Sai Mukhesh
The disinterestedly wise ought to desire the holding together of all being — Bhagavad Gita, Verse 3.25
Normal men do not know that everything is possible — David Rousset
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present — Albert Camus
The liberal democratic apparatus has been imploding, and the more I think about the lying world order [1], the more I am convinced—from global to provincial—that beneath the facade of democracy is an oft-concealed rotting reality. The political theorist Michael Walzer writes in “Liberalism and the Art of Separation” that “Liberalism is a world of walls, and each one creates a new liberty” (315). If the autonomous institutions strengthen liberal democracy, fusing these institutions with a supreme leader’s and a single party’s will or the sovereignty of capital indicates a totalitarian impulse. The litmus test for any proclaimed democracy, be it the largest or the smallest, is whether the institutional integrity is being upheld or erased.
In the Indian context, an attempt at answering this test shows that the signs of rot are all around us. For example, the judiciary and the election commission ought to act disinterestedly, but they overwhelmingly do not. The totalitarian impulse visible in the collapse of institutions integral to the well-being of citizens of a polis does not entirely take the form of classic totalitarianism. The demise of democracy, as we have been witnessing, is not a collapse into classic totalitarianism—total mobilization, total war, and the like—but is nicely orchestrated so that only the facade of democracy remains. At the same time, insidiously, like cancer cells, the core gets killed from the inside. How does this killing unfold? In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin argues,
One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic: surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media. (105)
We see the replacement of citizenry by the electorate, i.e., “voters who acquire political life at the time of elections” (59), to sustain an order that keeps the power and capital in the hands of few. Wolin coined the term “inverted totalitarianism” [2] for this phenomenon. Managed democracy, the product of inverted totalitarianism, “exploits what appear to be formidable political and legal constraints, using them in ways that defeat their original purpose but without dismantling or overtly attacking them” (56).
The Economist Claire Mattei, in her book, The Capital Order, defines the capital order as maintaining a certain sociopolitical order (“the social relation of capital—people selling their labor power for a wage—must be uniform across a society”) to promote economic growth (4). Politicians, policymakers, and some economists always almost invoke austerity [3] to maintain the requisite sociopolitical order for unhinged economic growth. Mattei argues that austerity is “an anti-democratic reaction to threats of bottom-up social change” (7). It is an invocation by the economists and technocrats—whose actions are increasingly inseparable from the establishment’s policy-making—with the supposedly transcendental understanding of economics, which claims that economic growth is an undeniable good. In the book, Mattei shows how austerity policies originated post-World War I to subdue the alternatives to capitalism that arose during the war. In short, it was a deliberate and successful attempt to keep democratic practices at bay by its subjugation to the sovereignty of capital order.
Once the goodness of economic growth is established as the good for all, the social cuts, higher interest rates, and wealth generation for the very few are posited as the necessary conditions for attaining a good life in the future. In short, the deferral is ideological since it promises utopia for all in the future and delivers wealth only for the select few in the present. In other words, Capitalism is the ideology of managed democracy, and capital order is sustained through deliberate subjugation of democracy to non-democratic economic policies—such as invoking austerity to pump money into corporations at the cost of social spending, which results in profit maximization of the few and burden on the non-saving and non-investing public.
In this article, I attempt to elaborate on the themes introduced—managed democracy and the capital order—in light of recent corruption scandals in the youngest state of India, Telangana. I look at the recent developments in Telangana to understand how universal capital order and managed democracy play out in particular provinces. Also, I try to underscore the importance of Wolin’s question from the book Democracy Incorporated: “Can the citizens relearn the demands that democracy places on its highest, most difficult office—not as commonly supposed on the office of the president, but on that of the citizen?” (43)
Ten years ago, the State of Telangana was formed on 2nd June 2014 with many aspirations. It seems that the Bhartiya Rashtra Samiti (BRS) that governed Telangana for the past ten years, regardless of a wave of welfare schemes [4] that it introduced, has pushed the state into a seven lakh crore debt crisis, allegedly oversaw a major surveillance scandal [5] involving tapping the phones of opposition party members, media and the perceived enemies inside the party. Meanwhile, Kavita, the daughter of K. Chandrashekar Rao (KCR)—the BRS party’s founder and two-time chief minister of Telangana—was arrested on the charges that she is a vital member in the Delhi liquor scandal [6]. The BRS government invested one lakh crores in Kaleshwaram, touted as the world’s largest lift irrigation project. However, issues have arisen with the piers of the Medigadda barrage [7], a crucial component of Kaleshwaram. The Dam Safety Authority has yet to report on the safety of the barrage. And the 700 crore sheep scam [8], which saw the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) arrested by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB).
Allegedly, a ten thousand crore scam [9] involved diverting paddy meant for the Public Distribution System (PDS) with the help of BRS officials. Five months ago, the Indian National Congress (INC) won the third assembly election and formed the government, promising the delivery of six guarantees [10] that would push the state further down in the debt crisis if implemented properly. During the reign of ex-CM KCR, the current CM, A. Revanth Reddy, was caught red-handed in the vote-for-note [11] case. The incumbent government has released several white papers on irrigation projects, welfare schemes, electricity, and other issues to show the corruption of the BRS government. The BRS party retaliated by responding to these allegations in the assembly meetings; however, there were no definite conclusions as expected.
Instead of thinking about the correct course of action for the overall good of society, political parties engage in sophistry and gain a rhetorical victory at the expense of not being concerned about the question of the good life, or worse, present themselves as the precursors of the highest good by using filthy propaganda….
https://mainstreamweekly.net/article14980.html
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
After the truth-shower 