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It is neither high nor commanding

Harish Khare

It is time for the Congress and the BJP to restore the efficacy of the institution called high command if the polity is not to suffer further fragmentation.

ON JANUARY 11, 2007, Congress president Sonia Gandhi wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, conveying to him the various contrary views she had received on the advisability of permitting foreign direct investment (FDI) in the retail trade sector. Three weeks later the letter was leaked to the media, obviously by one of the Cabinet Ministers whose views the Prime Minister had sought on the party president's confidential communication. It may be that the Cabinet Ministers themselves are divided between the comprador bourgeoisie and the national corporate class, and wanted to use Ms. Gandhi's name to swing the debate one way or the other. But what is relevant is that one or more of them had no compunction in creating an embarrassing situation, both for the Prime Minister and the Congress president. The moral of the story: the `high command' no longer seems to overawe.

A similar situation prevails in the other major national organisation, the Bharatiya Janata Party. Its new president, Rajnath Singh, finds himself under siege for daring to exclude a Chief Minister from the party's Parliamentary Board. And no one seems to feel the need to speak up for the party president, not even the RSS the presumed force behind the new central authority in the BJP. The siege has been laid essentially by a section of the pro-BJP media, which is in search of a new mascot in the post-Vajpayee-Advani era. The new BJP president is being subjected to the same daily dose of factional doubt and scepticism that was once meted out to Uma Bharti by New Delhi-centric scribes. In due course the BJP, its president, and various factions will hammer out some kind of a working truce, but not before the centre's authority gets considerably depleted, in and outside the party.

These developments in the Congress and the BJP point to the Indian party system's central paradox: the absolute imperative of a national control mechanism, on the one hand, and the increasing debilitation of the institution called high command, on the other. For some time now it has been deemed politically correct to deride the idea of a high command in political parties. The high command got a bad name, first during Indira Gandhi's heyday and later during Rajiv Gandhi's post-1984 ebullience. These notions of political correctness were anchored in the general belief that no individual or group of individuals, based in New Delhi, could (or should) have the wisdom and the insight to be able to over-ride voices and inputs from the State capitals. The high command became synonymous with arbitrariness and waywardness; nonetheless, in the 1980s State- and district-level Congress leaders gladly submitted to the high command's diktats because both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi seemed to have the requisite charisma to win votes for the party. But whatever the Congressmen's calculus for submission, liberal opinion held the `high command' arrangement to be undemocratic and at the root of much of the political mischief and mis-governance in the public sphere. It was the high command's high-handedness towards Andhra Pradesh Congressmen that is said to have provoked N.T. Rama Rao to launch the Telugu Desam. The rise of other regional parties is also attributed to this presumed omnipotence and a wilful insensitivity to voices from below of the Congress high command.

On the other hand, there has been a largely unexamined assumption that the high command syndrome was peculiarly a Congress phenomenon. This has been one of the enduring myths of Indian politics, especially in the post-1975 era. Still, it is worth keeping in mind that the Communist parties are, in fact, organised on the principle of `democratic centralism'; and both the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and its later incarnation, the BJP, were and are centrally directed and operated, with the RSS being assigned the institutional role of the old-fashioned Stalinist political commissars. The difference between the Congress model and that of other parties basically comes down to the number of individuals who constitute the high command.

Like any other all-India organisation, political parties need to have a national level decision-making structure, constitutionally mandated to monitor and nurse the party's organisational health and to calibrate and control ideology, ideas, and individuals for the requirements of the day. Ipso facto, the national decision-makers must be sufficiently empowered so as to insist on a course correction should the regional leaders or operatives deviate, ideologically or behaviourally, from the collectively accepted path. Inversely, it is also clear by now that the absence of a central court of appeal in regional parties leads to drastic outcomes. For example, since there was no central corrective mechanism in the Telugu Desam, the party leaders did not know how to cope with N.T. Rama Rao's highly personalised approach to men and matters. Eventually they unceremoniously dumped the founder-patriarch. And when the Janata Dal's central leadership did not or could not restrain Lalu Prasad's political unilateralism, other Bihar leaders such as Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav, and George Fernandes walked out to form a separate entity, the Samata Party.

Since the BJP always positioned itself as a practitioner of an alternative (and presumably a more desirable) political culture, its rhetoric appropriated the `democratic' badge for its operational style and practices. The pretence, however, gave way to reality during the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) regime. Having decried the high command model all these years, the BJP suddenly discovered the need to invoke central authority in order to make the State units fall in line with the requirements of running a coalition at the Centre. For the first time it was in the driver's seat at the national level and realised that a firm and guiding hand was needed to harmonise seemingly irreconcilable interests. Paradoxically, when, after the Gujarat riots, it failed to invoke the aura of the central authority to send Narendra Modi packing as Chief Minister, as Prime Minister Vajpayee wanted to do, the party paid a heavy political price: being voted out of office at the national level. After the 2004 defeat, the BJP central leadership lost its sheen and the new Rajnath Singh regime is finding it difficult to make organisational demands of individuals who consider themselves autonomous and larger than the party. A political party that has all these years taken considerable pride in its internal functioning has now been reduced to having its party president negotiate with political warlords.

The situation is not conducive to a healthy party system. Both the Congress and the BJP now find themselves having to vacate electoral space to smaller parties, and are re-discovering the need for an effective high command. The BJP, for instance, is mired in serious factional disputes in all the States where it is in power or hopes to be in power (like Uttarakhand). The central authority is simply unable to invoke that sense of collective élan that induces recalcitrant individuals to give in to the party's needs.

The situation is equally unhappy in the Congress, notwithstanding that Ms. Sonia Gandhi enjoys absolute power over the party. In the recent Mumbai civic elections, for instance, the high command took the politically correct stand that the selection of candidates was better left to the local leaders. Immediately, the Mumbai Pradesh Congress Committee president dispensed with the structure of democratic consultation. The absence of a meddlesome central presence became a licence for factional aggrandisement. To take another example, the Congress high command has been reluctant to use its authority to rein in a rampant Chief Minister in Punjab and is now reduced to waiting for an electoral set-back.

This erosion of central authority in the two national political parties cannot be a good omen, notwithstanding all the fashionable talk of decentralisation and devolution. The polity is becoming increasingly integrated: almost every political and electoral development at the State and even local level finds resonance at the national level. The BJP's victory in Lucknow's mayoral elections has been tom-tommed as the beginning of a national revival. Similarly, the outcome of the Punjab Assembly elections will be interpreted as a reflection on the Prime Minister's leadership.

For all its faults and limitations, it is the party system that sustains the Indian state's democratic legitimacy. The need of the hour is to resurrect the political parties, especially the two national ones, as veritable pan-Indian organisations if the Indian state is to produce a stable and acceptable order. Such an order will remain elusive if the national parties fail to re-invent a firm and fair central authority, providing direction and control, arbitrating disputes, reconciling interests, and yet capable of inspiring obedience and respect from activists and leaders across the land. In the absence of a firm central authority, the advantage belongs to the demagogue, the provocateur, and the destabiliser. Incoherence in national political parties produces purposeless public choices. Disorderly politics is the very antithesis of good governance.

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