Bangalore’s New Agenda Setters

Is the media’s unquestioning hosting of the B.PAC yet another example of its propensity for elite groups & movements?

WrittenBy:Mathew Idiculla
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Midway into Headlines Today’s Right to be Heard-Town Hall show in Bangalore, a group of youngsters in colourful “B.PAC” T-Shirts came up to the centre and began to perform an aerobic style dance – which was referred to as a flash mob.  According to a tweet by Rajdeep Sardesai, a similar “flash mob” of young B.PAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee) volunteers spontaneously appeared in Sagarika Ghose’s yet to be telecast special show on the Karnataka elections and also in various shopping malls across Bangalore. What B.PAC seeks to do with these flashes in the pan is to urge Bangaloreans to go out and vote.

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So is this the arrival of “mob culture” into Karnataka politics? The not-so-sudden break out of some of the audience members into a jig in the middle of a serious conversation on Headlines Today represents one of the most awkward scenes in news television in the recent past.

More interestingly, when Rahul Kanwal asked one of the dancing girls (or “mobsters” if that’s more appropriate) whether she is going to vote the answer was a ready “no”. The reason, when prompted to say so, was that she hadn’t found a good candidate.

The irony could not have been greater. The young crusader in a citizen’s initiative which sought to bring in maximum number of new voters by endorsing “good” candidates didn’t think there was anyone or anything worth voting for. It is symptomatic of the larger problem of how the ever-extoled “young Indian” sees its new role and how groups like B.PAC seek to engage with politics. It also demonstrates the problem of the national media’s constant engagement with elite groups/movements and issues.

B.PAC which calls itself “a group of responsible citizens” is helmed by Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Mohandas Pai and was officially launched in February this year by Narayana Murthy. In the Assembly elections coverage, while the regional media largely ignored the citizen’s initiative – as it perhaps understands its limited influence in affecting the electoral result – the English news media chose to go ga-ga over them. This could be result of the urban or class bias, the ability of B.PAC’s effective PR team to induce big media to feature them, or simply a case of lazy, inexpensive journalism where the story of Karnataka election is best captured by a TV debate with a few “prominent” Bangaloreans.

In the studios and newsrooms of Delhi, Bangalore represents Karnataka, and the likes of Narayana Murthy, Mohandas Pai and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw represent Bangalore. Hence, the skewed coverage of the elections is not surprising. Before Rahul Kanwal’s special programme on Bangalore, NDTV 24X7’s Barkha Dutt did an election special – We The People on the topic- “Civil Society and Politics: Call for Change?” positioning B.PAC as a unique citizen’s initiative. CNN- IBN also featured B.PAC as a success story in its India Positive show and Times Now featured it as one of the “agents of change”.

B.PAC, like most other innovations in Bangalore, is imported from the US. PACs in the US are organisations, usually representing particular business interests, which raise money to support or defeat candidates and also influence laws and policies. Ironically, PACs were first formed in 1947 by labour unions to circumvent a law that prohibited them from financially supporting candidates. In Bangalore, the initiative has come not from the workers or common Bangaloreans but from its elite IT-BT entrepreneurs and other “prominent citizens” of Bangalore.

What’s interesting about the citizen’s initiative is its claim of representation. The initiative purports to not represent any particular interest but speak on behalf of all the citizens of the city. With slogans like “vote for a better Bangalore”, which while sounding empty and unspecific, seeks to further an inclusive agenda.  But as members of the initiative have themselves admitted, the effort so far has been to build a large vote-bank of urban educated, middle-class citizens who infamously do not vote.

After the voter registration drive, it has now endorsed a set of 14 candidates from 12 constituencies among the 27 constituencies present in Bangalore and has decided to fund each of the endorsed candidates with Rs 5 lakh.  In endorsing the candidates, B.PAC considered factors like past record of public service, level of education, and absence of criminal record – issues typically resonating with the middle-class. Among the candidates endorsed, five are from Congress, three from BJP, three from Lok Satta, two from JD(S) and one from Yedyurappa’s KJP.

As is apparent, there is a clear effort to remain neutral by a do-not-displease-any-political-party approach. Interestingly, the two constituencies where they have supported more than one candidate are constituencies where Lok Satta candidates have been endorsed. The only Lok Satta candidate who got singular support from B.PAC is Ashwin Mahesh, a former NASA scientist and a founder member of B.PAC. New urban parties like Lok Satta and Aam Aadmi Party (which is not contesting the Karnataka polls) also largely cater to the urban middle class constituency and the presence of AAP’s State convenor, Prithvi Reddy as a founder member of B.PAC reveals the many overlaps between the citizen groups.

But if the initiative was completely honest about bringing in “clean politics”, instead of endorsing candidates from established parties, it would have endorsed more from Lok Satta and independents. The approach of B.PAC seems to be a more pragmatic one though, that considers winnability and is perhaps even Machiavellian in endorsing candidates across the ideological spectrum. In this process, candidates like Lok Satta’s Sridhar Pabisetty, the COO of Centre for Public Policy, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, failed to get their nod. So is B.PAC merely a lobby group of Bangalore’s elite entrepreneurs who want their agenda imposed through endorsing and funding candidates who have a fair chance of winning?

It wouldn’t be strange if that’s how B.PAC is perceived. All the endorsed candidates have to support the Agenda for Bangalore set by B.PAC. The Agenda includes reforming the governance structure of Bangalore to ensure the city’s autonomy; including citizens in decision-making and allowing experts to be nominated to the city council and its standing committees; increasing revenue of Bangalore by having  a major share of professional tax, stamp duty and road tax collected from the city to remain with the city; ensuring accountability of agencies by public disclosure of information, progress reports and CAG audits; strengthening urban politics by increasing the number of Parliament and Assembly seats allotted to urban areas and setting realistic limits of expenditure for campaign financing.

Beyond the clear urban bias in the agenda, the image of Bangalore that emerges in B.PAC’s agenda is that of a “world-class” city that’s rich in its financial resources and is conducive to do business. One of the instances of influencing policy (or lobbying) in its agenda is the demand that every part of a proposal drawn up by the Karnataka Information Technology and Communication (ICT) Group be implemented.

The rhetoric on “public participation” in governance and “citizen’s involvement” in decision-making is unsurprisingly high. What this translates to mean, as the city has witnessed before, is that certain powerful individuals and interest groups get a direct say in the way policies are decided by the state. Under SM Krishna’s tenure, it came in the form of the Nandan Nilekeni-headed Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) and under BS Yedeyurappa it came less effectively through Agenda for Bangalore’s Infrastructural Development (ABIDe). B.PAC seeks to take on their mantle, whoever comes to power in the elections. In fact, the demand for “citizen experts”, which could mean the members of B.PAC itself, to be nominated to Bangalore’s Municipal Corporation, is explicit in its “Agenda for Bangalore”.

Anyone questioning B.PAC has been derided as cynics who are suspicious of supporting “good people who are at least doing something”. But it is exactly what the “something” that B.PAC seeks to do that needs to be critically looked at. An innate cynicism at B.PAC’s effort due to its elite routes is perhaps not healthy, especially since Bangalore’s entrepreneurs didn’t amass wealth by the standard business model of loot-and-sale of natural resources.  But instead of training their skeptical eyes into how citizen’s groups like B.PAC operate, the media coverage of the initiative was celebratory and even starry-eyed.  Hopefully, the young B.PAC volunteer’s display of indifference to electoral political process under media glare would mean that people view the valiant young Indian and the noble citizen’s groups more realistically and critically.

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