Principal, teachers, parents and some 200 students of Delhi's elite The Shri Ram School staged a play recently that lambasted the `system'.

The politician, Dukh Ram, was portrayed as a suitcase-lugging corpulent slob; the police gave an account of their non-performance; file pushing bureaucracy did a little number `in triplicate'; the trainer of those who yearn for safe `gorment' jobs gave a lesson on `50 ways to lose a file', and so on.

A little boy put up the case of Modernity vs. Tradition, while a girl who played the role of a maid-servant placed before the audience the aspirations of a class betrayed. At the end the national anthem was sung. Worth televising. Radical stuff.

Schools are usually not expected to be a source from which a critique of the regime emerges. When things are such, it means that things have really gone a bit too far, and strong protests are emerging from very deep within the pillars of society: they are refusing to hold up an inept and corrupt system. They are crying out for change. When change is sought, we need radical politics.

Anthony Giddens, sociologist, newly appointed director of The London School of Economics & Political Science, authored Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics which provides us with some intellectual tools with which to examine our predicament. The radical is he who seeks radical change and it seems that many in our society are calling out for such an event. The Naga Students Union has just asked the Prime Minister to write the slate anew, and not merely pump money into a system that does not see it reaching the common man. It will be foolish to expect the slate to be rewritten without a heady dose of radical politics.

For the word radical means `root' and if the root of our present ills is to be sought out, then it is ideological. The socialism we practice is not ideologically challenged by any political party. Only from a radical front can real objectors emerge to the fact that the socialist economics of the Planning Commission merely feed a politics of spoils and the question arises as to how such a front should operate politically. The answer comes from The Shri Ram School: engage in radical politics with ties to neither party nor state. Either through the arts, or through knowledge-based civic activism. The latter requires a little elaboration.

We all live in societies of our own, where knowledge is exchanged. The key to the success of radical politics lies in spreading knowledge of the ideological falsehoods of the regime that in which all political parties believe. For example: that our housing crisis is on account of rent control, urban land ceiling and inadequate investments in roads. Yes, roads raise the supply of land and that brings down prices. Or that, theoretically, employment cannot be `generated' by taking money from A and giving it to B. Such activism is already here: there is a health NGO whose workers are spreading Hayek and Popper. There is a trust communicating liberal literature. It is such efforts that must be replicated far and wide.What will transpire is the polarisation of society between radicals and conservatives. The latter will be those who seek to preserve the system while the former talk about altering it. As Giddens explains, in the UK it was the Conservatives who took up a programme of radical change while Labour sought to `conserve' the system. It does not matter how the party system in India reacts to radical politics but, eventually, we ought to see radicalism coming into the mainstream.

The world is waiting. It has been many years since the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Deng is gone. India has had nothing more than a shallow liberalisation. Radical politics in a free society can weed out the false ideology that saps away the nation's energies and resources. It's the way out of this morass. The future of our children depends on it. They've registered their protest.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.