Ramu Ramnathan and Vijay Pratap represent democracy in all its diversity. While one penned an extempore satire in his response, the other presented a well thought out argument to the debate. With elections around the corner, we leave it to the readers to draw their own conclusions.

RAMU RAMANATHAN// One night in the middle of nowhere. On the 32nd day of the month. At a time when we the people are asleep, 101 lal batti wallah cars circle round and round, in the middle of a dry lake. In the midst of the circle of cars is a teak table from the Maurya period. A white khadi sheet. Two jhoolas. With Two High and Mighty Leaders seated on it. Black commandos are present. But no clerks to minute the discussion. For the sake of convenience, we will refer to the two unmarried, bachelored, bearded High and Mighty Leaders as First Front and Second Front.

Silence.

Second Front: Tiring na, Baba?

First Front: Yes, Bhai.

Second Front: By the way, I’ve a gift for you. Home-made oondhiyo. It’s the best food item in the whole world. At least 6.5 crore people have voted on Facebook.

First Front: Right. I have pizza for you.

Second Front: You do? It’s the second most popular item in my state. Beats dhokla any day.

First Front: Mama Mia. Mummy will be delighted to hear this.

Second Front: How is Behen? Tabiyat paani fine?

First Front: Mummy is fine. But Behen is having trouble with her husband.

Second Front: That’s why shaadi nahi karvanoo. Aapde jevaah. De taali! Silence.

Second Front: Biju shu?

First Front: All good. Thank you for your elocution tips. Especially the dialogue baazi.

Second Front: Arre Baba, what thanks and all. We must help each other na? I am also trying to be less uncouth.

First Front: Yes Bhai, you need to work harder. You can’t shout at Angela Merkel and Obama. You’re not Putin. At least, not as yet.

Silence.

Second Front: Seven rallies for me today. You?

First Front: Five and a half, Bhai. Second Front: Five and a half? How so?

First Front: The rally in Bulandshahar was not a good one. Too bloody hot. We cancelled it. So I sat by the Ganges and read Discovery of India.

Second Front: Don’t know why EC always conducts general elections in April–May. Tadka maa bahu tadpo chhe, baapla.

First Front: They should make all polling booths air-conditioned. Provide air coolers to voters.

Second Front: Good point. I can get one of the Ambani bandhus or Adanis to provide it. “Free a/c if you use our electricity”. This can be in our money-festo.

First Front: Money-festo?

Second Front: We have abandoned manifesto, Baba. From now on, only money-festo.

First Front: Are you not afraid of that fellow who speaks about the truth. And how we have not been able to abandon our masters since 60 years?

Second Front: Afraid of who? Bapu?

First Front: No no. The muffler chap who swept away Sheila-ji recently. That diabetic fellow.

Second Front: Oh. Him? Ignore him. Like I ignored Keshubhai and Shankerbhai.

First Front: How, Bhai?

Second Front: Listen. You can’t have leader and praja eating from the same plate na? Aap log ne gadbad kar diya Dilli main. If the aam aadmi and the non-aam aadmi enjoy the same comforts and expect the same treatment, then what will happen? Tell, tell?

First Front: French Revolution? October Revolution? Kranti?

Second Front: Chhe chhe. In our country, it means, the aam admi will remain poor. But the point is, the non-aam aadmi will also remain poor. We cannot let that happen. We have to preserve the Establishment. Status quo zindabad. Hain na, Baba? Silence.

First Front: I have an important question to ask you Bhai.

Second Front: Poocho poocho. I am sure it is about my good governance and hat-trick of victories.

Second Front: This is much more important. How often do you trim your beard?

Second Front: Once a week on mangalvar. Aap?

First Front: When it starts to scratch and irritate.

Second Front: Do you realise, on 17 May, you or I will make history? We will be India’s first bearded PM.

First Front: Really? But what about Chandarsekharji? Manmohanji?

Second Front: True, true. But if I say it a hundred times, and Arunji and Ravi Shankerji and Nirmalaji and Arnabji repeat it, people will believe me.

First Front: That is true. Your lawyers and barristers are better than ours.

