The times we live in

"As the Age[1] turns to evil every virtue decays and vanishes : honesty, forbearance, kindness, memory and strength disappear.

Wealth replaces a noble birth, character and conduct. Might becomes right, for might alone determines dharma and justice.

Trade and fraudulent practice become synonymous.

The law will favour only the rich, and will have no regard for justice. He that can curse and swear best will be considered the finest scholar.

Poverty will be sufficient cause to establish guilt in the eyes of the law, while wealth and ostentation will be indices of character.

Rudeness and brashness of speech will be equal to dharma.

He that maintains his family by the foulest means will be considered respectable. Dharma will be observed only for exhibition.

Whoever is strong and daring will become the king, and will rule like greedy lustful bandits, with plunder and rapine of their own subjects, who will often flee such tyranny and seek refuge in forests and mountains.

Exhausted by cruel taxes, deprived of rains in lands from which true dharma has fled, the people will subsist on wild vegetation, roots, flesh, fruits, flowers, etc.

Kings will become mere robbers, and men, driven by despair and poverty, will become thieves, liars and murderers.

Men will become bestial and perverse-- miserly, ruthless, greedy and vindictive for the flimsiest reasons.

Arrogance, hypocrisy, deception, dishonesty, sloth, somnolence, cruelty of every kind, delusion, terror and wretchedness will rule.

Brigands and robbers will rule the land. Kings will all be tyrants.

People will espouse gluttony, lasciviousness and venality of every kind.

The vilest men will become the foremost traders, making cheating and thievery the common practice of the marketplace. Even when they are not threatened with any danger, men will take to forbidden means to earn their livelihood, and pride themselves on it.

Relationships between parents and children, brothers, friends and relations will not be valued.
Seated upon the sacred thrones of great and holy gurus of yore, men that are masters only of vice will expound dharma to the gullible populace.

Depleted by dreadful taxes, tormented by drought, starved, owning none of the bare necessities of life---homes, clothes, food and drink, a bed, a bath, etc. --men will seem more like bhutas (ghosts) and pisachas (demons).

Over small matters, members of the same family will fight their own blood relations, even unto death, forgetting all ties of affection.

No one will bother to look after their old parents any more, they will only live for themselves, and will neglect their own children. "

--Bhagavad Purana- 12th Chapter.

You might think this has to do with something that is happening right now. But it is written in the Bhagavad Purana, ancient scriptures collated and published around the 6th or 7th century CE. What caught my attention was the amazing resonance with our time.

Notes:

[1] Probably referring to Kaliyuga

Reinventing Government

I will divert briefly to Government as I am reading some excerpts from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's book "Reinventing Government" [Osborne and Gaebler, 1992]. The book draws many of its ideas from the reforms in Britain in the 1980s and became an inspiration for the Clinton presidency. As the primary objective of political parties is to form government, we will keep these ideas in mind as we develop our own political concepts and ideology. The chief tenets are of the book are:

1. Government should concentrate on catalyzing various social and economic activities. It should steer, that is, give broad support and direction, rather than get involved in rowing, that is, in actual operations. It should steer rather than row.
2. The government should empower communities to serve themselves rather than the government itself getting involved in community service activities. The services in which community control can be especially beneficial could be health, schooling, and welfare related services.
3. The government should set out to create competition in public service delivery
   so that citizens, as customers, get the best value for money. For example, monolithic public sector organizations could be broken up into numerous units to foster competition; public services could be contracted out to the best bidder, and bidders could include public as well as private sector agencies; and an option could be given to government agencies to buy from inside the public sector or outside it. Privatization of a government activity or service could be done in such a way as to promote competition, for example, by handing it over to several parties rather than a single party.
4. The government should be transformed from being rules-driven to being mission-driven, that is, driven by a vision of excellence and a sense of mission.
5. The government should be results-oriented, and fund outcomes rather than inputs. The tendency in democratic governments is to worry about whether the budgeted expenditure is incurred or not, and whether government rules have been followed or not in incurring it. Instead, the stress should be on getting results even if it means liberalizing the budgeting rules and regulations, such as by permitting agencies to reallocate money from one head to another freely, or to carry forward the unspent balance next year without prior government approval.
6. The government should be customer-driven, meeting the needs of the citizen-customer rather than mainly the needs and requirements of the bureaucracy. This could be done through customer surveys and follow-up assessments of changes introduced as a result of such surveys, compulsory minimum contact of each staff member with the customers of the government agency or department, setting up of customer councils for feedback, of focus groups for dialog on a new service or service modification, creating electronic facilities for customers to communicate directly with an agency, customer service training for agency staff, test marketing of new services, giving of quality guarantees to customers, use of undercover inspectors to monitor public services, the setting up of efficient complaint registering and complaint tracking systems, etc.
7. The government should become more business-like, and try and earn what it spends on its various activities. Thus, its agencies should price their services rather than give them as gratis, and price them to generate a surplus. Having to support activities on their own would make these agencies value efficiency much more.
8. The government should concentrate on prevention rather than cure, and learn to anticipate problems. Governments generally tend to be reactive and that too slowly. Also, often governments undertake activities without thinking through their wider implications for pollution, environmental degradation and effects on disadvantaged groups. Anticipation of these consequences could lead to more effective plans.
9. The government should decentralize its operations and learn to get its work done through participative management and teamwork rather than hierarchically through the orders of bosses. For example, the bulk of authority over schools could be transferred from the local government to teams of principals, teachers and parents; a field laboratory to test creative ideas could be participatively setup; staff meetings could be held to brainstorm on how to rehabilitate a moribund sanitation department, etc.
10. The government should harness incentives and markets rather than controls and regulations to bring about desired changes, such as by offering guarantees for educational loans by banks to students rather than give loans itself, by creating a secondary market for housing loans, by taxing pollution at punitive rates rather than banning it, and by providing tax credits or vouchers to low income families to get [nutrition,] child care [or other benefits] from the market.

