Maharashtra or maha farce?

Maharashtra may have just shown us the future of Indian democracy, when those seeking political power are part of an extended network — of kinship, or patronage or caste/community affiliation — which exists in a sphere quite removed from that of ordinary people. Their paths cross only in that brief mating period known as the election campaign season. Successful parties are the ones with the canniest managers, and the canniest managers are the ones that can best accommodate these formidable clusters of influence within the party organisation. It should therefore come as no surprise that there are — as Maharashtra Election Watch, which has examined 1,625 affidavits of the 2,678 candidates this time, has reminded us — at least 200 crorepatis in the fray and that 22.5 per cent of candidates surveyed have criminal records.

It doesn’t need any great political insight to argue that the great majority of these characters are going through this exercise not to correct the democracy deficit or transform the lives of those they now seek to win over through extravagant pledges, but to acquire the power to gain more power. Dalit poet Baban Londhe’s ‘Shroud’ has words for this: At times, to our shanty towns they would come,/careful not to rumple their ironed clothes/ crossing our lanes and alley/ jumping across steaming gutters/ when they stopped beside our doors/we felt inexplicably moved/…Days passed by./ Darkness pressed from all sides…

Maharashtra is the site of the greatest intra-state disparities in India. While Mumbai has a ranking of 1 in terms of the Human Development Index (in 2000), Yavatmal stands at 34 and Gadchiroli at 35. It is rife with paradoxes that never cease to astound: infants of tribal communities living just an hour’s drive from Mumbai, the great iconic capital of wealth creation, die of conditions aggravated by endemic malnutrition; in a state with an average per capita income of Rs 24,248 — much higher than the national average — a quarter of the population live below the poverty line; in a state with a per capita state domestic product of Rs 20, 644 — estimated to be 40 per cent higher than the all-India average — only 14.5 per cent of the net area sown has irrigation facilities. In fact this state, with it considerable material and human resources, has actually seen a decline in public investment and health expenditure through the ’90s.

There are today two Maharashtras. One of growth, the other of decline. One unable to reach out to the other; one unable to gain from the prosperity of the other. Perhaps the fact that the state gets its wealth today, not from its farms and factories, but its tertiary sector — specifically from trade and transport — has something to do with this developmental schizophrenia. Agriculture’s share in the state’s wealth creation declined from 42.14 per cent in ’60-’61 to 17.44 in ’99-’00, manufacturing declined as well, while the share of the tertiary sector went up from 31.73 per cent to 50.45 per cent over the same period.

Nothing unusual about this, of course, given rapid urbanisation in large pockets of the state and with Mumbai as the ultimate engine of corporate growth. What is disappointing, however, is that the one force that could have helped bring the two Maharashtras together and and contribute towards addressing the serious regional imbalances — political action and good governance — is nowhere in evidence except perhaps in the pocket burroughs of a few biggies. It is the privatisation and personalisation of politics.

When the state’s leaders should have been taking steps to improve irrigation facilities at an all-Maharashtra level, address water conservation, diversify agricultural produce, shore up the productivity of land, reduce the vulnerability of the small farmer and improve the quality of life of those who live in the village hut and city shanty — the state, incidentally, also has India’s largest urban slum dwelling population — there has been an almost complete apathy. Even when the occasional bureaucrat has tried to expose this criminal neglect, he has been summarily silenced. In 2002, Arun Bhatia, as commissioner of the Tribal Research and Training Institute, let it be known that the deaths of infants in the Nandurbar and Thane districts were a consequence of endemic malnourishment, caused partly by the misappropriation of subsidies. He was served a showcause notice.

This is a post-modern tragedy. A state that once had wealth, an ambition for social change and leaders who exhibited a genuine interest in ordinary people, has today been hijacked by a motley crowd of time-servers. Elections will alter nothing. More

Telgi-like figures will emerge from the shadows of the future and more politicians like Mungantiwaar Sacchidanands — when last heard he had 22 cases against him — will continue to patronise them. As for those left out of the charmed circle, they’ll only matter five years later. And for the precise period of a month — the mandatory mating month of passionate but false love calls.