HVK Archives: Of parties, politics and people
Of parties, politics and people - The Free press Journal
M.V. Kamath
()
March 12, 1998
Title: Of parties, politics and people
Author: M.V. Kamath
Publication: The Free press Journal
Date: March 12, 1998
In many ways the 1998 election has become a watershed. The BJP
has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. It many soften its
stand on some issues as the situation demands but in a clear way
it indicates a break with the Nehruvian past where secularism,
howsoever it was understood, was the watchword.
If there is one aspect of the just concluded general elections
that one can legitimately be proud of, it is the maturity of the
people. They first showed when they threw out Indira Gandhi
following the Emergency. Her charisma did not help her. Her being
in power was of no avail. She was summarily dismissed because
she had offended large sections of the public. It was punishment
to fit the crime. The same electorate returned her to power when
it realised that the successor government was in no way an
improvement. In the circumstances the gadi was 'returned to her.
The public believes in punishment; not in permanent banishment
>from political life. Time was that was in the early years of
independence when it was said that the Congress could nominate a
lamp post for membership of an elective body and the people would
blindly vote for it out of sheer loyalty to the party. No more.
Today the electorate wants results. Accountability. It wants a
government to be answerable to it. Let the response be poor or
inadequate and the sword falls. This is called the Incumbency
Factor. That may be an apt description, but it does not pay
homage to where it rightfully belongs; the public. From this
follows the conclusion: you cannot take the electorate for
granted. And so it happened. And so it happened in Maharashtra,
Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Orissa. And even in West Bengal, though
to a limited extent. In Maharashtra it was simply a case of the
Congress making common cause with the Republican Party of India
and the Samajwadi Party. The Samajwadi Party has come to
represent Muslims in a big way. There was no magic involved.
What happened was a re-alignment of forces.
The results would have been vastly different had the RPI put up
candidates of its own in opposition to the Congress as it did in
1996. Better sense prevailed this time. It was not a victory for
the Congress. Rather, it was a victory for conununalism and
casteism. Sharad Pawar may pat himself on his back but nobody
else who understands caste equations would. And the Congress need
not have to be self congratulatory either. Pawar may be in
Congress today but his loyalties have always been to Pawar, not
the Congress as anyone who examines his political career can
tell. That said, one can focus attention on another personality:
Sonia Gandhi. Did her on behalf of the Congress Party help it in
any way? The quick answer to that is: No, it didn't. The
posturing and the hand-waving was of no avail. Sonia Gandhi was
no ersatz Indira Gandhi. There were fears in some quarters that
her appeal on an emotional level could bring some votes for the
Congress. If did it must have been minuscule. Not even her
foreignness helped. She may have attracted large, even
enthusiastic crowds but that plainly did not translate into
votes. After all, the Shiv Sena outdid the Congress in drawing
crowds for Atal Bihari Vajpayee but where did that take it?
Neither in Maharashtra nor in Gujarat and certainly not in Tamil
Nadu and even more so in the Nehru family's own backyard, Uttar
Pradesh, could Sonia Gandhi be of any material and significant
help. In Uttar Pradesh the Congress was completely routed. As
many as 77 candidates lost their deposits!
Sonia Gandhi's visit to over a dozen parliamentary constituencies
failed to boost the party's prospects. Amethi was a family fief.
It was believed that no candidate who had the Sonia seal of
approval could fail there. And yet Satish Sharma lost. He has
since been saying that there was large scale booth-capturing in
Amethi. Grapes are sour. In the 1996 polls the Congress had won
at least five seats from Uttar Pradesh, including Amethi,
Pratapgarh, Rampur and Bagpat. Rampur was a traditional Congress
seat which had sent the local Nawab, Micky Mian, six times to the
Lok Sabha' This time the seat was captured by the BJP's nominee
Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. In Pratapgarh sitting Congress MP, Ratna
Singh, daughter of the late Dinesh Singh lost to Ram Vilas
Vedanti, the BJP candidate.
In Sahajahanpur, Jayendra Prasada, brother of Congress vice-
President Jitendra Prasada lost to BJP candidate Satypal Singh. A
major loser was UPCC president Narayan Dutt Tiwari himself. He
lost to Mrs. Pant. Whatever happened to the Sonia magic? It is as
much Sonia as the Congress that was routed. In future nobody
need be afraid of the so-called Sonia Factor. In fact the BJP
must encourage her even more strongly to plead for the Congress
case in order to win a seat for itself. It is here again that
the illiterate electorate has shown an unbelievable
sophistication.
