Elections are lessons that voters—the ultimate masters in a democracy—hand out to the political parties that claim to serve them. The results of the assembly polls in five states announced last fortnight have some important messages, and also reproofs, for our three major political players—the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The last one we’ll give a pass, for many commentators, including this writer, focused on the CPI(M) during the run-up to the elections in West Bengal, and quite obviously the writing was on the wall for it. The dramatic defeat ended 34 years of uninterrupted rule in the state, to which the party owed much of its clout at the national level. But it’s time for the Congress and the BJP, too, to read the fine print in the results.
First, the BJP. It’s a pity a party that fancies itself as a contender-in-waiting for power at the Centre hardly has a presence in large tracts of the country—and despite having ruled in coalition at the Centre for six years. It’s also a pity that, for a party claiming to be more nationalist than the rest, the BJP’s long-term vision, ideology, policies and programmes have proved so narrow they fail to strike a chord in large swathes of the population. Forget the communal divisions it has steadfastly refused to bridge in more than six decades of existence—including its pre-1980 avatar as the Jan Sangh and its Hindu Mahasabha-RSS ideological roots running into the colonial era—the BJP has failed to negotiate other prejudicial barriers too—of region, language, caste and community—to bolster its claim of being nationalist.
True, it’s an era of coalitions, but BJP-led coalitions in the nda’s various avatars have been held together by the glue of power hunger and the region-specific anti-Congress sentiments of its partners, some of whom had as little stake in an all-inclusive idea of India. It was a functional enough logic, but an ultimately limiting one. The pity is, instead of taking note of this from the assembly results, the BJP continues to remain imprisoned in its warped mindset and pins hope on contradictions it thinks are likely to afflict the ruling UPA coalition—the stand on corruption, essentially, and the aam admi versus liberalisation debate. BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad formulated it thus for the TV channels: “These results are very interesting because of the implications an autonomous Mamata and a wounded Karunanidhi have for the future of the UPA and the Congress.” But by pinning hope on what the Congress’s allies might do to the grand old party, the BJP betrays a lack of confidence in its own political charter (one it’s unwilling to alter) and strength. This amounts to reposing faith in a distant arithmetic rather than in its foundational principles.
Now for the lessons the Congress, which is putting on a smug visage, must draw from the results. The issue of corruption has registered deeply in the minds of people and no amount of glibness or gimmickry is going to erase it. The rout of the DMK-Congress alliance in Tamil Nadu and the defeat in Pondicherry are clear pointers. The last-lap rally of the Left in Kerala—which came close to nipping the UDF despite the CPI(M)’s many organisational flip-flops and the state’s history of cyclical change between the UDF and the LDF—was because outgoing chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan’s honesty and integrity was in sharp contrast to what members of the UPA at the Centre demonstrated. People expect sincere action against corruption from the UPA, or else they may go for any option available in the next parliamentary elections.
The vote against the entrenched Left in West Bengal is in favour of a Mamata Banerjee whose posturing was actually more leftist than that of the Left itself and made Buddhadeb Bhattacharya look like a bit of a capitalist roader, to borrow a quaint term from leftist writing. The signal in this to the UPA government is that it should apply some leftward course-correction to its sharp and obstinate policy shift away from the aam admi in its second term. An effective universal food security enactment, a satisfactory land acquisition law, tackling runaway inflation—this is the least the UPA must do. The West Bengal election results prove that land and displacement remain crucial issues for the rural poor. Turbulent times lie ahead for the Congress. Read also the lesson from the byelections in Andhra Pradesh, and it’s clear the arithmetic can darken for the UPA too.
