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Will it be the UPA’s last supper? statecraft

On May 22, the leaders of the political parties constituting the ruling United Progressive Alliance will gather at 7, Race Course Road, New Delhi, to go through the motion of celebrating the completion of the fourth year of its existence. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi will release a “report to the nation;” there will be, to use a media jargon, the familiar “photo opportunity” in which the respective positioning of various leaders is attended to with meticulous planning. After that, it will be time to break bread together. No one is quite sure whether the Left leaders will follow the practice of the past two years — put in an appearance at the dinner table to show some kind of political solidarity with the UPA without being part of it.

Will this turn out to be the UPA leaders’ last supper or will they still be together to celebrate the fifth anniversary? The answer to that question depends on whether the Congress bosses as also the allies’ leaders believe that they would be better off electorally with — or without — the alliance; more importantly, whether the UPA can still be marketed politically as the answer to the country’s need for stable and effective governing arrangement in New Delhi. The answer to this question will acquire a sharper urgency after the Karnataka verdict when the Congress is likely to find itself on the back-foot.

As most political innovations go, the UPA was born out of sheer expediency. It remains essentially a power-sharing mechanism, tactically an anti-BJP conglomeration, and symbolically an anti-communal, secular front. It has yet to realise its promise as the arrangement that will help the Indian state maximise its power potential at home and abroad.

Nonetheless, it must be presumed that large sections of the Indian society still believes that the kind of sectarian impulses and individuals the BJP represents ought to be kept away from capturing the Centre. Not only have the minorities but also every sane, law-abiding, Constitution-respecting Hindu has learnt a lesson from the central failure of the NDA era: Had there been no BJP-led government at the Centre, there would have been no “Gujarat” in 2002. The import of this lesson has become even more acute now that there is no Atal Bihari Vajpayee to provide a sane corrective to the hot-heads who want to replicate Gujarat’s “He-man” strategy all over.

“Gujarat” alone overwhelms the BJP’s claim to have in its ranks desh bhakts, men of exceptional integrity and extraordinary competence. Outside the hardcore BJP constituency, there is little support for these self-serving claims; and, even within the BJP, the age of pretence is over, as evident from the challenges from within the party to the assertions made in L.K. Advani’s recent memoirs. In itself, the book completed the process of middle classes’ disillusionment with the saffron brigade. It will go down as the finest self-goal in Indian politics.

The BJP, as the core of the NDA, has not shown any new intellectual energy or political insight to convince the country that it is wiser after its 2004 defeat. On the one hand, it remains a prisoner of the failed slogans of yesteryear and, on the other, it continues to remain trapped in the “Shining India” calculus: it believes that just because it is favoured by the elite, English-speaking electronic media it is politically acceptable to the country at large. It is not surprising that the BJP has not gained any new members for the NDA; its principal allies, the Janata Dal (U) in Bihar, the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, and the BJD in Orissa are reluctant partners. Except for the burning ambition of one or two individuals and the undiminished resentfulness of a handful of “leaders” to the Nehru-Gandhi family, there is very little to sustain the NDA’s viability as an alternative, credible political instrument to help the Indian state conduct its affairs in an exacting international milieu.

If the BJP and the NDA find themselves stranded in the margins of political imagination, it is because the Left parties have managed to appropriate the opposition space. Be it people-centric issues or the disquiet over the proposed closer ties with the United States, the Left was first off the block in protest. In any case, because of its class composition and ideological preferences, the BJP has long ceased to speak for the masses, especially the poor. The Left may have caused considerable discomfort to the UPA but it has also helped to checkmate the NDA.

Nonetheless, the UPA has to be much more than a negative platform. Has it succeeded in carving out a niche for itself? Does it deserve to be voted back to power, assuming the Congress and its allies want to stick it out? On the face of it, there is nothing compelling in the way the UPA has conducted its business, or compelling enough for the middle classes and the centrist forces to favour it decisively over the BJP-led NDA.

Except, perhaps, in one crucial area. The Manmohan Singh government has definitely steered the country away from the NDA-cranked divisive and excitable, post-9/11 mood. The country has been spared a disastrous simmering civil war. If despite jihadi provocations and occasional successes, civil society has remained calm and united it is only because of a sensitive and humane approach to governance. It is possible that the Manmohan Singh government’s non-sectarian approach to the terrorist’s challenge has prompted a new and welcome response from the Muslim community. In the last two years, almost all the leading Islamic scholars, clerics and community leaders have disassociated themselves and their religion from the terror vendors.

Perhaps in no other country have the Islamist terrorists been so forthrightly isolated within their community as in India. It is no surprise that the “Indian Mujahideen” (the group that claimed responsibility for the Jaipur blasts) reserves its harshest words for those Muslim leaders who have tried to inoculate the community against the jihadi agenda.

This wholesome beginning needs to be encouraged to deepen and consolidate itself if this country hopes to defeat the terrorist’s challenge. That challenge can be met only if we are allowed to prefer the politics of inclusion and accommodation over the politics of division and exclusion (code words: minorityism, appeasement, vote-bank politics, etc.). The terrorist’s tactics are calculated to provoke rage; the secular challenge is to defeat all those whose politics depends on working on the citizens’ anger, anxiety and resentment over the terrorist’s ability to get away.

Thus, between now and the next Lok Sabha election, the UPA leaders need, first, to convince themselves and, then, the voters that the country has done reasonably well in providing a caring, governing arrangement. By accommodating regional voices and aspirations, the Manmohan Singh government commends itself as a worthwhile experiment in initiating regional leaders into the responsibility of governing from New Delhi this vast country.

It may be that often these regional leaders have not met the “mainstream” standards of probity and competence; but these standards can be enforced only in an environment of non-partisanship and non-divisive politics. Be that as it may, the best interests of the Indian state can be defended and promoted only if the “national” and the “regional” leaders and parties arrive at a working protocol.

However, irrespective of the BJP’s inadequacies in answering the polity’s needs, the country will still yearn for a more decisive and more effective governance than the UPA has been able to provide these last four years. The “mainstream” discourse insists on a “firm” response to a meddlesome Pakistan, and an insensitive United States; this middle class-centric discourse also demands a “strong” government that would attend to every single crisis, however small and however remote — without making any demands on the citizens in terms of compliance with laws, sacrifices, or respect for the authority.

It is in this unhappy context that the UPA leaders have to make up their mind on whether they want to stay together or will like to give in to their overweening ambitions. Individually, neither the Congress nor any of its allies can possibly mesmerise the electorate into giving it commanding numbers in the next Lok Sabha.

Only if they stay together can the UPA leaders hope to bargain with other players such as the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh to expand the areas of cooperation. Without a healthy dose of realism and sense of realpolitik, the UPA leaders will not be able to fulfil their historic role.

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