One of the reasons for the scarcity of water in India’s hill states is climate change: the amount of rainfall and snow the hills get has reduced. This is not a projection but a lived reality.
Yet nobody seems to care about this. Climate change was not an election issue in Himachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand. Parties were not trying to impress voters with who has the best plan to combat climate change.
Some say issues like climate change or air pollution don’t become political issues because economic issues are at the forefront for most voters. People are too busy trying to eke out a living to care about complex policy issues. In that case, unemployment and inflation should be big issues. But we don’t hear much about them in our political discourse.
Are people not worried about air pollution? If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be buying air purifiers. Many can’t afford an air purifier but would like one. Why don’t people put enough pressure on politicians so that they are forced to present competing plans on how they will combat air pollution? I didn’t see this become an issue in the recently held municipal elections in Delhi, held very much during the pollution season.
If you ask politicians, they say people don’t care about these issues enough to influence votes. If you ask voters, they say politicians don’t care about these issues. It becomes a chicken and egg question.
The trap of identity politics
So what do voters care about, according to politicians? Caste, religion, freebies and access to power. In my election travels, I have asked voters about this, and they blame politicians.
Why do you vote on caste lines? “Because that’s the way politicians look at us.”
The result is that the important issues of our time are relegated to the pages of the manifestos nobody reads. That these manifestos are released a day or two before polling day tells you how much our politicians think issues matter.
In the United States, you will see even the worst populist — say Donald Trump — going from state to state, making claims about how many jobs his policies helped create in that state. Recently, climate change has been the biggest issue in Australian elections, helping overthrow the ruling party. In the UK, whether or not the National Health Service is adequately funded matters to people when they go to vote.
The old explanations for this used to be that India is not literate and educated enough for the public to be involved in complex policy issues. That is nonsense: there is a large critical mass of Indians educated, interested and able to engage in matters of public policy.
Crystallising public opinion
The answer to this question is that nobody is taking the lead in setting the agenda. A weakened civil society is unable to grab media attention. Our opposition parties are lost in an era of BJP dominance, often dejected that the public is not responding to them.
Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, wrote a book called Crystalising Public Opinion. You don’t even need to read the book to grasp its main message, that public opinion needs to be crystallised. The raw materials are present in society. It needs a catalyst to crystallise public opinion from the raw material.
If in 2010 someone told you that India would see a massive anti-corruption movement demanding a law for a new ombudsman, you would have laughed. Lawmaking is not the stuff of mass movement. Yet that is what happened in 2011. Similarly, you could have been dejected in 2011 that women’s safety is not a political issue in India. Yet in 2012, it became one, so much so that women’s safety became an election agenda in 2013-14.
Climate change, air pollution, quality of education, the need to increase public spending on health, the need for a data privacy law, and even a re-look into the misuse of special laws — all of these and some more can become big public issues. All they need is a catalyst. The catalyst could be a party, a leader, a non-profit, or the media.
Who will bell the cat?
Sadly, nobody seems to want to try. People have decided that we the people don’t care. Nobody wants to bell the cat.
Walking from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, from the southern to the northern tip of the Indian peninsula, Rahul Gandhi has wasted his effort in abstraction. He has gone from the philosophical to the transcendental.
Instead of grabbing attention on the issues that matter to the public, he’s making headlines for teaching people martial arts and claiming that ‘Rahul Gandhi has killed Rahul Gandhi’. Ask an average citizen on the road what the Bharat Jodo Yatra was about, and she won’t know.
The word “leader” means someone who leads. Our politicians will have to have faith in the people to start setting the agenda, start talking about things that really matter, and make them the centre of our politics.