Second Front: I have personally trained them. I told them there are two things our people love: a good set of lies and some circus. You want some chai? Arre Amitbhai, ek cutting chai mokllo ne.

Silence.

First Front: Oh no. Second Front: Shu thayu?

First Front: That muffler man has sent me a WhatsApp again. He says: It is easier to open a Swiss Bank account than a SBI account. Ufff.

Second Front: He sends messages to you too, Baba?

First Front: Aapko bhi?

Second Front: Hahn hahn. First through Kiranji, then Ramdevji, then through pigeons. I told him not every problem in this country is because of a Swiss Bank. He started talking about 20,000 malnourished children in Maninagar. Plus 1,000 farmer deaths in Panchmahal. I mean, what nonsense!

First Front: He did that!

Second Front: Imagine. Have you and your party ever said so for 20 years? Never. Now that’s true democracy na, Baba? Then how dare he? Anarkali! First Front: Anarkali nahin, Bhai. Anarchist. Like Proudhon.

Second Front: Same, same. Thinks he is damn smart because he quotes Ambedkar, Bapu and the Constitution.

First Front: What do we do now, Bhai? I am scared. I wish Naani was here.

Second Front: Arre, ignore him. He will simply fade away like Kumar Gaurav. One good film and then oblivion.

First Front: I wish Chacha was here.

Second Front: Arre arre; don’t cry Baba. Between you and me, we have so many shakhas and cadres and offices. It is a whole social system. Like your Naani and your Chacha, we can indoctrinate and manipulate anything; and promote a false consciousness that is immune to the truth.

First Front: You have an action plan?

Second Front: First I win the election ...

First Front: That is a given, Bhai. I am working very hard to guarantee you a majority. You saw that interview na...

Second Front: That was brilliant. I would have kissed you now. But kissing is banned in our country. But you’re my Brahmastra. I wish I could appoint you as Deputy PM, instead of Lalji or Paswanji.

First Front: Bhai. Focus. That muffler man is planning direct action. He is planning an FIR against India in the name of the Aam Aadmi.

Second Front: Don’t worry. I have a plan to prevent it.

First Front: Che cosa?

Second Front: Banish the chap to Karachi like that other anti-national fellow.

First Front: Bhai. He is not like that Karachi don. He was a democratically elected head of state.

Second Front: In which case, I can resort to Plan B.

First Front: Quale e?

Second Front: I can ship all the aam aadmis out of India. … To Mars. I am working with ISRO to organise low-cost ST buses to Mars. If my state can export Shahs and Patels and Kutchis to the USA and UK, then exporting the aam aadmi to Mars is pretty easy.

First Front: Arre waah. Aap mahaan hain Second Front: I have learnt how to be brutish and riotous from your family. Your father, mother, uncle, grandmother ...

First Front: (coughs) Vande Matram, Bhai.

Second Front: Fratelli d’Italia. Ciao. The short scene ends as it begins. And no one knows if it transpired or will transpire. But we got this transcript from an unmanned drone in the sky that reports to masters in distant lands. Jai Hind. Ramu Ramanathan, the acclaimed playwright -director is based in Mumbai.

VIJAY PRATAP// In less than a year-anda- half, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has made such an impact that it occupies a prime position in the political discourse of the country today. It is being observed not only in India, but the world-over. On February 22, 2014 in Brussels, the European Greens were voting on their common manifesto for the European parliament election, which are being held on May 22–26, 2014. On the sidelines of this gathering some important functionaries held a small meeting to understand AAP and its policy perspective and future possibilities. This was not a formal secretariat meeting, nevertheless there was a consensus that European Greens must increase its contact with AAP. The majority in this small but significant group felt that this party seemed to be a good possible ally for responding to global economic, ecological and other crises. The next day—i.e., February 23, 2014—there was another small meeting of civil society activists, where Indian analysts from the European Commission also joined. I was present in these meetings and was amazed to see how keenly and systematically Europeans were watching AAP and other political developments in India.

