Bollywood doesn’t sell

Shun those attention-seeking, unruly MPs and they will learn to behave, writes Jay Panda.

Despite the cringe-inducing behaviour that has become common in Parliament, its members are rational people. More often than not, there’s a method to the madness, which has developed over the decades and has its own system of rewards and punishments. As a republic, India is six decades old; at a similar stage in developed-country democracies, the legislative ambience was similar.

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Joanne Freeman of Yale University, who is writing a book on violence in the US Congress in the 19th century, states that “(members) pulled knives and guns on one another. There were shoving matches and canings... Tables were flipped, inkwells and spittoons went flying”. And yet, today that very same US Congress is a model of procedural rectitude and decorum. I hesitate to speculate how long it might be before our Parliament discovers that ambience, but I am convinced that we will. In part, my hope stems from an unlikely parallel: Bollywood.

Both electoral politics and Bollywood cater to the masses, who prefer tamasha over subtle storytelling. Look back a generation, and Bollywood’s offerings for middle class sensitivities were relatively slim pickings. That’s where the spectacle of Parliament remains today, with very little on offer for the middle class voter. Many parliamentarians are still stuck in the mould of the anti-establishment, rampaging, angry young man, because that persona, in politics as in the Bollywood of an earlier era, paid dividends.

Many of our politicians cut their teeth in an era when literacy levels were lower, and the explosion in the electronic mass media had yet to happen. Disrupting Parliament was a way of getting attention, whereas asserting that same position via a debate was pointless in a country where most voters never got to hear of it. This strategy still pays dividends because of the media’s tendency to highlight disruptive behaviour and ignore parliamentary discussions.

Bollywood, in the meantime, has evolved. As India’s middle-class grew, filmmakers smelled money, and as a result today’s productions include a large number that target this new demographic. These productions are much more nuanced and less dishum-dishum. Politics, on the other hand, hasn’t kept up with the middle class as much because it hasn’t had the incentive: the middle class continues to be stingy with the only currency that ultimately matters in politics: votes.

This is rather odd by the standards of developed country democracies, where middle class activism in politics, including voter turnout at elections, is far higher than that of the poor. Perhaps it can be explained by the fact that the size of the middle class far outnumbers the poor, thus putting much more of their way of life at stake.

So, why aren’t we experiencing a similar improvement in parliamentary decorum? I believe it’s because the size of our middle class — as a percentage of the total population — and the level of its engagement with the political process, has not yet reached a tipping point. When they do, it will be more profitable for politicians to adapt to what appeals to this demographic than to persist in the old ways.

To me the big question is not if, but when. My optimism stems from both the continuing growth of the middle class and the many new examples of their recognition that it must engage with the political process in order to see it improve. And I keep hoping for the surest prescription for curing bad behaviour in Parliament: for the media to simply ignore it.

Jay Panda is MP, Lok Sabha

The views expressed by the author are personal