PARLIAMENT IS A SERVANT OF DEMOCRACY - Shekhar Kapur

PARLIAMENT IS A SERVANT OF DEMOCRACY

With the BJP having announced Narendra Modi as their Prime Ministerial candidate and Manmohan Singh having said that Rahul Gandhi would be his choice, we spoke to Shekhar Kapur about his view on the current political scenario. Excerpts:

    “India was formed on the idea ‘Let’s get the British out.’ Today again, India needs an idea to hold it together. Independence brought together so many different cultures and languages in different states. It is interesting that Nehru fought and kept saying that if you break India into languages, there is no end to it. So may be what we need is a different idea to hold it together. For a long time, Bollywood held it together. Dev Anand was a star everywhere. Now, cricket holds it together. Business holds it together. 800 million cellphones will hold it together. It cannot be held together politically. I don't think we will see another strong central government due to coalition politics, the effect of which we are seeing — scams and each partner wanting his pound of flesh. We need to change our political system to adapt to the changing India. The population, at the time our constitution was written, was 350 million, 85% being agricultural and demographically older. At that time if you said that people will want to migrate to bigger cities and that young people will change the world and that the world itself will change everyday with technology, no one would have believed you. So the point is that the system was not set up for 1.2 billion people with the youngest population of the world, a large part of which is urban. We are adding 12 million youth every year in the unemployment pool. An angry youth has to have a way of expressing it. Growth is not spreading in the way it should and is not as wide as it should be. I used to say to everybody you should fight from inside. But the fact is, it’s a club with membership rules. People get into the system and become a part of it. We are not inherently corrupt people. We just have such a system, with so much inertia in it, that only the corrupt can get through. We were born in a system that accepted feudality. This generation will not accept that. Parliament is a servant of democracy. We now need a new form of democracy that responds to India that is rejecting central control. We need to change the political system from inside — create a kind of Jan Lok Pal that sits above the political system, but not above democracy. Coalition partners will look for a central leader who is not strong. Yet the demand of the Indian democracy is that you need a strong central leader.”

Shekhar Kapur