On 25 February 2014, in the Finnish parliament’s annexe, a senior Indian political worker, who is also an engaged observer of AAP, spoke to a group of activists and intellectuals on AAP. In this meeting, the Finnish foreign minister Erkki Tuomoija and a Gandhian socialist philosopher–activist Dr Thomas Wallgren were formal discussants. The wellinformed discussion which followed the presentations was a pleasant surprise. These three meetings highlight not just the interest of the European Union countries in India and its polity but also the crisis in their party systems. They seem to be in search of models to renew their polity, and, therefore, AAP is also being keenly watched. The crisis in our party systems is about their ability to articulate and assert the aspirations of people they claim to represent. If the party system is in crisis, then the ability of governance institutions to govern also declines.

The crisis in the party system in India got accentuated with the spilt in the Congress in 1969. The eminent political scientist Rajni Kothari has pointed out in his book Politics in India that the Congress is a party of dominance and other parties are linked to it through factional chains. To state it differently, we can say that the Congress represented a microcosm of society and other parties linked with the Congress represented sub–sets or smaller segments of the larger whole of society. The way regional parties are constructed, they represent one or the other sub-set of society. Contemporary regional parties in India have a definite set of caste/ethnic/ regional following. They neither bother nor have the ability to develop a coherent and holistic view of the nation’s governance, development and growth agenda.

In practice, the regional parties do not have inner-party democracy. Sometimes even the notion of justice does not seem to be fully insulated from a sense of sectarian identities that these parties embody. In a society where the notion of justice is no longer universal, a universal tyranny of the system becomes the rule. Ordinary citizens feel helpless. The story does not end at a point where they cannot get justice, but they cannot even get satisfaction of fighting this system, as there is no listening space for the universal notions of justice. It is in this context that people invented an instrument called the Aam Aadmi Party. The national convenor of this party, Arvind Kejriwal, describes the emergence of AAP as kudrat ka karishma (nature’s miracle). He seems to think that human beings could not have accomplished this task.

One significant fact about AAP is that it touched the moral/spiritual chord with ordinary people across class, caste, region and religion. The party, born out of this moral and emotional crisis, has also a potential to develop as an antidote to various kinds of helplessness among the aam aadmi. ‘Ordinary’, according to Kejriwal, is not a reflection of class, but it signifies ordinariness in the sense when you are trying to lead your life by following rules of the game and not of privilege. On 18 March 2014, I attended a meeting organised by AAP called ‘A Roadmap for Indian Muslims’. In this meeting none of the AAP leaders indulged in any conventional public relations exercise. They did not make populist promises and called a spade a spade. It is worth noting that popular support to AAP is based on a broader and deeper notion of corruption. There is no denying the fact that in everyday life of ‘ordinary’ people of any class, corruption in its ordinary sense is the most hard-hitting instrument of this system’s tyranny. But, starting since the early 1980s and getting a fillip in the early nineties, identity politics has acted as a double-edged weapon. For the hitherto oppressed SC and OBC communities in the electoral domain, it has proved to be a positive resource of support base. This has changed the complexion of our parliament and state legislatures. At the same time, this very resource has been used by a majority of the Dalit and OBC leaders to corner power for their families. Those of them who do not have families have concentrated power in their coteries. Thus, the inner party democracy and representation has been greatly undermined, and consequently inevitable mis-governance and corruption is becoming increasingly institutionalised. So, non-alienated ‘ordinary’ people clearly experience and see a link between corruption and identity fundamentalism. Broad popular support from the elite to the socially and economically most underprivileged have supported AAP, because Kejriwal articulates reaction and response to this impasse.

In the agenda-setting meeting of Muslims in Delhi in March 2014, there were clearly two strands. One, which reinforces a feeling of victimhood, fears of security and facts of exclusion and discrimination all stated in a fashion that will contribute to identity fundamentalism. The other strand was linking exclusion, discrimination, security anxieties and powerlessness to larger forces, processes and institutions. This kind of effort to speak the truth is not common in our political class. They cannot speak the same language to all sections of population. This new phenomenon called AAP has a fresh air of commitment to truth and learning the ways of nation building.

Vijay Pratap is a founder member of Lokayan, a think tank on democracy. He received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Prize, in 1980. He can be reached at vijaypratap@ vsnl.net.