Parties without ideology are endangered in the BJP-era. Even Congress needs a modernised doctrine

Does ideology still matter? If you look at the big picture, ideology has become a stronger force than it’s been in decades. Except, it works only on one side – the BJP’s.

Illustration: Soham Sen | ThePrint

The dramatic transformation in Maharashtra this last week gives us an intriguing view of the state of our national politics. Of where we stand now, how we got here and where do we go next.

Some interesting questions follow. Does ideology still matter in our politics? You’d probably think it doesn’t, if you look at the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, for example.

However morally exalted, the promise of a corruption-free government and free-this and free-that do not make an ideology. Not even when backed by framed portraits of Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh on the wall.

At the other end of the spectrum, the same conclusion can be reached by looking at the moves in Maharashtra: first, the Shiv Sena defected from the NDA to move to an alliance of ideological arch rivals, the NCP and the Congress. In the course of time, two of the three split and saw a majority of their MLAs defect to the BJP. Where does that even leave the ideology and principle in politics?

NCP leader and former UPA cabinet minister Praful Patel gave us an insight into this when questioned by journalists to justify his switch to the BJP-led coalition.

If we (NCP) had no problem aligning with the Shiv Sena, he asked, why should there be a problem in aligning with the BJP now.

I did see a comment from Sharad Pawar somewhere that it was okay to embrace the inclusive Hindutva of the Shiv Sena but not the BJP’s. Which, we know, and must dismiss as pure baloney.

The fact is, that if you look at the big picture with an open mind, ideology has become a stronger force than it’s been in decades. Except, it works only on one side – the BJP’s. You may adore or detest it, but you can’t deny that the party has moved closer to its core.

On the other hand, too many leaders and their parties have thrived for these same decades in an ideologically permissive environment where principles and philosophical commitments have always been fungible with power.

Developments in Maharashtra politics over the past four years are probably telling us that the era is now over. The Eknath Shinde Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar NCP may enjoy their short innings in power, but electorally and politically, they now represent forces in terminal decline.

This could then spell the end of two mostly transactional political entities. That the Shiv Sena and the NCP are almost entirely one-state parties does not matter as over the past 25 years, ruling coalitions in Delhi have almost always had one of the two as partners.

In the pre-Modi past, especially after the 2009 elections, many of us (this columnist included, so guilty by self-incrimination) were quick to hail the arrival of an ideology-free Indian politics.

The increasingly younger voter, we had concluded, had only one thought while hitting the button on the voting machine: what’s in it for me? Modi kept that in mind in his 2014 campaign, but his larger appeal was of hard, emotional, Hindutva-based nationalism.

There were frequent references to Pakistan, and many indirect ones to Muslims, especially the questions over the justification for “pink revolution” (electoral code for meat exports). It was on the other hand the Congress-led rivals who sounded transactional with talk of MNREGA and other rights-based laws and welfarism.

By 2019, Modi had moved on to even harder, post-Pulwama/Balakot nationalism and the Congress was fighting back with charges of corruption (Rafale, “Chowkidar chor hai”) and NYAY scheme handouts. A clear ideological binary was still not created. And if the Congress struggled, we can easily understand the predicament of the smaller, regional parties fighting the BJP.

The product differentiation they sought was either based on protection of Muslims, or handouts. With the exception of some regional forces, the DMK and the Left in Kerala, no party other than the BJP fought in the name of its ideology. It made it that much easier for Modi.

It’s a point we make often because it is central to our post-1984 politics. We take 1984 as the cut-off because that’s when Rajiv Gandhi won his mandate of 415. Since then, who rules India has been a function of one factor: can one side use caste to divide what religion (Hinduism) united? Or will the other succeed in reuniting with religion what caste divided. For the first 25 years since the Congress lost power in 1989, the forces of caste won. Then came the Modi era.

It was in those 25 years when the so-called secular politics became confused and lost its larger ideological moorings. To oppose the BJP began to look increasingly as a utilitarian function of winning the Muslim vote rather than standing by a larger principle.

This is how “secular vote” became a synonym for Muslim vote. That led to local tussles also, as between the SP and the BSP in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress, Left and the TMC in West Bengal and finally also between the Congress and the newer Muslim forces such as Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM and Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF in Assam. In most states other than Maharashtra, the NCP also began putting up its own candidates — as notably in the Gujarat elections of 2017, which once looked touch-and-go for the BJP.

Meanwhile, the BJP was making its product sharper, better-defined and unapologetically Hindu nationalist. Its slogan of “sabka saath, sabka vikaas” also underlined its raw, new confidence that while it knew the Muslims didn’t vote for it, it will still not victimise them. While this created a one-sidedness to national politics, in several of the states the BJP still failed to defeat local/regional powers.

Barring Kerala and Tamil Nadu — both of which aren’t so relevant to the BJP — in most other states, this challenge came from one leader or one family parties.

These include Andhra, Telangana, West Bengal, Delhi, Bihar, Odisha and Maharashtra, among others. Many of those parties now need a rethink. Families can be broken, nephews can ditch uncles for example, loyalists can be either enticed or muscled out using the agencies, and they will all have some version of the argument that Praful Patel offered to justify his move.

Delivering a lecture on the life of late Lal Bahadur Shastri (titled Lal Bahadur Shastri – The man who died too soon) at New Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Library earlier this Friday, editor and author T.N. Ninan raised an important point.

Thinking aloud on what would have happened if Shastri hadn’t died too soon, he said one possibility was that the Congress wouldn’t have split. Or maybe, Indira Gandhi was timed out and Y.B. Chavan rose as the successor instead.

It follows that if the party hadn’t been split by Mrs Gandhi in 1969, it probably would not have taken such a sharp turn to the Left as she led it into. She chose to do it to fight her own old guard. In my view, this was expedient politics, not ideological conviction. What better than ideas of the ‘progressive, youthful Left’ to destroy the conservative fuddy-duddies.

This she did with aplomb.

But in the process, the Congress was left with an ideology its rank and file, particularly the top leadership that remained with her, hadn’t bought into. Congress was never designed to be some revolutionary party. That’s probably why the party has kept on splitting since then, almost at the rate of once in five years. Most of these breakaway factions then became regional, family-run forces, from the NCP to the Sangmas of Meghalaya, Mamata’s TMC to the YSRCP. The BJP, on the other hand, kept its ideological and political cohesion. A few leaders who broke away returned: B.S. Yediyurappa, Kalyan Singh. And the odd one who didn’t fade away: Shankersinh Vaghela.

This pretty much explains the state of national politics today. It is also the message of Maharashtra. If only the Congress could rebuild on its strengths and evolve a modernised ideology, we could again be moving towards a clearer two-party, bipolar politics.