Why Elections 2004 is shining

Let me begin by telling you the most heartening thing I have observed on my travels this election. Wherever I have gone I have met ordinary,...

Let me begin by telling you the most heartening thing I have observed on my travels this election. Wherever I have gone I have met ordinary, humble Indians — the type our politicians rudely call the ‘‘common man’’ — who have a single thing they want from their elected representatives and this is a decent standard of living.

There has been much talk since the last round of Assembly elections of how people voted for bijli, sadak, pani but if you explore the meaning of this in some depth, as I have lately been doing, you find that people want to live like they see people live on television. They want water to come out of taps in their homes. They want homes that look like houses and not mud huts. They want electricity so they can watch their favourite programmes on television and not just to run the tube well. They want their children to go to schools that have proper classrooms with chairs and tables, they want mobile phones and Maruti cars, and they want their sons and daughters to get jobs in proper offices and not just in the fields.

Jobs are what they want more than anything else because they see them as the key to getting everything else. In earlier Lok Sabha elections, even in the last one, there were other issues that dominated. Last time round, there was anger at Sonia Gandhi for having pulled the government down over ‘‘272 and many more coming’’ and there was a feeling that Atal Behari Vajpayee needed to be given a fair chance to rule India. Earlier there were all sorts of other reasons that influenced voting. Assassinations, caste, corruption, temples, secularism and going back to ’77 democracy itself, but this time round when the voter says koi kaam nahin kiya about his MP he immediately points to open drains, unbuilt roads and irregular supplies of electricity and water as evidence.

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The truth is that however much India might be shining, the average Indian, even the middle-class Indian, continues to live in conditions that would be considered unfit for human beings in almost any other country. He wants this to change and he wants change to happen tomorrow.

When I speak of a standard of living I begin with the image of a decent house. But, in our fair and wondrous land on account of the state having taken full responsibility for providing ‘‘housing for the poor’’ in socialist times the poor in our cities live mostly in windowless hovels without clean water, sanitation or minimum public hygiene and always on the edge of filthy, open drains. Living standards in rural parts are only marginally better in that there are open fields (instead of dirty lavatories) and clean air but the average dwelling is still pretty much a windowless hovel. Well, dear readers, on my travels this time I was pleased to see that most people no longer considered this good enough and the reason for the change is television. I have not so far been to a single village where television had not arrived in one way or other. Desperately poor Dalits in Bihar said they watched it in the houses of the upper castes and in villages that had never seen electricity they used tractor batteries to watch.

Television has acted in rural India as an engine of change. Us intellectual types bemoan the evils of MTV and Hindutva’s culture police fear that our ‘‘ancient civilization’’ will fall to pieces when it clashes with America’s instant culture but for the average Indian television has brought the 21st century into his cloistered, blinkered world. And, you cannot begin to imagine what a closed world it was not so very long ago.

In the eighties I can remember going with Swami Agnivesh to a village near Daltonganj in Bihar’s Palamau district to meet people who had been kept in bondage by a local farmer. The farm was no more than ten kilometres from Daltonganj but the bonded labourers we met had never been there. The outside world quite simply did not exist. When P V Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister I remember going to a village, a hundred kilometres from Udaipur, where they could not name a single Indian Prime Minister. They had heard of Rajiv Gandhi but for the wrong reason. ‘‘Who was the one they killed with a garland?’’

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There may still be villages in the wilds of Orissa and Bihar and even Rajasthan which remain areas of darkness but television will probably penetrate even these soon enough.

Right. Now having given you the good news can I tell you what I find most depressing about this election? I find the spectacle of the baba log tumbling out of political cradles from Kashmir to Kanyakumari deeply depressing. There are some that show promise but by and large the sons and daughters who have appeared on the electoral landscape to claim Daddy or Mummy’s seat look like children who would never have been able to hold a job in any other area of enterprise. To a man, they have wives who are heiresses while they (poor things) have barely a bit of pocket money to get by on according to the assets they have declared. And, almost to a man (the women are even worse) have no political opinions worth discussing.

The baba log will have to go if the political system is to throw up the kind of political leaders who will bring real change and real change is what the Indian voter now wants.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com