Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Is this the tryst we sought with destiny when freedom came at midnight?

Reflections of a Congressman

Has the Congress outlived its utility? Is it in terminal decline? Should it be assisted to the grave? Through the 18th and 19th centuries, British politics was dominated by the rivalry between the Tories and the Whigs. The Whigs stood for progress, unimpeded progress, ineluctable progress. For Britain, the 18th and 19th centuries were the centuries of progress, unimpeded progress, ineluctable progress. A small island sparked the Industrial Revolution and emerged as the world's leading economic power military power, political power, cultural power.

The Whig view of history -- history was an inexorable march to progress -- was apparently being borne out. It was a view that only generated progress but was also validated by progress. By the mid-19th century, the Liberal Party in Parliament had consolidated its position as the political vanguard of the Whig movement.

The triumph of progress shuddered to a halt with World War I. Progress had led to a massacre on an unprecedented, unimagined scale. D H Lawrence dismissed the whole motivation of progress as that 'bitch goddess, success'.. T S Eliot saw stretching around him only The Wasteland. The most influential novel of its generation, Journey's End, summed up in its title where the Whig view had landed history: At journey's end. In the enveloping gloom of the Victorian/Edwardian age shattered by the Guns of August, the Liberal Party met its quietus. It has continued on the fringes of British politics for the last 80 years but never recovered its lean.

Is what is happening to the Congress now what happened to the Liberals in post-war England? The parallel is worth pursuing. In a sense, the trauma of World War I was the death-knell of Progress. In another, and historically more meaningful sense, it was a vindication of Progress. For, after all, it was Progress that won. Yet, the first casualty of the victory of Progress was the Party of Progress.

Here in India, we did win the Independence. And this week we have entered the 50th year of that Independence. Fifty years, after Independence, our country seems consumed by disillusionment over what we have done with Independence and doubt over what to do next. Where at the dawn of freedom there was a kind of national consensus on what we should do to build our modern nationhood, that consensus now lies fragmented. The Golden Jubilee of Freedom has been heralded with a fractured electoral verdict that has put 13 regional satraps at the helm of the nation. There is no government of the Union. Is this the tryst we sought with destiny when freedom came at midnight?

The consensus which endured in the nation for many decades after that fateful midnight was built on four pillars: democracy, secularism, socialism and non-alignment. Democracy, in the eyes of many Indians, has come to be associated with venality; secularism with the appeasement of bigotry; socialism with degrading poverty; non-alignment with obsolescence.

If we are to recover that first flush of freedom in the second half-century of freedom we have to rebuild a national consensus. In a democracy, that consensus can never be over the details for the politics of political parties is the contest over details. What, however, distinguishes democracy from anarchy is that disputation over detail is conducted within the framework of a consensus over the framework.

The old framework has been overtaken by the march of events. Which is the reason why the Congress, as the party which put together that framework, threatens also to be overtaken by the march of events.