreme poverty as the new year dawns.

Globally, billionaires’ wealth is at an all-time high. The 10 richest men have had their fortunes doubled and 32 of the world’s largest corporations saw their profits rise by $109 billion since September 2020. The wages of workers have fallen in that period but shareholder payouts recorded a high of $1.47 trillion.

All this is cause for great concern. Instead of democratisation of the world and a better wealth distributive mechanism, we are steadily moving towards autocracy. V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2022 says that there is a marked decline in deliberations and other democratic processes with toxic polarisation ruling the roost in more than 32 countries. The report goes on to say that this was not the condition 10 years ago and therefore the rapid decline in the health of democracy can be seen to be in sync with the immense inequality that has been generated.

Liberalism has been one of the biggest losers in this drive of autocratisation. Western propaganda would have us believe that the crisis of democracy was endemic to the Socialist world and that they were on a high political and moral pedestal. It is clear to most who follow serious politics that the joke is now on the other foot. Democracy is definitely not a linear progression and, more importantly, settled democracies now have strong anti-democratic forces at work within their boundaries. The mainstream media, long considered to be one of the pillars of institutional democracy, is firmly tied to the coattails of billionaires and their political agents. Dissemination of misinformation is no longer the work of mischief-makers. Authoritative reports state that governments are now the chief agents of news and statistical manipulation and that governments use misinformation to mould opinion and create favourable political ecologies for covering up grave injustices, both economic and social. In other words, democratic dystopia is upon us.

Therefore, the moot question is, can we have a politics of hope, or are we doomed to the dark and damp cellars that we have created in our relentless pursuit of wealth and forgetfulness of sympathy, empathy, and the right of the poor, the minorities and the disadvantaged to live with dignity and justice? The question can be answered only if we are ready to challenge and change the tropes through which we see the question of politics or society. That is a tall ask, given the unimaginative response of the left and left-of-centre to the question of economy and culture. If the status quo holds, then the new year would bring no hope. Let us, therefore, begin to reflect and introspect about the state we are in before the dystopia of material success devours us completely. We owe to our children, if not to ourselves, a new beginning.

(The writer is Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The Assam Royal Global University)