As expected, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the crucial Gujarat Assembly elections by a much narrower margin than earlier. As expected, both the BJP and the Congress claimed different kinds of victory. The Congress claimed that it had almost caught up with the BJP, which is true. The BJP claimed that it had won after all and even managed to get its second highest percentage of votes in a State that it has ruled for more than two decades, which is also true.
Reasons for losses
In fact, no party won the Gujarat elections; one party just lost a bit less than the other. Whether the party that lost less was the Congress or the BJP is up to the reader to decide. But there are two major reasons each behind what I consider a loss for both the BJP and the Congress.
The lesser of the two reasons for the Congress is Rahul Gandhi. Or rather, it is not Mr. Gandhi, who appears to be a genuine person and has proved himself to be a competent politician. It is the family he is associated with. This association provides him with visibility and an unchallenged position within the Congress. But it also loses him the votes of many who do not support the BJP.
These are crucial votes, votes of people who want a secular and even socialist India, but who cannot bear the promotion of another scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, despite the respect they might harbour for Jawaharlal Nehru. These are not people who care about Rahul Gandhi’s ‘half-Italian’ parentage, but they remain unconvinced by his prominence. Any scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family will have to be absolutely brilliant, not only decent and competent, to stand an independent (and not an incumbency backlash) chance in India today.
The fact that some in the Congress seem to believe that the party would be destroyed by internal dissension without a Nehru-Gandhi figurehead is less than convincing. In any case, it reflects poorly on the party as a democratic institution. Despite the stranglehold that Narendra Modi and his coterie have on the BJP, and their disturbing treatment of the old guard and internal dissent, no one really believes that the BJP would fall apart without Mr. Modi!
Question of alternatives
But the greater loss of the Congress — and for that matter, all the other Opposition parties in India today — has to do with their inability to come up with a clearly positive agenda. Mr. Modi and the BJP have occupied that vantage point for years now, with talk of development, progress, and so on. Despite the fact that they have built on measures initiated by Manmohan Singh’s Congress-led government, the BJP has been selling Indians a dream.
The Opposition, including the Congress, seems to be only able to criticise this dream. There might be good reasons to criticise this dream or expose it as hollow, but criticism has never swept a party to power. It is the ‘vision’ that has always counted, whether it was the dream of equality and solidarity that brought various communist parties to power across the world in the early 20th century, or the promise of modernisation that Nehru held out, or the slogan of garibi hatao by Indira Gandhi. If the Congress wants to win, it has to come up with a vision that goes beyond being a critique of the BJP.
The reasons for the loss of the Congress are sad for the nation, as they deprive voters of a full choice, and they might become disastrous for the party. But the reasons for the ‘loss’ of the BJP are disastrous for the country in the longer run, partly because they translate into a technical (if reduced) win in the short run.
Dangerous world view
Once again, there are two such failures. The Gujarat elections brought home the fact that the vilification of certain groups of Indians that the so-called ‘Hindutva loony fringe’ indulges in is by no means limited to loonies. Even top leaders of the BJP share that world view. It is a world view that, if allowed to fester and grow, will plunge India into greater conflict in the future than we can imagine today. Vilification of difference, as history has shown and as Islamists are illustrating in many Muslim countries right now, finally leads to endless violence.
The other failure was reflected by the fact that when, for a short while, the Congress appeared to be leading in Gujarat, the share market and related financial institutions evinced great nervousness. This does not mean that the BJP is necessarily good for the Indian economy and the Congress is bad. In fact, at an essential level, Mr. Modi’s BJP is only extending the ‘liberalisation’ launched by Mr. Singh’s Congress.
What it means is that the BJP is clearly seen as being good for certain financial sectors, both national and international. The good of such financial sectors is not necessarily the good of the people: share markets, net percentages, GDPs, the approbation of foreign governments who basically care about their industries and not our starving millions, all these are limited indices. Finally, any responsible government has to address the price of onions and potatoes, as the poor rightly demand. Failure to do so might be good for the financial classes but disastrous for ordinary people.
But is the Congress or the BJP capable of looking these facts — these failures behind their mutual losses — in the eye?
