How Mandal drives the battle against the bottle

Chennai: First the vignettes and then rises the political collage. Weeks back, actor-politician and DMDK founder Vijayakanth lived up to his celluloid roots, as he released the ‘first part’ of his party’s manifesto for the May 16 Assembly polls
in Tamil Nadu through a video at its Kancheepuram conference.

The other day PMK’s youth wing leader and its Chief Ministerial candidate, Dr Anbumani Ramadoss was seen fuming on television how the Dravidian major DMK’s 2016 election manifesto, “is 60 per cent a cut-and-paste job of the PMK’s draft manifesto.” But the DMK patriarch M Karunanidhi was unruffled, as his party sought to impress the electorate with a comprehensive agenda for action.  

And just a few days back when the AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa released her party’s electrifying poll manifesto at a rally in Erode, a citadel of the Dravidian Movement associated with one of its consolidators, E V Ramasamy Periyar, it was the turn of the DMK’s youth wing leader M K Stalin to hurl the ‘Xerox-copy’ charge on Amma’s document. Explicitly at least, the two other key fronts, ‘People’s Welfare Alliance (PWA)-DMDK-TMC combine, and BJP plus its allies, are yet to join in this unseemly war of words on who was “inspired” by whose poll manifesto.

Pouring over these testaments of faith with great multiplicity, even the great American philosopher William James who once said, “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,” would have blushed. But to be fair to all the leaders in the poll arena, after all the sound and fury, some new irreducible common elements, transcending party lines, have come from these manifestos.
Even if Dr Anbumani likes to do a little bit of Donald Trump’s brazenness in asking should all leaders in Tamil Nadu “come only from the world of cinema”, or actor Vijayakanth least worried about what people think of his expansive delivery style, the PWA leaders led by MDMK chief Vaiko eying a ‘snatch a Kejriwal moment’ theme, or the BJP leaders clearly pushing for voting out both the Dravidian majors, the political reactor ahead of this polls badly needs a coolant.

Thankfully, some underlying narratives hinging on people’s overall welfare have turned up as moderators. Bracketing the nitty-gritty’s, the controversies and convergence have largely revolved around the issues of prohibition and freebies.
And both these relate to the gains of a nearly century-old stance of ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of backward classes (BC), other backward classes (OBC) and other depressed sections, though the Dalits are still on the margins, through reservation policy at the state-level and later cemented by the Mandal Commission’s report taking it forward at the all-India level.

In fact, all the political parties this time including Congress, notwithstanding its next-door Pondicherry predicaments, are for “reintroducing total prohibition” in Tamil Nadu, while the AIADMK has more realistically opted for it in phases.
If thus, prohibition has become a universal favourite, it means the notion of self-respect has enlarged from just Tamil linguistic/cultural pride to ending the social misery and ruination of the family structure that unmitigated alcohol consumption can trigger. This realization has slowly, yet steadily dawned alongside progressive economic empowerment of the BC/OBCs’ over the decades.

So don’t be surprised if the key ‘Mandal metaphor’ that has catalysed post-1980s’ political discourse in India, a narrative that began even earlier in erstwhile Madras Presidency, is now ‘driving the battle against the bottle’. While the PMK’s founder Dr S Ramadoss has been highlighting this issue in recent years along with a few committed Gandhians and few others in the Left Movement, the giveaway on the Mandal aspect is in the PMK’s election manifesto itself.  

The PMK’s document harks back to need for caste census, extending reservation to the private sector, - the DMK wants it in the upper echelons of the Judiciary too-, and above all to Dr Ramadoss’ pet theme of proportional representation.
“With the support of the Supreme Court (given the 50 per cent cap on quota fixed in the famous Indra Sawhney Vs the Union of India that came to be known as the Mandal case), 100 per cent reservation will be implemented,” says the PMK’s election manifesto. That reservations, while lessening socio-economic inequalities, have not led to real egalitarianism is another complex issue by itself.

“The OBCs’ in India have now really come on their own,” said a social scientist. Thus, whether it is Bihar or Tamil Nadu, cutting across parties that represent their interests, restrictions on liquor seems to be a must in any social agenda.
Consequently, the pro-right attacks on freebies/welfare schemes/ subsidies etc. are quite misplaced as they have also been at the heart of the economic empowerment of the OBCs’ and others.

In a Keynesian sense, planned public spending on these, in whatever form, from free education, health care, loan write-offs, to free mixers and grinders or electricity, helps to increase ‘aggregate demand’ and improve the overall liquidity in the economic system. Singling out Ms. Jayalalithaa alone on this issue looks political rhetoric at best.

Nonetheless, as economists have rightly cautioned, future governments at Centre and States must keep an eye on the limits of public debt and strive for more jobs and overall economic growth.     

With just a week to go for the polling day, a word on results of various opinion polls, which have become part of these narratives. As the distinguished American philosopher W.V. Quine said, if two theories can account for a same or similar set of data, that far reality “is under-determined”. Hence, we all need to wait for the proverbial last vote, cast and counted.