Stuck in the past

Jan 17, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Over the past few months I have sought to underscore the effects on the society of the unremitting stream of incendiary rhetoric that is emanating from some quarters of the opposition and its partisans. In their daily exhortations for a storming of the Bastille, the revolutionary narrative immanent in our history (remember Cuffy?) with its supposedly “cathartic” orgies of violence, is invoked. Those that cited “the poetics of history” cannot plead ignorance of the nature and consequences of their emplotment of the cherry-picked truths, half-truths and falsifications they regurgitate. There are the meta-narratives.
Today, I wish to expand on another effect of the narrative of revolutionary romance. In the “Past as Prolegomena” I had pointed out, “This fixation on the culture of violence leads to what psychologists call a “grievance-hunting” mindset. It is a pathological condition that betrays a state of mind uniquely incapable of seizing the opportunities and responsibilities of the present and so must morbidly escape to the past to discover a sanctuary of grievance for itself.”
The fixation, I explained, is due primarily to ideologues locking on to a problem space from the past and in refusing to rigorously interrogate the present, mechanistically apply the answers from that past to circumstances that might have changed radically. Critiques being always strategic, those answers are not so much wrong as irrelevant. The “expired strategies” invariably lead to frustration and anger since even though hard work may be done to implement them, success is elusive. External malevolent forces and scapegoats are blamed for the failure and the grievance-hunting mentality sets in.
Take for instance the insistence by many, and most recently expressed by Mr Eric Phillips that, “How can an electoral system in a racially divided nation be ‘free and fair” when only one side can win because of an ethnic census?” This is an exemplary instance of refusing to interrogate the present and to dwell only on the past. The “problem spaces” then and now are different: the questions to be posed must be different and therefore, so might be the answers.
In terms of Mr Phillips’ concern what was the salient feature of the then problem space? Before the 1992 elections, Indians had been estimated as more that 50% of the population, and with only a plurality necessary to secure the Presidency and form the government, I not only accepted Mr Phillips’ thesis but identified it as the source of the African Ethnic Security Dilemma. What would their incentive be to participate in elections where most voted on ethnic lines? They would be legitimising a system where they would be locked out of the Executive in perpetuity. As an answer, among others, I proposed such changes as a two-thirds majority to elect the President to encourage possible coalitions but for sure, programs that reached across the ethnic divide. The PNC, however, felt comfortable with the existing system; later went into the elections and lost. They retained, it should be noted, 42% of the electorate that was roughly coincident with the combined African and Mixed groups.
In 1997, the PNC still felt comfortable with the plurality system and participated in the December elections. They still misread their problem space. After losing once again (but retaining its traditional voting percentage) the PNC precipitated riots (their grievance-mindset recourse) not over the voting system but over the conduct of the elections. This action only served to harden the Indian Ethnic Security Dilemma about physical insecurity. In the ensuing constitutional changes forced on the PPP, the PNC ignored modification of the electoral or governance structures in wilful denial of the exigencies of their problem space.
In the 2001 elections, (in which ROAR participated and wrested 1 seat from the traditional PPP voting bloc) the PPP once again won, while the PNC maintained its usual percentage. And the latter, inflexibly again, precipitated violence and a further resistance against cross-ethnic support. The PPP in the meantime, cognisant of the inexorable shrinkage of its traditional base due to higher rates of emigration, maintained its well-oiled electoral machinery and intensified its wooing of the Amerindian and African blocs. The PPP, unlike the PNC, was adjusting to the new problem space. It should not be surprising that in 2006, the PPP repeated its majority even though Indians were then only 43% of the electorate.
From our informal surveys, the percentage of Indians in the population is now below 40%. The question in our present problem-space is therefore not how to deal with the obstacle an automatic built-in majority – or even a plurality. The answer then, has to be different. I believe that it is the opposition’s own unwillingness to forge a strategy and build a mobilization machinery that could deny the PPP a majority, rather than any inbuilt “ethnic censuses”, that is keeping the PPP in office. In such a scenario, even if the PPP at best secures the Presidency, they would need opposition support to govern. This could provide the leverage for initiating changes in governance structures and was the premise of my “Centre Force” proposal in 2005. The “Third Force” platform that was actually floated was torpedoed by such crass political opportunism, naked ambition and gamesmanship that I am quite cynical about the “change” that is being touted.
I still believe that we need a system of governance that will engage the widest possible consent of our people. However, simply repeating this aspiration like an incantation will not bring it into existence. It is the people that will have to be convinced of this need and make their convictions known at the polls. And this is the task of the opposition. The people whose opinions we hope to change cannot be just castigated as “fools”; their fears have to be understood as rational and real – and certainly not to be further inflamed. The PPP will also have to be convinced. Our horizon of expectations cannot be about “working together” in a government of national unity while shouting about “genocide” and excesses that rival Hitler’s in the present.
The history of our present also does not justify a narrative that arbitrarily essentialises one group as congenitally incapable of change, and another as having no control over being elected into office. To accept that reality is socially constructed is to assert that we, and our future, can be changed. The present is pregnant with positive possibilities and it is up to the opposition to cast off their debilitating mindset of grievance and create that change.

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