ELECTION WINS ARE NOT VOTES FOR DEVELOPMENT

The cancellation of the IIT project in Melaulim is a clear indication that the government can heed the wishes of the people. The cancellation further suggests that all development that the government sees fit to impose on Goans and the Goan land is reversible. The decision to cancel the IIT project came after much chest-thumping bravado by ministers in the ruling government, especially after the Zilla Parishad elections that the BJP swept, that they had the mandate and support of the electorate.

 

The Chief Minister, Pramod Sawant, assumed that this sweep of the Zilla Parishad elections is people’s approval of his leadership and giving him the go ahead for the recent projects in the Mollem forest reserve. Similarly, the Health Minister, Viswajit Rane, who also tasted success in the Zilla Parishad elections as all the candidates he supported emerged victorious, acted as if the people of his constituency had given him the green light to proceed with the IIT in Melaulim.

 

For the legitimacy of Sawant’s leadership, the stakes at the Zilla Parishad elections may have been indeed high. Sawant became Chief Minister in 2019 after the demise of Manohar Parrikar, but has never been recognized popularly as the leader of the people of Goa. In 2017, the BJP had managed to cobble together an alliance, after the Congress failed to form a government despite winning a majority of 17 seats. The 2017 election thus disregarded the will of the people, in fact it reminded many of the horse trading era of the 1990s. Parrikar and the BJP justified their actions saying that they had a greater share of the polled votes. As a result of the 2017 horse trading fiasco, and the fact that he faced opposition within BJP supporters, Sawant desperately needed an electoral win, where both the vote share and seats would be in his and his party’s favor.

 

One cannot really fault Sawant and Rane for claiming that the Zilla Parishad results meant that Goans were effectively giving consent for the development projects. Perhaps the Chief Minister and the Health Minister jumped the gun because of the victory despite the widespread protests against mega projects, be it the IIT or the infrastructure projects in the Mollem forest. In the months leading up to the Zilla Parishad elections, these protests drummed up support for the anti-people and anti-environmental policies of the government, both through sustained actions on the ground and through social media. The public opposition to development was so strong that the Zilla Parishad sweep had to be a sign that the people were wrong, or so everyone thought.

 

And so, following the results of the Zilla Parishad elections, many, for this or that reason, were deeply dejected that all the protest had amounted to nothing. No matter what one believed, it seemed that everyone accepted the narrative that the victorious side promoted; many tried to make sense of why Goans had effectively voted for the same people who promoted the destruction of their land.

 

But the people of Melaulim seem to have proven everyone wrong! From what one gathers from the core leadership of the Melaulim protests, the primary goal of the protest was ownership of land. The people of Melaulim did not change their demand of land ownership even after most of the BJP-supported candidates won in the Zilla Parishad elections. They stuck to their guns, and in fact are pushing for their demands ever more vociferously these days, despite the IIT project cancellation.

 

While the issue of why Goans vote for pro- destructive development politicians might have to wait for some other day, the Melaulim case forces us to think about the role of elections in Goan society today. What are elections for? Just an occasion for the transfer of power and the gift and favors that are exchanged before voting? What is the value of one vote?

 

The value of a person’s vote comes into serious question when the government blatantly disregards people’s wishes. In this case by promoting destructive and harmful development. If the health of the citizens is jeopardized due to the coal dust, if the land on which citizens and their ancestors have lived and worked on is not legally theirs (as is the case in Melaulim), or forests and other fragile ecological niches are destroyed, or the fact that the government decides that another railway line should be cut through villages and the houses in them, then the government does not serve the interests of the people that voted it to power.

 

While politicians supplicate before the voter before elections, what happens after is that the will of the people is, more often than not, ignored. In fact, as far as the history of Goa is concerned, post 1961, what happens after elections matters much more than the pre-election promises of the politicians. A recent case in point is the private resolution to scrap the three linear projects in Mollem where 11 members voted for the resolution, and nine abstained. The resolution was defeated by 20 votes.

 

An electoral victory is no license for ‘development’. From the Melaulim example, it is quite clear that winning an election, or having a greater vote share, or majority seats, does not give authoritative powers to the elected representatives. But it is also clear that while one can approach politicians for personal favors, one cannot count on them when it comes to issues that determine the collective future of the state. The people then have to protest and put their lives on the line. This unaccountability of elected representatives post elections is fast rendering the electoral process empty.

