Reports that the ruling BJP carried a hefty after-poll bank balance of nearly 7,000 crore, against the Congress party’s over 500 crore, should surprise none. This is the recorded white money, a small portion of these parties’ actual funds. For every big payment to a party, there’s a quid pro quo while in power. Rules are bent, systems sabotaged, and favours extended to the eagles on the prowl. Receipts below Rs 2,000, which form the bulk of contributions to parties, are not part of this record. Politics today is the best business for many to make money. Ideologies have given was to ‘blah-blahs’ from public platforms that enthuse crowds, or distribution of doles and kits to select concentrations of masses from the lower rungs of the society, who, poorly informed as they are, are easy prey to unscrupulous elements practising vote bank politics. Democracy here has degenerated into ‘shows’ by crooked politicians, who purchase people with promises of goodies and welfare, win power and loot the exchequer in multiple ways. Democracy gets degraded into a play of money power. The poor, whose empowerment is possible only through a fast-paced economic growth to the nation, are made fools of the first order, they being at the receiving end of the politicians’ lip-service.
The Congress party had earned mass opprobrium due to the CAG’s expose of the large-scale corruption under the UPA-II. Narendra Modi spearheaded a campaign against the Congress-led ruling alliance in 2014, promised to end the corruption raj and wrested power for the BJP. But, the corruption at the levels of bureaucrats and politicians has only skyrocketed in recent times, a worst manifestation of which is also evident in the judiciary. The accidental currency packs burning incident at a senior judge’s residence in Delhi was only the tip of the iceberg; and curiously, he’s being given a long rope. Modi has proven that he has no strength to re-energise the decaying systems. He makes this up with shows – like large-scale road constructions. However, there too, the CAG has a while ago noted huge financial cuts/misappropriations, possibly benefiting the ruling party or its leaders.
The life of the ordinary folks and the middle-income groups has not improved in any significant way even as India claims to be the world’s third largest economy. The strength of this economy is the strength that the business class, the middlemen, the hugely corrupt breed of bureaucrats and politicians accord it. No more than 20 per cent of the society is leading a comfortable life and enjoying the benefits of national growth, either through good remuneration or through corrupt means. For the rest, life is a hard struggle. A steady enlargement of governmental controls, through new and harsh laws, makes life for the ordinary citizens more miserable. In the global happiness index, we fare poorly. Fundamentalist streaks are increasingly evident in governance. The RSS, which guides this governance from behind, is game with all these. The collective obsession of the present establishment is more on negativism, like erasing the legacy of the well-adored father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
