Confusion is good. It means debate, thought

The Congress as a political party is a fascinating entity. Its sense of tradition continuity, its obsession with youth, its sense of dynasty, its idea of the future make it appear as a conglomerate of confusions. I think the presentation of a confused self is an art form. It states one is incomplete, limited, open and ready for experiments. It allows for layers of complexity, and the hypocrisy that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) may not possess. The latter are more simplistic bunch as they are on a core competence of competing ideologies. Ideologies simplify while the Congress lives out the complexity of its confusions.
Earlier, the complexity of the Congress was coalitional. It embodied the rainbows of the political mind, becoming a meta-narrative of politics. Political scientist Rajni Kothari captured it brilliantly in his book Politics in India. But the Congress’ current confusions and the creativity involved in it are of a different kind. One is focusing more on the Cabinet and the party leadership. There is a part of the Congress that spouts the best of management and believes in the gospel of capital. One sees it in the behaviour of Kamal Nath, the ideas of P. Chidambaram, even the worldview of Praful Patel. To parody them, they seem to hold that investm­ent delayed is investment denied.
Opposed to them is a second network whose ideas have centred around the informal economy and eco-system. First there is Sonia Gandhi who provides a quiet thoughtfulness to issues, a tacit confidence to NGOs working on Narega or the need for right to information. Mrs Gandhi brings a housewife’s sense of detail and economy to big programmes, demanding a sense of feedback or sensitivity that the old-fashioned call “conscience”.
The second figure in this scenario is more flamboyant and controversial. Jairam Ramesh has been lambasted for political biases for harassing non-Congress regimes. Mr Ramesh’s career was a collection of technocratic messages from his stint under Lavraj Kumar to his time with Sam Pitroda. The individuality of Mr Ramesh as a person has to be divorced from his social role as a minister. It is his role that is important because it emphasises issues that go beyond personalities. Mr Ramesh allowed environmental politics to move from shareholder to stakeholder politics. Environment becomes more widely representational. As a technocrat he also knows the power of method. As a politician he understands the validity of debate. By combining method as fairness with justice as a social concern, he becomes a challenge to the current ideas of development that are utterly indifferent to suffering. Ecology is back as a question of governance through all the rituals of regulation, assessment and feedback. Mr Ramesh the technocrat is a hero to the ecological movement. Tribals, whose ways of life were mere footnotes of development, have now acquired a different textual prominence in industrial clearances.
Mr Ramesh showed the same courage to tell the urban interests around the new Mumbai airport that environmental clearance is a gauntlet they have to run. After years of Mr Nath as environment minister, such behaviour comes almost like an ambush to investors and urban developers.
The debate on ecology and development still wavers at the middle range of the methodological. Method as science contends with participation as democracy. Representation becomes a turf war between the claims of experts and the arguments of NGOs dreaming alternative imaginations. But there is a new effervescence to politics creating a sense of debate between the ideas of civil society and the logic of the market.
The pendulum swings are still at the tactical level of politics. There is no reference to ethics or ideology, or to justice with a capital “J”. Then comes Rahul Gandhi who clears the ethical and political decks. He states he is the voice of the Orissa tribals in Delhi. The effect is electric. It galvanises civil society and creates a sense of concern, ethics, care within what till now was a space of indifference.
I am not interested in personalities, but in the diversity of scenarios emerging in the debate. The argument of the investment-friendly trio of ministers mentioned earlier now meets the triptych of environmental sensitivity. The Cabinet has become a debating society of confusions where the left hand need not know what the right hand is doing. For the first time in decades there is a diversity of positions openly articulated in Cabinet politics. These differences cannot be reduced to personality politics or factionalism. What we have is a lattice of public debates providing a variety of mental models.
One senses the same over the violence of Naxalism. If Mr Chidambaram as home minister pl­ays McNamara, Digvijay Sin­gh provides a tutorial on the politics of negotiability to him. The Congress does not need Mamata Ba­nerjee as it has a diversity of po­sitions on the possibility of po­li­t­i­cs within it. What is seen as an em­barrassment actually adds to the dynamism of politics, especi­a­lly to its openness. There is no­thing embarrassing about confusion. It might actually represent a new politics of authenticity.
I think the Congress should encourage such debates. Not all of it needs the public eye but one can look forward to a valuable public space where the policy is no longer rigid. The prospect is enticing. As one steps towards globalisation, clarity might be a reflection of the parochial. A whole range of issues, like terror, violence, poverty, rights, security and justice, need to be debated again. A Congress that is unafraid of controversy becomes open to new possibilities. Democracy acquires a new sense of gossip of intellectual debate.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not irrelevant to all this. His is a leadership that allows the diversity. At a time when other major parties are feeling insecure and umbilical about ideology, this is an openness that the future will celebrate.
Such an openness needs to be encouraged. It can create new thought experiments and possibilities in Kashmir. It can reopen the possibilities of the informal economy by re-creating a new politics of livelihood. The pomposity of experts need not worry us. A Congress open to the noise of politics might create a new music. Even if the goal is messed up, the process in a democratic sense is socially welcome.