 

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 3 February 2021) 

 

CONVERSATIONS FOR OUR FUTURE

In the Lok Sabha elections 2019, most voters faced the proverbial horns of a dilemma. These voters who want a non-communal, non-corrupt government have, on the one hand, voted for a particular party whose record in combating communalism and corruption belies its lofty rhetoric of upholding values of honest politics and secularism. On the other hand, some may have voted for a new party, whose unique selling pitch is its tirade against corruption, and whose new-ness has ensured that it has no real record of malfeasance.

However, these two choices—though made in desperation—have a fatal flaw built into them: they are stopgap solutions and have consequences for the future of the polity, society, and the environment for the next 10 or 20 years. As far as electoral representation is concerned, if the abovementioned dilemma gets resolved momentarily by choosing the lesser evil, throughout the next several decades, we shall only be electing the lesser evil.

One can appreciate why many voters are desperate. The Indian first-past-the-post electoral system with the minoritization of thousands of communities often leaves people with little choices other than the short-term, stopgap ones. Often, voters operate based on guesswork over how best not to waste one’s vote, and also get some short-term benefit by choosing the lesser evil. More often, one hopes that the short-term choices have no long-term destructive consequences.

It is crucial, therefore, to have a new type of political conversations, which ensures long-term solutions to our current problems. Our powerless-ness and hopeless-ness during elections should encourage debates over long-term changes in politics, society, and environment. As many have started to recognize, deepening democracy and combating communalism and corruption cannot happen during elections alone. What we do and say after an election, anticipating the next, buffers us from powerless-ness and can truly give us a choice. Accordingly, we can think of education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection as part of a multi-pronged strategy for providing us with better choices during elections.

We must have political conversations over issues that are useful in the long-term. Education is fundamental if one is to live in an empowered society. In recent times, Goa has seen the demand for government aid for English as a medium of instruction at the primary schooling level. In terms of higher education, we are witness to spirited fights for securing the right for education and employment in universities through affirmative action.

The importance of education and the discrimination therein should impress upon all the need for affirmative action in our schools and universities. The empowerment of a generation of young persons, otherwise excluded from these spaces, will create a citizenry that contributes to equal or equitable social relations. Currently, schools and universities are battlegrounds where the marginalized lose out to the privileged. The reason is that schools and universities have not provided equal opportunity for all. By leveling the field through education, the electoral process will see the participation of young voters who are not easily swayed by demagoguery or false promises.

Another theme for a political conversation is migrant workers and the bogey of ‘vote-banks’. Some of us get enraged by ‘vote-bank’ politics when the truth is that it denies a large section of the population their basic rights. These workers provide vital labor and hence, rather than rail against the ‘vote-bank’, we need to be sensitive to the matter of their fundamental rights. Securing the rights of workers such as minimum wage, health insurance, housing and enforcing these rights in good faith empowers a constituency to be not exploited by the vote-bank politics of the national and regional parties.

Protecting the fundamental rights of migrants have advantages for locals as it strengthens the rule of law internally. One can see an interesting parallel with the denial of basic rights to migrant labor and the crisis facing Goa’s mining-dependent, or the locals. In the case of the mining-dependent, the government had no safeguards against rampant illegalities and the economic fluctuations of an industry based on the whims of the global capitalist players. The mining-dependent, much like the migrant labor, are expendable in the larger scheme of the capitalist-party politics nexus. The mining dependents form a large group of people whose destiny depends on the goodwill of politicians and big businesses. They, too, vote but hardly control their destiny.

Thinking of workers’ rights and mining dependents, we can easily see the connections with environmental degradations. More and more people are pushed into doing the work for large, capital-intensive industries like mining and construction in the name of ‘development’. This ‘development’ often occurs by flattening forests or filling prime agrarian land. Every successive election sees an intensification of the destruction of the forests and the communities that call these forests their home. Together with the communities which depend on agriculture and mining, the forest-dwelling communities form another chunk of voters. It is best if the electoral process does not deny these communities an independent say, so they also contribute to the common good.