The central government's focus should be shifted from red tape to results by reinventing and redesigning government systems, agencies and programs to make them more responsive to their "customers", and to streamline the administration to make its operations cost-effective and its managers more accountable and empowered.

During the Clinton era, recommendations on the National Performance Review (NPR) task force (as the reinventing initiative was called) resulted in an estimated savings of nearly  $60 billion. Some 2000 field offices were closed and 160,000 positions were eliminated. Scores of agencies began to measure their performance, and over 200 developed and posted more than 3000 customer service standards. The federal government workforce was also cut by over 17%.

Some metrics on governance quality included among others:

• Government Effectiveness - the ability of government to pursue its priorities such as encouraging business, delivering quality public goods and services, and the control of waste in government.
• Political Stability - the absence of social unrest, radicalism and coercive governance
• Voice and Accountability - democratic functioning and the rule of law

In all, six perceived governance quality measures (affecting per capita GDP), each an aggregate of a number of sub-measures, are:

• Voice and accountability - orderly change of government, transparent and fair legal system, civil rights, political freedoms, press and media freedom, freedom from military influence, etc
• Absence of political instability and violence - absence of social unrest, coups, terrorism, civil war, armed conflict, ethnic or tribal tensions, coercive government, radicalism, etc
• Government effectiveness - pro-enterprise policies, degree of red tape and bureaucratic delays, quality and turnover of government personnel, ability to continue programs, political non-interference in public administration, quality of public goods and services, honouring of commitments by new governments, effective implementation, etc
• Reasonableness of regulatory burden - burden of regulation, degree of government intervention in the economy, wage/price controls, tariff barriers, regulations on capital flows, banking regulations, foreign trade regulations, restrictions on non-residents, barriers to entry in banking and other sectors, freedom to compete, effectiveness of anti monopoly legislation, dominance of state owned enterprises, state interference in private business, tax system, etc
• Rule of law - whether crime is properly punished, enforceability of contracts, extent of black market, enforceable rights to property, extent of tax evasion, prevalence of rule of law, police effectiveness, protection of intellectual property, independence of judiciary, ability to challenge government actions in courts, etc
• Absence of graft - absence of corruption among government political and bureaucratic officials, bribes related to securing of permits and licenses, corruption in the judiciary, corruption that scares off foreign investors, etc

Even a cursory glance indicates that we have a long way to go.
The first step in that journey is building inspirational political leadership.

REFERENCES
1. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) website.
2. Reinventing Government, Osborne and Gaebler, 1992

A model for analysing political ideologies

In his column Politics and Society, "Rethinking Political Ideologies", Salvatore Chiarelli asserts that since quantitative models are fundamentally flawed when used for qualitative measurements, the traditional representations of the political spectrum are inadequate for properly comparing and contrasting political ideologies, and hence the need for a qualitative model.

Chiarelli proposes that the new analytical model be based on the work of the jurist and legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, who created a concept known as the Grundnorm, or “grand norm.” Kelsen used this word to denote the basic norm, order, or rule that forms the underlying basis for a legal system. This is a theoretical concept based on a need to find a point of origin on which the system can be legitimized. Conceptually, it is a pyramid with the top-most part being the basic norm and all other norms derived from this in an ordered and logical structure going down to the base of the pyramid (see below). Any norm not within this structure is seen as an illegitimate norm to the structure.

This essentially implies exploring complex political ideologies, both individual and syncretic. Syncretic ideologies are hybrids of disparate political philosophies and has often been dismissed by political parties that are modeled either on the uni-axis left-right political spectrum or on the bi-axis social/economic model.

Kelson's pyramid, which has a basic norm and lesser norms branching outward, better serves the civil community and political discourse. Although Kelsen applied his theory to legal systems and the basic norm of such a system is hypothetical, one cannot only apply it to political ideologies, but can deductively determine the basic norm of each one. Unlike a legal system, a political ideology is much more ordered and intellectually consistent with itself.

