BJP, Left face existential dilemma

[Yusuf]

The politician who has suffered a greater loss of face in the elections than anyone else is Prakash Karat. The manner in which the voters have busted his grandiose dreams shows that he hadn't a clue of the conditions at ground level. Driven by his dogma, he had bulldozed his way through a subservient politburo without realising that he was leading not only his own party, but the entire Left group into a dead end. The latter, too, was seemingly so mesmerised by Big Brother that it had no inkling of the approaching calamity.

Karat's journey towards disaster began with his championing the anti-imperialist cause which, he thought, had a wide measure of public support. Surrounded by like-minded apparatchiki, he presumed that opposition to America as in the days of the Vietnam War and castigation of neo-liberalism were sure-fire recipes for political success. He evidently had no idea that India had changed meantime and that he was 20 or 30 years behind time, as Rahul Gandhi later pointed out.

Perhaps vaguely aware that the Left by itself would not have the requisite numbers to pose a serious challenge to the two national parties, Karat turned to some of the country's most unreliable politicos. He should have anticipated their fickleness when the Samajwadi Party, an old friend of the CPM from the days of Karat's predecessor as party general secretary, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, joining hands with the Congress on the eve of the trust vote in Parliament. Karat ignored Surjeet's earlier acceptance of the Congress as a lesser evil than the BJP. Though adept at stitching together unwieldy alliances, Surjeet's broad objective was to keep the BJP at bay. He would have been appalled by the sight of the Marxists voting along with the BJP against the government on the nuclear deal.

Karat, however, had no such compunctions. To him, anti-Americanism was all. Since the government, according to him, was selling out the country to the Great Satan, his first objective was to pull it down even if it meant supping with the devil. His lack of foresight was also evident from the fact that he apparently never considered what would happen if the government really fell. Since Mayawati was waiting eagerly in the wings, he evidently thought that a replacement for the prime minister was at hand.

But he never bothered about the consequences of helping someone into the prime minister's chair who had no experience of running a country of India's size and complexity and whose party had hardly any presence outside UP. Steeped in the history of turmoil in pre-revolution Russia and China, political upheaval was not something that was expected to daunt the CPM general secretary. Besides, his bedtime reading told him that anarchic periods were the times when power changed from the bourgeoisie to the hands of the people.

In the event, it was the Left that "lost its voice", as Amartya Sen said. Now, it has lost it altogether because of the steep drop in its numbers from 61 MPs to 24. What this dramatic fall means is that the comrades will not have the kind of clout they enjoyed at the Centre for four years from 2004. Karat's singular achievement, therefore, has been to take the Left down from the highest point it ever achieved to one of the lowest in recent years.

The root cause of this precipitous decline was his pursuit of the Third Front chimera, whose defining feature was that all its non-Left constituents had once been the BJP's allies Mayawati, Jayalalithaa, Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik, H D Deve Gowda. Of them, the BSP czarina had campaigned for Narendra Modi in the post-riots elections in Gujarat while Naidu had remained a silent spectator of the carnage as a member of the NDA. None of Patnaik's secular bones ("every bone in my body is secular", Patnaik had said after the Kandhamal tragedy) seemed to have rattled in 2002.

It wasn't only the dubious choice of partners that exposed the limitations of Karat's stewardship. He had little control over the warring comrades in his own party, especially in Kerala, his home state. The bouts between V S Achuthanandan and Pinarayi Vijayan intensified when the latter's command of the state unit's internal structure enabled him to deny nomination to Achuthanandan in the 2006 assembly elections. Although violent demonstrations forced the CPM's central leaders to allow Achuthanandan to contest, his skirmishes with Vijayan have continued to this day.

If power in Kerala has alternated between the LDF and the UDF every five years, the looming threat to the Left's 30-year rule in West Bengal shows that Karat had no idea how to check the erosion of the party's popularity. All his time was spent running from Mayawati to Patnaik to Naidu to shore up an alliance fraying at the edges right from the start when neither Mayawati nor Jayalalithaa showed up at its inaugural rally in Tumkur in Karnataka. Karat's only experience of "mass" politics was in the JNU. Since then, his cloistered existence in party offices has not helped broaden his vision.

 

[Mohan]

I am happy that the pawn of a beast is silenced and hope will be kicked in the future elections too. What i have seen in this election is disgusting agendas. One for mulayam saying that he supports anyone who throws out mayawati.No one is asking votes for development and other issues at hand.

 

[Flint]

Yusuf, great post.

 

[Flint]

Yusuf, as Hindu, I personally dont care if they build a temple in Ayodhya or not. Whether they build the country or not is the question. You cannot contest an election, with your primar objective being "building a ram mandir". That is where the BJP flopped. Time for a strategy rethink for BJP.

We can see Gujarat as an example. The reason BJP has retained it is due to the good work Modi has put in, same goes for Nitish in Bihar. Most people nowadays see through this religion thingy.

However, I have only couple of major point points against the congress, 1. Its caste politics with the 49.5% reservation. 2. It calls itself secular, what was 1984, and why is Tytler still free?

IMO, BJP doesn't face an existential threat, the Left does.

All said and done, the BJP is a representative of the kind of politics that has shaped the boundaries of most countries today - religious pride, and ethnic pride. One cannot blame them for trying out what the rest of the world has done.

However, the boundaries and idea of India exceeds the idea of Hindu pride, and therfore they cannot win the support of the majority with that idea.
We have, for example, two Christian majority states in NE India and one Muslim-majority. Will those people ever subscribe to the Hindutva ideology? Very unlikely.

