It is not hard to see why Congress President Rahul Gandhi hardens his position on Rafale. He appears to be emboldened by the symmetry of history—Rafale now to Bofors then. Rafale is a mirror image of Bofors. But that is also why it should not be pressed too far.
Why it is tempting to hammer this issue home—especially emboldened by the recent electoral gains of the Congress—is easy to see. To win, Rahul needs to dent PM Modi’s image as the Pied Piper of good governance. Good governance, in classic political thought, has two aspects—order and stability.
Order pertains to not only the absence of violence on account of issues in public being settled by the use of private violence, as in lynching. It pertains to the preservation of the multi-faceted good of a society. Progress pertains to its enlargement. Both order and progress, therefore, demand collective strengths like industry, integrity, justice and wisdom.
Modi, through his effective pre-election propaganda in 2014, foregrounded integrity as the cornerstone of good governance. Much of his mass appeal then resulted from the withering ridicule he rained on the Congress for its venality. Dynastic rule was pilloried as a denigration of the dynamic of democracy in forestalling free choice of leaders. Modi spun this web of corruption in governance like a master craftsman. He mesmerised crowds. So it makes sense that Rahul needs to dent the prime minister’s image of integrity. But the shelf life of this strategy could be short-lived.
The main reason for it is not that integrity is not basic to good governance. It is that the effectiveness of Rahul’s rhetoric is blunted by the lingering disenchantment of voters over UPA-2’s track record. The BJP can deflect such arrows by saying, “Look, who is talking!” The public can’t be faulted for growing weary of the pot calling the kettle black. People today assume the engine of politics is necessarily greased with graft.
To what extent he transcends his subjective priorities will be the test of Rahul’s stature as a political leader. He has good reason to believe his father was done in by belabouring Bofors. So Rafale could be the providential stick with which to return the compliment. But he needs to transcend this subjectivity to be able to see the big picture, the constructive agenda.
Getting fixated on one issue incurs the risk of becoming blind to a host of larger issues. Rahul needs to hold Modi to account on the promise of good governance —‘less government, more governance’, an epigram plagiarised from David Thoreau. Eradication of corruption was projected, even in 2014, only as a means to realising the goal of good governance, not as an end in itself. So, if corruption continues to rule the field, the issue is not corruption per se, but good governance.
The two broad dimensions of good governance, according to the English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are permanence and progression. According to John Stuart Mill, they are order and progress. The limited canvas of an article does not permit their detailed analysis. It suffices, to get a flavour of what is at stake, to consider two of their more familiar ingredients: ‘peace’, in respect of order; and ‘innovation’, vis-a-vis progress.
The preservation of order, involves the safeguarding of the social good, the national capital, gained over time. A society is like a garden. For a garden to retain its beauty, it is essential the gardener works diligently. Much of the work he does pertains to the preservation of the garden. Your run-of-the-mill gardener unweeds, digs and decomposts the soil, to keep the garden as it is.
Expert gardeners go beyond mere preservation. They seek to improve gardens. They add diligence to innovation. They think out-of-the-box and envision gardens as they could be. Our stereotypical gardeners merely conform to the prevailing ideas about what a garden should be. They are agents, and victims, of conformity, without knowing it.
The foremost danger to good governance—in its two-fold dimensions of order and progress—is the stifling of the spirit of innovation through coercive conformity. This precipitates two serious problems. First, it undercuts order by unleashing extra-constitutional agents of disorder. The gau-rakshaks, the anti-love-jihad goons, the cultural police that terrorise people into conformity regarding what they may eat, wear and believe, and who they may marry, are agents of outright anarchy. They expose whatever pretensions to good governance there might be.
Secondly, every attempt to enforce intellectual conformity—the attack on institutions of liberal education—is a de facto subversion of the very foundation of good governance. Free-thinking, the essence of all spiritual traditions, is the womb of innovation. Suppression of the spirit of innovation is compounded further by the callousness to human suffering, and the brutality with which the agenda of material progress is pursued, of which the epidemic of rural distress in general and of farmer suicides in particular, as well as the volcanic restlessness and disenchantment of our educated youth are tell-tale symptoms. Rather than the social good achieved over the decades being preserved, it is at risk
of being squandered.
In comparison, Rafale is a flea-bit; a mere symptom, not the disease.The disease is bad governance. Rahul needs to tell the nation what alternative solutions and strategies he has to improve on Modi’s vision and track record. Nothing less will carry conviction for any length of time.