Ultimately, politics should not be about left-wing vs right-wing; it should be about answering such questions as hat public policy best benefits the people, what the appropriate role of Government should be, and how to cope with the challenges humanity faces in the future.

I will use this model both to analyze existing ideologies and to determine a core principle (the basic norm) from which an ideology can be derived.




REFERENCES
1. Rethinking political ideologies, Chiarelli, Salvatore [2009]

Political Parties and Ideologies

Political parties are groups of like-minded individuals who seek to realize their shared goals by fielding candidates at elections and thereby securing election to public office. Most conventional parties would ultimately aim to emerge victorious at a general election, and thereby earn the right to form a government. In this respect, parties differ significantly from pressure groups, for while some pressure groups employ electoral candidacy as a means of raising public awareness of their chosen cause, they generally have little interest in being in office.

A political party has to have mass and inclusive membership as well as a formal structure that extends from the Village/Town/Municipality through Tehsil/Taluk and Zila/District to the State and National level, paralleling the administrative structure of government. It is little wonder that founding a viable political party is such a daunting task in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-language country like India. Does it need a formal organization? What form or shape will such an organization take? How will it be funded? What will be the vision, the glue that will sustain it through its critical life cycle phases of inception, infancy and growth?

Ideology has to be the critical underpinnings of such an organization. Or does it? Should vision be based on ideology? So what is ideology?

"An ideology is a set of conscious and unconscious ideas that constitute one's goals, expectations and actions."

Sure. But how do you find a set of people with a common set of ideas? Is it something that can be proposed by a dominant class of a society to all members of the society, a "received consciousness", a product of socialization?

A political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principals, doctrines, myths, or symbols of a social movement, institution, class or a large group that explains how society should work, offers some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social order.

Political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.

Political ideologies have two dimensions:
1. Goals: how society should work
2. Methods: The most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement

Typically, each ideology contains certain ideas on what it considers to be the best form of government (democracy, theocracy, caliphate etc) and the best economic system (capitalism, socialism, communism, etc).

Ideologies also identify themselves by their position on the political spectrum (left, centre, right) though it is rare for a political party to hold one position on the spectrum. A position is more likely to be associated with an issue, rather that with its ideology. Of course, the bi-axis model (figure below, based on Nolan's chart) is often used to better explain the concept of an ideological spectrum.

Ideologies can also be distinguished from political strategies (eg, populism) and from single issues that a party may be built around (for eg., eliminating corruption).

 

Philosopher Michael Oakeshott provides a good definition of ideology as:

"the formalized abridgement of the supposed sub-stratum of the rational truth contained in the tradition". 

Ideologies are systems of abstract thought applied to public matters and thus makes this concept central to politics. Even if not explicitly expressed, implicitly, every political tendency entails an ideology.

But then we have had political ideologies for eons.
Are we any better as a society for it?
Is there a better model?

REFERENCES
1. Rethinking political ideologies: Chiarelli, Salvatore [2009]
2. Links in "Ideology Study Guide"
3. Lenin and philosophy and other essays; Louis Althusser [1971]
4. Ideology and Symbolic Power: Between Althusser and Bourdieu [2009]




 

About this blog?

We all have our opinions! Some write them, some twitter about it, some appear on TV shows. And some blog it!

I am fed up with the narrow minded activity that politics has been reduced to in our country. The terms of the UPA-2 is coming to an end and thank god for that! There is only so much of crap that citizens can take.

But what are the alternatives? BJP is a party that is falling apart with the weight of its own contradictions. Modi could be a great big hope, but in the era of coalition governments, what can one man do? Of course, one can remain hopeful until he proves otherwise. More likely, unless there are some very rapid developments and BJP transforms itself by retiring the old guard, brings in fresh new faces and reinvents and rebrands itself as the "New BJP", we will be getting more of the same, albeit, in a different container!

3rd front? Well, less said the better.

Aam Admi Party? At least their heart appears to be in the right place, though their execution leaves much to be desired. The pace is frenetic and they are in too much of a hurry. If they have to succeed, then they have to give it time and adopt an approach that is both creative and universally applicable for general good.

"General good"! That was once the credo of democracy. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. Right? Wrong! Democracy appears to be a lot more complicated and what given to one always appears to have been taken from another.

So what is the solution? Is there a system that will work better than democracy? Or should a democracy be run differently?

The systems of a democracy as vast and complex as ours needs to go back to the drawing board to be redesigned ground up. The result may or may not be very different to the system we have in place now. If the gaps are small, all we need are a few tweaks to set it right. And if the gaps are large, we have the challenge of a transformation.

I will use this blog to clarify my own mind.
You, the readers of this blog, are quite welcome to use this material, if useful.