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| Monday, 8 March 2004 |
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Politics | |
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| Off the cuff The electorate is a job agency Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar' is not simply an historical tragedy, it is an immortal treatise on politics and politicians. I return to that text again and again because it describes the quintessential politician, the demagogue and demagoguery, and the pathways of justifying atrocity and legitimizing anarchy, best exemplified by the characters of Brutus and Antony. The world has, over the centuries, seen many Brutuses and Antonys. Strip the rhetoric from the practice and we are left with a pretty hollow, human craving. Power. All this I learnt from my father, many years ago, as he read 'Julius Caesar' for me, to help me prepare for an exam. What brought me to Julius Caesar is, not strangely, a short story I read last night, Gabriel Garcia Marquez' 'Bon Voyage, Mr. President'. An ousted President from somewhere in the Caribbean, goes to Geneva for a medical check-up and operation, and is befriended by a compatriot and one time loyalist, Homero. The following dialogue merits reproduction. "Some of my old supporters have been Presidents after me," he said. "Sayago," said Homero. "Sayago and others," he said. "All of us usurping an honour we did not deserve, with an office we did not know how to fill. Some pursue only power, but most are looking for even less: a job." A few years after my father lectured me on Julius Caesar, I read Marquez' 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' and I will never forget how Colonel Aureliano Buendia's responded to the indignation of one of his activist aides when lawyers representing the Liberal Party drafted a truce document to end the long war with the Conservatives, giving into all the demands of the latter. The aide said in alarm "But Colonel, if we agree to this, we would be admitting that for 20 years we have been fighting against the popular will of the people". Colonel Aureliano Buendia's response was classic: "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because it means that from now on we will be fighting for power". Every party and every candidate has a vision. Everyone has a plan. Everyone is honest. Everyone is brave. And humble. The biggest problem of the would-be liberator, whatever his/her ideological persuasion, is that these "attributes" are common property. They can't be privatised. Mr. Random Candidate may wave different coloured banners, articulate different agendas, but his countenance is unmistakable. And his signature is not illegible. It reads, "I want power". Political office is an honour very few deserve. And fewer still have the requisite skills to do a decent job. I think the ousted President in Marquez' story got it a bit wrong. Power and employment are not mutually exclusive entities. They go together. This is why the more enlightened don't talk of the economic and the political but the political economy. When one becomes a Member of Parliament, one ceases to be unemployed. MPs get paid. They even get pensions. They come with job descriptions. They are on contract. Their contracts can be renewed or terminated. And, like most jobs, when the time comes for contract renewal, they can sweet talk the boss (in this case the people), take credit for what others have done, blame others for their lapses, and even promise to deliver heaven and earth (meaning bribe) to the boss. It is a job also in terms of the simple arithmetic of the balance sheet, i.e. the costs and benefits. If you want it in the terms of the economist, you would call it "investment" and "profit". They are all in this because it is, as they would say in the USA, "money in the bank". Good business. Don't let anyone fool you that any one of them really wants to save/rebuild/regain the country. They typically decimate real incomes, destroy culture and heritage, and concede territory and resources to terrorists and swindlers. The bottom line is: they are in this for what they can get. Let's face it, people want power because with power comes money. The tragedy is that very few applicants for this job have to juggle around numbers every time they go to the pola. Chances are, they never even go to a pola. Why should they, when they can go to one of the many supermarkets around, gedara yana gaman, or yana ena gaman, or get someone else to do the shopping? I remember my friend Walter Sumith Pradeep, an undergraduate at the time, responding to a UNP advertisement for applicants to succeed the slain MP for Kuliyapitiya, Lionel Jayatilleke thus: "I want to apply. I want to become an MP. Then I can work out a guru pathveema and resign". What an innocent strategy, compared to what our current crop of aspirants envision! The biggest joke during elections, then, is the fact that thousands of job-seekers come to us seeking a job. Election campaigns are about the unemployed asking the unemployed and under-employed for employment so that they can return the favour later on. Colonel Aureliano Buendia observes at one point, "To think that we fought so many walls just because we didn't want to paint our houses blue!" (A Conservative government agent had ordered all residents of Macondo to paint their houses blue, the party colour) What is colour without substance? Something trivial. It is not something we should put our lives on line to defend. The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating. Sad to say, we never got to see a pudding and we didn't even get to taste the strange-looking piti guliya produced after much effort and labelled "Prosperity" and "Peace". I bet it was not even palatable. Such is the political economy of "dividends", peace and otherwise. This is the long and short of campaign promises and what happens to them before politicians get the next opportunity to promise us the moon. The next time you see someone claiming, "We delivered", ask, "What?" and "To whom?" And if someone starts a sentence with the words, "We shall," tell him/her "We shall refuse to believe you". Chances are, 999 times out of a 1000, you would make him/her squirm. |
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