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Party time in Mumbai and Hyderabad

Harish Khare

The recent sting operations only confirm the rot in the political arena, which can be traced directly to the crisis in the party system. The onus is on the BJP and the Congress to show the way for a re-vitalisation.

OVER THE next few weeks, India's two premier political parties — the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party — will be indulging in rites of celebration. Towards the end of December, the BJP proposes to stage an elaborate celebration in Mumbai to commemorate the organisation's survival for 25 years. Then, in the third week of January, Congressmen are scheduled to congregate in Hyderabad for the party's plenary session. While the BJP's gathering will be an unabashed celebration for the sake of keeping the cadres and the leaders engaged, the Congress conclave will be a ritualistic bow to the party's time-honoured constitutional provisions, which stipulate a grand gathering to formally "inaugurate" the newly elected president.

To the extent rituals do have a role in any organisation's life, the two gatherings in Mumbai and Hyderabad can be seen as rites of institutionalised functioning. The Mumbai conclave will witness a display of the BJP's senior leader, Pramod Mahajan's legendary resourcefulness. If Mr. Mahajan has his way, the Mumbai show will be a prolonged exercise in pleasantries, with no troublesome questions and issues to remind the leaders of the difficult choices the party needs to make. Similarly, the Hyderabad plenary session of the Congress will enable the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, Y. S. Rajasekhara Reddy to earn a few brownie points with the party's high command in the hope no one scrutinises his stewardship.

However, these congregations will be taking place in the larger context of a deepening crisis of the party system in India. The recent "sting" operations have exposed the BJP's long-cherished image as a party dedicated to idealism and moral robustness. The Congress and other parties never claimed to be immune from these vices. The sting operations only confirm the diagnosis of a self-indulgent and self-serving political system, in which politicians and bureaucrats have converted every scheme and proposal into a licence.

The rottenness can be traced directly to the crisis in the party system. This crisis manifests itself in three unequal relationships: individuals have come to matter more than ideology; individuals' intrigues suborn any formal engagement on issues; and, leaders' triumph over cadres and organisation. The sum total of these three unequal relationships is that most political parties have been reduced to be this or that leader's family outfit. If the turmoil within the Shiv Sena has brought out the party-as-a-family-jagirdari dimension, the unhappy preoccupation in the BJP with the L.K. Advani leadership issue is the saddest denouement for the party system in India.

These cumulative infirmities have reduced political parties to organised unions of most unemployable men and women, dedicated only to winning (and losing) elections. "Success" or "failure" is judged by a party's ability to perform all those tricks that produce a winning majority at the State and the national level. A leader is declared to be great only if he or she is able to garner votes for the party's candidates. Even when the leader's charisma does not work and candidates make it on their own, party managers appropriate the win for the leader. Winning and losing elections have become the beginning and the end of a party's raison d'etre. With this yardstick uppermost, most political parties find themselves having to make compromises with all kinds of unappetising voices, of the criminal, corrupt, and corporate varieties.

These compromises produce, on the one hand, a massive disconnect with the masses and an over-connect, on the other, with the middle class byte-centric discourse. Much political energy and man-hours are spent on reacting and responding to agenda set by the unpredictable and uncontrollable discourse-managers. For nearly three weeks, the two Houses of Parliament were paralysed over the Volcker report in a bogus morality play-act. Then, came the "stings" and the country moved on to another episode. Winning or not losing these staged episodes becomes a party's central concern. Issues and problems of governance are left to be sorted out by insensitive and unaccountable techno-bureaucrats. Meanwhile the parliamentarians, political activists, and cadres get distracted from their primary charge of voicing the citizens' grievances, aspirations, interests, and needs.

Because the BJP and the Congress are the most guilty of departing from the straight path of party institutionalisation, the onus lies on these two outfits to show the way for a re-vitalisation of the party system. Of the two, the BJP has a more difficult task. It has first to sort out the transition to a post-Vajpayee-Advani age; as a rule political parties find it problematic to deal with an aged leadership, which refuses to fade away. It is a blasphemy for any BJP leader to suggest (publicly) that it was time Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani hung up their boots. Having served the party for so long these two leaders owe it to themselves — and the party — to exercise the Jyoti Basu option.

The octogenarian Marxist from West Bengal remains an icon and a respected voice but he has becomingly allowed a new generation to take over the leadership role in the Communist Party of India (Marxist). As long as the two remain in the leadership frame, the party would remain mired in the past, more particularly it would remain a prisoner of the self-inflicted matrix of intrigue and factionalism. It is worth remembering that when the party began its journey, in its earlier incarnation as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, it put its faith in a band of young organisers — Vajpayee, Advani, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Balraj Madhok, Deen Dayal Upadhyay, Sunder Singh Bhandari — all in their twenties. Now it is not prepared to trust even those who are in their fifties.

In Mumbai the BJP would be entitled to celebrate its journey from the margin to the centre-stage, but the party will do well to ponder what it takes to get out of the present obsession with electoral politics to the exclusion of ideology, idealism, and organisational élan. And because the party will not be permitted to de-link itself from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, it should stop fighting shy of its RSS linkages. Given the older leaders' hunger for governmental power, the party pretended to its coalition partners that the RSS and all it stood for were mere pretensions. The much touted "coalition dharma" was a definite impediment to the pursuit of a distinctive political culture based on a purity of vision. Now the BJP has to decide whether it wants to remain content being a pale copy of the Congress, pursuing centralist politics of compromises and compulsions.

On its part, the Congress has to re-invent itself as a political party suited to the temper of a new India. Having declined last year the chance of becoming Prime Minister of India, Sonia Gandhi has consecrated the party's dynastic matrix. Thus, unlike the BJP, the Congress does not find itself in any kind of confusion on the leadership issue. After the mother, the son will take over. For any political party this leadership unambiguity is a blessing; the party does not need to waste its time and energy in sorting out the leadership question. But unfortunately this asset has been allowed to induce an organisational dysfunctionality. No one attends to the simple organisational chores; worse, there is no recognition at the top that the party means organisation at the taluka level and below. The string of defeats the Congress has suffered in Gujarat's municipal elections is only one reminder of the neglect on this front. This neglect makes the task of recovery almost impossible in areas like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Also, the working organisational style puts a premium on inducing defection of disgruntled "leaders" from other parties.

But the Congress has much larger responsibility. Once it was a party of state building and consolidation, now it has to redefine the very nature of activity in the political arena. It is on this count that Ms. Sonia Gandhi could use her moral authority to instigate the party's divorce from crooked and self-serving individuals who have usurped leadership slots at the provincial level. Her inclination to want to carry everyone along is a recipe for leadership paralysis. The time has come to purge the party of the old and the tired and put faith in the younger generation.

Between the two of them, the BJP and the Congress barely command a majority of the seats in the Lok Sabha. It is obvious these two parties are deemed to be uncaring and unconcerned by the majority of the voting population. And while the two parties are happy to be mired in the quagmire of a nine per cent growth rate, the party system is becoming oblivious to the unfinished task of making India an equitable and egalitarian social order.

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