However, one can learn some lessons from their idea of cultural pride -and all Indians, irrespective of their religious affiliations, should have pride in Indian culture, not necessarily Hindu culture and history.
An Indian Christian should take pride in the achievements of his Hindu/Buddhist ancestors just like the Greek Christians celebrate the achievements of the ancient Greeks.
Similarly, Indian muslims should take pride in the achievements of both Ashoka and Akbar, because as long as his ancestors lived on his land, they experienced both histories, and possibly influenced them as well.

 

[Yusuf]

Despite having a plethora of issues to campaign against the ruling UPA coalition the BJP has suffered a poll debacle. Its paltry tally of 116 Lok Sabha seats, as well as dip in national vote share by 4 to 5 percentage points compared to the last Lok Sabha elections, which it had also lost, should prompt rethinking in the party about its direction. If it wants to look once again like a contender for power, the first lesson it should draw is not to run a shrill and negative election campaign, full of grievance and vitriol, as it did this time.

Terror, for example, can be a valid election campaign theme. But it's a serious issue. The BJP's approach, by contrast, came across as rancorous, personalised and superficial, hung on the three pegs of reviving the unpopular POTA, hanging a convicted terrorist and characterising Manmohan Singh as a weak leader. As Shivraj Singh Chouhan, one of the BJP's most successful chief ministers, has observed, the hanging of Afzal Guru can hardly be made into an attractive election issue.

Internal criticisms within the BJP have brought out that it is losing popularity among youth as well as among the urban middle classes, two segments where it had been strong earlier and which represent the emergent India of the 21st century. To reconnect with these segments and devise a winning strategy, it needs to focus on the future rather than obsess with the past. The BJP may still look at the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as a foundational moment, because that's how it came into prominence as a national party. But this is a new century, where destroying a mosque in order to establish a temple at the same spot hardly makes policy sense. India has changed dramatically between 1992 and 2009. The old ploy of provoking communal riots in order to polarise the electorate, a formula that BJP appears to have stuck to as late as 2008 in case of anti-Christian riots in Orissa, is subject to diminishing returns at the ballot box.

If identity politics has played itself out by now, how can the BJP reorient itself? It could do so by identifying and filling a gaping lacuna in Indian politics, the lack of a centre-right party which speaks the language of reform and harnesses globalisation to expand the middle class. That would be incompatible with a Hindu Rashtra plank, but Hindu Rashtra could be substituted with a strong nationalist appeal which would have greater resonance across the country. If that requires the BJP to cut its ties with the far right, it should do so with the intention of occupying a moderate conservative space.

 

[S.A.T.A]

I don't think either the left or the BJP face an existential threat based on the 2009 verdict.BJP's debacle in this election is primarily because it was unable to match the congress in occupying the political space that the third front parties had begun to concede.Congress made spectacular gains and BJP didn't.

Its going to be interesting as to what inferences the BJP think tank will take from this verdict.while there has been obvious erosion of trust in the BJP,its not clear if it was BJP's invoking hardliner hindutva the reason for the debacle.We have to remember that in the states where the hindutva decibel was discernibly higher,like Gujarat,karnataka and UP,BJP has fared handsomely.

BJP made several tactical mistakes during the campaign phase which cost it dearly,the part well know for [party discipline,was a picture of indiscipline and factionalism during the campaign phase,with sections of BJP leadership even projecting Narendra Modi as a PM candidate.This confused the electorate.BJP also seriously erred with its seat sharing tie ups with its NDA partners.BJP must have bargained for more seats from Nitish's JDU in Bihar.

However there is no indication that the election verdict somehow indicated that there was complete alienation of its core Hindutva ideology from the electorate and BJP understands the same.BJP suffered set backs in Rajasthan, Punjab,MP,UK and MAH.except for MP the results in other states where on expected lines,with Congress gaining from the split of votes between SS-BJP and the MNS in MAH.

Whats the road ahead for the BJP.BJP is certainly not abandoning the Hindu plank.Most Hindus like the idea of a Hindu revival,what they dislike is the attendant communal hatred and bloodshed.If BJP manages find this elusive formula,its chances are brighter in 2014,when the electorate will be ready for change after ten years of UPA rule(unless congress really does something special)

 

[thakur_ritesh]

a very good point made there sata, there is nothing to show that both these parties/group of parties/ideologies are heading towards getting extinct. the bad luck of the left was that they depend on just two main states to cobble up their numbers and one of them west bengal is more or less taken for granted to give a certain minimum number of seats, even this time till the very last they were expected to get at least 28 odd seats which was not to happen. quite clearly it was a case of lightening striking the left twice, once in kerala where they were a complete divided house a rarity to be seen in this rather disciplined grouping and then well of course the nandigram and singur episode which at the end of the day left the reds, red faced. one wonders had these two incidents not happened would the left have faced the same humiliation like they did, probably no and seriously from the looks of it ms mamta benerjee does not quite present her self as a viable alternative, she comes across as way too hyper to fill up the void that will be created and for this very reason i do not see this jubilation on the part of tmc to even last till the next vidhan sabha election in that state. as far as kerala is concerned, they have been in a habit of once voting in the left front and then the congress led front and this repeatedly happens in lok sabha elections and vidhan sabha elections, so as sata has said for bjp, i repeat the same for left, its way too early to write the obituary of the left front, wait for 2014.