The Hindu : In search of crutches

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Sunday, Jun 08, 2003

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In search of crutches

While the Congress is yet to be convinced of the inevitability of the coalitions, for the BJP, cobbling together an aggregation platform is an easy exercise, says Harish Khare.

COALITIONS ARE in. So it seems. All thanks to the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi's "totally unintended" remarks about the party's new, if half-hearted, willingness to entertain the idea of coalitions at the national level. Since Ms. Gandhi was speaking at a press conference immediately after a conclave of the Congress Chief Ministers in Srinagar, the obvious assumption was that there was a change of tone in the party's collective wisdom. Ms. Gandhi's tone definitely suggested a departure of sorts from the "Pachmarhi Line" which has allowed the party to keep an enigmatic silence on coalition at the national level.

Some of the non-BJP parties eagerly welcomed this change of heart. As it turned out, the Congress quickly sought to downplay the remarks of its president. The party, after all, has still to think through the coalition matrix.

For a pan-Indian political party such as the Congress, with substantial presence across the country, the coalition strategy cannot be predicated on an off-the-cuff remarks at a press conference.

Over the years, coalition politics has tended to rotate itself on either the ideological or pragmatic opportunism axis. If the National Democratic Alliance is a prime example of the second kind, the 1996-98 Congress-United Front arrangement can be cited as a good instance of an ideologically parametered relationship. But one has survived for five years because of accommodating attitudes, while the other collapsed because of a lack of compatible approaches among the senior players.

It was P. V. Narasimha Rao who gave a brilliant defence of the Congress-United Front idea when he spoke for the motion of confidence moved by H. D. Deve Gowda in 1996 (after the collapse of the 13-day Vajpayee Government).

Speaking both as the Congress president and the Leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party, he argued that since there was simply no possibility of the Congress ever teaming up with the BJP, the only logical course that was open to the Congress was to support a secular alternative.

The Congress had 140 seats; yet it allowed smaller parties to sit in the Government. It was an action designed not to keep the BJP out of power but was a matter of `dharma' for the party to do everything possible to protect the republic against the communal voices.

That remains, by far, the best and the loftiest exposition of what was also a political gang-up. It is, of course, a different matter that the two partners — Congress and the dedicated anti-Congress outfits of the United Front — could not bring to fore the attitudes and impulses needed to sustain the Narasimha Rao thesis.

The Congress once again finds itself tempted to cobble together what would essentially be an anti-BJP front. There is a view, however, held by traditionalists such as Devendra Dwivedi and others, that it would be suicidal for the Congress to give in to such a temptation; according to them, such a front would be a concession — political, mental and intellectual — that the BJP has replaced the Congress as the premier political party in the country.

The NDA represents the other model. It began as a BJP-led, idealism-centric arrangement, but has ended as a remarkably untroubled euphemism for convenient pragmatism. For the key NDA leaders, the role model remains the 1977 conglomeration called the Janata Party, which was a coalition of parties, groups and individuals, all supposedly inspired by democratic values, as an anti-thesis to Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism.

That experiment floundered on conflicting demands of group loyalties. And the NDA's current leader, Atal Behari Vajpayee, seems determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Janata experiment. The only sentiment that unites the NDA partners is a desire to keep Sonia Gandhi out of the Prime Minister's chair.

The secular/pseudo-secular and the Hindutva/communal divide has largely melted itself away as socialists such as Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav have had comfortable stays within the arrangement.

Anybody and everybody is welcome, irrespective of his past, present or future; no questions — about ideology or integrity — asked as long as the junior partner does not raise questions (about the company the BJP keeps) or is not caught with his hand in the till.

After five years of "stable" NDA experiment, the BJP has come to believe that for the next decade or so, the country's party competition would be conducted by two groups, one headed by the Congress and the other, by the BJP. The Congress is yet to be convinced about the inevitability of the coalition solution. But for a party like the BJP, which has not been able to enhance its geographical spread in any significant manner, cobbling together an aggregation platform is an easy exercise.

Nonetheless, the BJP will sooner or later face the same dilemma that faces the Congress: how to grow and expand without treading on the finicky regional allies' corns. In fact, the NDA era has also been an era of the BJP's arrested growth. Except for transient gains in pockets of the north-east, the BJP is far weaker in the States than it was five years ago.

And the BJP has locked itself up in a corner in various States from where it can move out only courtesy the regional ally. The Uttar Pradesh situation is a tragic example of this self-inflicted marginalisation.

Unlike the BJP, the Congress remains unreconciled to a reduced presence as a pan-Indian party. The Congress has been unwilling, and rightly so, to cede politically or electorally any part of India to any other group or individual. There is no easy formula to confront a regional political party at the State level and then enter into some kind of a working relationship at the national level. Between 1996 and 1998, the Congress could live with — even if uneasily — regional partners like the Telugu Desam Party because a share in the power at the Centre was deemed to be an adequate compensation.

The challenge before the current Congress leadership is to reverse what is called the "tamilnaduisation'' process. The regional partner consolidates itself at the expense of the national party and is soon able to use its enhanced strength to bargain with this or that national party. The AIADMK was a Congress ally in 1996, sided with the BJP in 1998 and was back with the Congress in 1999. Laloo Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal is the only consistent ally, primarily because the regional partner needs the "protection" the Congress provides in the Rajya Sabha against the NDA's potential misuse of Article 356 (imposition of President's rule).

But the coalition issue that agitates the Congress leaders the most is the desirability of breaking political bread with Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. A section argues vehemently that if the Congress has to regain its pre-eminence in the country's largest province, then it must adopt a strategy aimed at rendering redundant Mr. Yadav's brand of aggressive secular politics; the argument is that unless Mr. Yadav's secular brand equity is liquidated, the Congress would not regain the Muslim support.

The other school says that the greatest and the most pressing requirement is to unseat the NDA and an alliance with Mr. Yadav is therefore desirable, even if means a delay in the revival of the Congress' political fortunes. The second argument has not carried the day so far because it means postponing the problem for another day.

The strategic challenge before the BJP and the Congress is how to provide a working political order in a pan-India polity without having the requisite all-India support and spread. Coalitions provide a short-term solution that solves nothing in the long run.

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