Mail Today 30 October 2009
Neither surgery nor chemo will help BJP
by Bharat Bhushan
THOSE debating whether the Bharatiya Janata Party’s illness can be cured by “ medicine, surgery or chemotherapy” do not seem to realise that the Hindutva moment in Indian politics has passed. This should be clear enough from its electoral performance in two consecutive general elections and the latest state assembly election results from Maharashtra where an incompetent Congress- Nationalist Congress Party government has been preferred over the BJP and the Shiv Sena.
There are several reasons why the BJP in its present form has no political future. The BJP’s ‘ Hindutva’ essentially represents a preoccupation with some grievances of the past — the Muslim invasion of India, the subjugation of ‘ Hindu India’, the building of mosques on top of destroyed temples and the need to right these historical wrongs. From this follows its hatred of today’s Muslims and ‘ secularists’ who do not share its historical grievances.
Even among its followers, the perceived and politically stoked grievances that existed were symbolically assuaged in 1992 with the forcible demolition of the disputed Babri Masjid structure. There is no doubt that the BJP benefitted electorally from the Hindu ‘ afterglow’ of the event. But then the issue was over.
Though the party continued to harp upon the building of a grand Ram Temple at the Babri site the issue has had diminishing returns since then.
This may be true not only of the Babri issue. Most political parties can use a political issue effectively only once before the returns start diminishing. Mulayam Singh Yadav could use the Muslim- Yadav card effectively just once; a Lalu Yadav in retreat has to remind ingrate Muslims of Bihar that it was he who had arrested L K Advani when he was travelling the length and breadth of the country communalising its politics; and Mayawati has to constantly reinvent her alliances even to push the Dalit cause. The only Hindutva politician who has tried to reinvent himself in the pauses between elections is Narendra Modi.
However, there is a bigger factor at work which is shaping Indian politics today. For want of a better phrase one could call it the politics of the excluded.
Exclusion
The rapid pace of economic growth in India goes hand in hand with the exclusion of vast sections of the population from its benefits. This exclusion may be due to skewed income distribution, traditional economic practices in agriculture and industry getting marginalised under the relentless expansion of the world market, lack of requisite skills or education to participate in emerging economic activity and the displacement from land acquired for private industry.
Development processes result in the sense of being left out among those sections which are undergoing pauperisation while they see others prosper.
This situation is not unique to India.
These things happen in all societies going through rapid industrialisation.
India’s problems are compounded by its huge population and the inability of traditional forms of livelihood to support a major proportion of it.
In a large democratic country like India, the negative fallout of economic growth and rapid industrialisation creates peculiar problems for the political parties. Economic liberalisation, which seems necessary for growth, creates large stakeholders in urban areas and political parties have to take them along. At the same time, it leaves out large sections of the population who are unable to partake in that growth. Both the constituencies are necessary to win elections.
Not all political parties are well equipped to harness these two political tendencies especially since they pull them in different directions. One pushes for the process of economic integration with the world economy to be accelerated because of the prospects of direct benefits — although such enthusiasm may have been temporarily dampened because of the recession. The other tendency is for cautiousness and wants the process to be slowed down and more controlled.
The party that is managing this contradiction to some extent is the Congress.
Its prime minister glows under the lights of world approval as an economic liberaliser. His core advisors share his vision. It has the middle classes and the urban elite behind it.
The so- called “ youth vote” and the urban vote is for the economic policies of the government and not for the aging prime minister.
Yet the party is smart enough to create a safety net for those getting marginalised by the process — thus whenever in power it starts centrally sponsored programmes centred on providing employment, rural sanitation, housing, water supply, cheaper loans, etc. It makes no distinction about funds going to Congress ruled or other states. The overall aim is to win the constituency of the poor and the marginalised.
Balance
The Congress therefore attempts to balance the interests of those pushing for economic reforms and those who get the wrong end of the stick. It sends visible signals to both the constituencies — by reaching out to the world as well as setting up the National Advisory Council with advocates of the poor as its members. While it cannot function without a dyed- in- the- wool liberaliser like Montek Singh Ahluwalia as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission it also needs advisors who have spent their life working for empowering the rural poor. It was also lucky that it had the support of the Left parties in its earlier avatar as the United Progressive Alliance because they provided the necessary balance in its economic policies which in fact eventually helped India’s partial insulation from the world economic recession. That cautiousness has remained with the Congress in UPAII also, largely because of Sonia Gandhi and her political advisors.
The appointment of an astute politician like Pranab Mukherjee as the finance minister is indicative of this.
BJP
The BJP, however, is not in such a comfortable position to deal with the turbulence being caused in Indian society by these overwhelming economic forces. It neither has programmes and policies for the excluded nor for those who are either direct or potential beneficiaries of economic growth. It only wants to feed them Hindutva. And that issue has no purchase any longer except amongst the lunatic fringe. The BJP has no programme for the rural poor, the displaced tribals, the urban poor and it has nothing more to offer to the urban upper and middle classes than the Congress is already doing.
What explains the electoral debacle of the Hindutva parties is their inability and lack of readiness to come to grips with a changed world. That would require engaging with the world economy but also defining and protecting India’s interests. It would also mean protecting the interests of the excluded and offering them alternative prospects or enabling them to participate and benefit from economic growth.
The caste and community based Mandal parties tend to do slightly better than the BJP in the politics of excluded because like the more chauvinist MNS and the Shiv Sena, they project the solutions to exclusion in terms of caste, community and regional entitlements. That too will not work in the long run. Quotas and free markets cannot go together for long and there is an upper limit to government as an employer. So, even castebased politics is set to come apart in the coming decades.
The biggest challenge that the politics of exclusion poses lies in the tribal hinterland of India where displacement, lack of governance, absence of social justice and the onslaught of economic growth is pushing desperate people into the arms of Maoist extremism. No one seems to have picked up the gauntlet here politically. There cannot be a long term military solution — political problems have to be dealt with politically.
And that problem is how to make the marginalised stakeholders in the rest of India’s economic growth.
bharat.bhushan@mailtoday.in
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