In each of the issues I have discussed above, there is currently a tremendous opposition from privileged members of our society, blinded by the caste and class privileges they enjoy. In such a context, a change in political conversations emphasizing social justice above everything else will alter the rules of the electoral game. Taken together, then, an emphasis on equal access to education, securing rights and protection for workers, and preventing environmental degradation promotes the empowerment of many voters who vote due to powerless-ness rather than out of free choice. Without truly empowered voters there are no democratic choices.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 1 May, 2019)

AMORAL ECONOMY: TRICKLE-DOWN POLITICS AND ELECTIONS

The dust kicked up during the recently held Panchayat elections in Goa has almost settled down. As in all elections, this Panchayat election also witnessed massive power struggles. While it is true that the way power operates would continue in ways that destroy Goa’s natural and human resources, yet in the meanwhile, we can still think why the system stays the way it does. One thing is very clear, a large number of people by participating in ‘grass-roots democracy’ are staking their claim for power – power that is otherwise concentrated  in the hands of a few. One of the commonest reasons given for such power struggles, and the fair and foul means employed to gain power, is greed of the people. But is there more to the story? Can there be another explanation for the way the masses behave as they do?

The British labor historian, E. P. Thompson wrote extensively about labor movements in Britain. Of his many celebrated works, his essay on ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971) has some relevance when we talk about the nature of how power is brokered through an economy of gifts and favors. Thompson spoke about the public disturbances involving the working class and peasants, and argued that rather than viewing such violence as riots, they were in fact demands to safeguard customary and other rights that the state had failed to protect. Thus, the term ‘moral economy’ as understood by Thompson referred to the unwritten codes that bound the masses and the authorities in a system of recognizing the basic rights to food and fair prices.

As far as elections in Goa – as in many other parts of India – are concerned, one can suggest that there exists an ‘amoral economy’. While Thompson’s moral economy can be considered as political action against authoritarianism, an amoral economy can be considered to do the opposite. In an amoral economy dominant power cannot be easily subverted. Though flawed in its very structure, such an economy promotes a form of power that gets concentrated in the hands of the few. The masses that participate in this economy or are drawn in this economy are not necessarily the ones who control the reins of power. At the lowest level, say the Panchayat level, it is a person who, for various reasons, has a decent amount of ‘supporters’. This hierarchy progresses upwards to Zilla Parishad members, municipality councilors, MLAs, Ministers, and other community leaders who are present at each of these levels. At all levels, the position of leadership and influence depends on one’s caste and class location and in some cases, on the financial resources available to negotiate this hierarchical game of power.The person who wants to be at the top of this hierarchy has to ensure that he has the backing of persons at each level of political representation. This is basically trickle-down politics!

What happens once elections are announced is that the masses, hitherto left out from power and influence, suddenly acquire a value because they can cast their vote. The vote, therefore, becomes a tangible resource that can be exchanged for short term gains and alliances. How this economy works for a large part of the masses – those that fall outside the boundary of the political class – can be gleaned from Sujay Gupta’s article on how favors were exchanged in four localities of Goa prior to the recently-concluded Panchayat polls.

In this article we hear about a candidate who feasts his supporters or potential supporters at a village tavern, as is the case in several other elections in the past. The next day this candidate approaches a “middle level but influential politician” for a hefty sum of a couple of lakhs, which he receives as “a grant or a loan”. Similarly, other candidates either seeking a re-election or a fresh mandate were reported to have purchased a large number of electronic items, such as LCD TVs, phones, tablets, and refrigerators. One thing is very clear, gifts and favors need to be exchanged. However, it is not necessary that the person at the lower level (for instance) will have the required resources and as such this person has to approach someone (mostly a few levels higher than him) to ensure that the unwritten codes are followed. On the other hand the person(s) at the higher levels receive the support from those at the lower level, as the latter owes a favor to the former.

I do not want to offer a sanitized picture of a well-tuned economy in which political and social relations exist in harmony. However, one needs to ask how does one survive, and in fact negotiate one’s basic aspirations – jobs, clean water, electricity etc, if one is stuck in an economy of unequal power relations. If there are multiple levels through which power is negotiated and brokered then the individual is often held hostage to the multiple levels of power. So the way towards gaining power and fulfilling aspirations for those at the lower levels of this hierarchy is a tortuous and winding one.

There is, I think, an element of greed in the amoral economy. But the further one goes down the hierarchy it isn’t so much about greed but about survival, and ensuring that certain expectations and aspirations in life – such as accessing basic amenities – are fulfilled.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 5 July, 2017)