It has not been taken in by foreign glamour. Perhaps Sonia
Gandhi might have done a little better if. she had not brought
her entire family son Rahul, daughter Piyanka and son-in-law
Vadera - into the act. Rejected along side the Congress was the
dynastic ambition of Sonia. Sonia had long been held by the
Congress as its ultimate weapon, its brahmastra. That weapon
should not have been used, even in its desperation. It indicates
total bankruptcy. Sonia Gandhi now holds no more terror. She may
still be able to attract crowds - after all everybody wants free
entertainment - but her weakness has now been exposed. It is
claimed in her defence that had she not decided to jump into the
fray at the time she did, the Congress defeat may have been even
greater and that its tally may have been way down. Possibly.
She may have tomporarily halted its total disintegration but now
it will gather momentum and not all the king's horses nor all the
king's men can save it. Certainly, Sonia Gandhi can't. Is there,
then, any hope for the Congress? It has been suggested that even
n Uttar Pradesh if the Congress had made cause with the Samajwadi
Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, it might have been able to do
better. But this is a mechanistic way of looking at politics. It
may have paid dividends to Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra, but
ultimately, it is a self-destructive tactic. People are looking
not for formulae but for honesty, integrity and oilier virtues.
Character still counts. Gimmicks may pay - sometimes.
But in the end it is what a party stands for, the values it
espouses and the quality of its leadership that is decisive. One
should never aim to be too clever by half. There can be no doubt
that the 1998 elections have tolled the bell for Sitaram Kesri's
leadership of the party. The man has been a singular disaster and
the sooner he is packed off into retirement, the better. Its
continuance as president of the Congress can only hasten its
demise. Younger, more innovative leaders must take over. The days
of the Tiwaris, the Arjun Singhs and the Shankaranands are
clearly over. The Congress is out of sync with society at large.
It does not reflect the peoples' needs, let alone their
aspirations.
The other message that the elections have sent is that the BJP is
no more an untouchable party. It has not only become touchable,
but even more, it has become embraceable. the Hate-BJP campaign
has recoiled on the hate-mongers. And they are going to pay a
price for it. To dismiss the BJP as a communal party was wrong to
start with. The BJP is no more communal than the Congress, the
Samajwadi Party or even the CPM.
Yet another canard that had been tacitly accepted was that the
BJP was a "northern" party and synonymous with 'Hindi, Hindu,
Hindustani' whatever that was meant. Actually people south of
the Vindhyas are even more Hindu, if one might make that
incautious remark, than people in the north, in the sense that
they have never felt as hard as the northern Hindus did, the
pressures of Islamic rulers. In that sense the BJP should have
always been more acceptable to the south.
It is true, though, that the BJP never had always been more
acceptable to the south. It is true, that the BJP never had much
of a presence in what is generally dismissed as the, south". But
now the BJP presence is vastly visible everywhere in the South.
It has dominating presence in Karnataka, it has a sobering
presence in Tamil Nadu (even if some credit has to be given to
Jayalalitha) and it is making inroads in Andhra Pradesh. There
is a Hindu awakening throughout the country and that shows. One
would have noticed that the Leftists have not done all that well
in Kerala and that in Jyoti Basu's own fiefdom, West Bengal, the
CPM's h is loosening. As long as Jyoti Basu is alive there may be
some sympathy for the but their days are clearly numbered. munism
is not a native ideology. It is an imported one and it will die
a natural death. One has to be patient. But one must take into
account yet one more message that the electorate has sent in the
course of the general elections and that is that it will not
accept doctrinaire positions. Compromise is the new name of the
game.
The BJP, for instance, may wish to scrap Article 370 etc. but it
had better move with caution. In the matter of a Common Civil
Code, the BJP has suggested that it will, if placed in power,
appoint a Law Commission to look into the matter, which is a
sensible thing to do. Even in regard to the Ram Janmabhoomi
affair the BJP will have to be chary; that it will be. Indeed, it
has to be. In many ways the 1998 election has become a watershed.
The BJP has emerged as a force to be oned with. It may soften its
stand on some issues as the situation demands but in clear way it
indicates a break with the Nehruvian past where secularism,
howsoever it was understood, was the watchword. By its show of
strength the BJP is giving back to Hindus their pride in
Hinduism. That pride had long been suppressed. It had become a
matter of shame for a Hindu to pronounce that he was a Hindu.
Now, a long suppressed instinct is beginning to blossom, It is
not by any manner of means, anti-minority. It is not anti
Muslim. It is merely what politicians would have said, a 'home-
coming'. The Hindus are discovering that it is nice to feel that
they are Hindus and that they do not need to look over their
shoulders to see whether anybody is eaves-dropping and ready to
condemn them as communalists.
One suspects that Swami Viveakananda who did so much for the
revival of Hindu, pride at the rum of the century would approve
of this new development. It is, only when the majority community
recovers its pride, a pride in its catholicity, its tolerance,
its sense of fairness and justice, that the country can march
forward to recover its glory.
The BJP is moving in that direction . All power to its elbow.
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