Long Live Our Dead Ghosts

Arjun Singh, we are told by his fans in the Congress, possesses one sharp political brain. L.K. Advani, his disciples in the BJP would tell you, is a genuinely creative political strategist. The actions of both over the past week would strongly recommend that we seriously question these reputations. Or, perhaps, substitute the present tense for the past. You could argue that both knew their politics and were greatly successful at it, in fact so successful that both came to within a missed heartbeat of becoming prime ministers. But now, they’ve lost the plot. And so have their respective parties.

Like an old couple hoping to rediscover some spark of romance by spending their 50th wedding anniversary in the same place as their honeymoon, Advani and Arjun Singh are trying to recreate the “magic”, such as it was, of 1989 when that hopeless cliche, “mandal and kamandal”, hijacked our politics. India lost three full years, filled by such forgettable interregnums as V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar, just when the Cold War was ending, China and Russia were reforming, and the world was brimming with new ideas and opportunities. At that point, between Advani and V.P. Singh, a majority of Indians were persuaded to vote on the basis, not of where their country should be headed, but of whether or not to build the temple – or, for or against OBC reservations in government jobs. Both will fail this time. Mandir and Hindutva are a cheque that the BJP has already encashed once and however much God may be partial to you, she hasn’t invented a cheque you could encash twice. To be fair to him, Advani, or Rajnath Singh in his wake (or should it be the other way around?), is not talking obviously of the temple. But the message is clear. It is to re-ignite the idea of Hindu nationalism.

Arjun Singh is more direct, first pushing for reservations in private institutions and now slicing away half of the IITs and IIMs for reserved quotas. But his desperate bid to re-invent himself as V.P. Singh Mark II will not benefit his party. It will damage it as much as V.P. Singh Mark I did. Given today’s messy politics nobody wants to vote against any idea of increasing reservations. But he will only succeed in destroying these great institutions by politicising them. To that extent, he will be more successful than his predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi. And just as Joshi did, he will also turn away the middle-class, upwardly mobile, even small-town and aspirational voters in disgust. Further, it will not impress the OBCs.

Most electoral hotspots of the country have OBC leaders of their own: Lalu and Nitish in Bihar, and Mulayam in Uttar Pradesh. And mark my words, soon enough you will see the rise of another such, a strong OBC leader with regionally limited, but significant mass appeal cutting both ways, Mandal and Kamandal, in Uma Bharati.

There is nothing personal about this confusion in the minds of both veteran leaders. They only reflect the demoralised, sterile minds of their respective parties. The BJP still can’t figure out how it lost power, and worse, it does not have the patience to wait till 2009. Barring Vajpayee’s late dash in his last two years, with his creative foreign policy and some aggressive reform, the BJP’s rise in power marked the end of its political imagination. All the chintan baithaks have failed to produce one new idea, except to debate whether or not to go back to the old one: Hindutva.

The Congress is uneasy in the current arrangement, dragged by its ears, its nose rubbed in the ground on a daily basis by its Leftist “allies”. Its insecurity is now compounded as an entire medley of “third front” types conspire with the Left and hope to bury the hatchet soon enough in the Congress’s most expendable back after these assembly elections. If there is another national election this year, as well might be the case, provided the latest gang-up gathers strength, the Congress needs a slogan, a programme, an agenda that will counter the appeal of the Left, the Right, and the third front satraps. Unlike the BJP, which at least has some loyal NDA allies, the Congress may have none except, maybe, Lalu and DMK. So what does its one-man brains trust do but dust up an old divisive idea from fellow Thakur, V.P. Singh.

It is dangerous for India if its two largest parties, its only two national parties who even today share nearly 300 seats in Parliament and, in a twisted way, together represent the will of a vast majority, fall back on these outdated ideas just because they are short on intellect and imagination. In today’s India, you can no longer sway voters with talk of the past. That era ended in the winter of 2003. It was in that mini-general election that the voter, particularly in Hindi states, told you that he was now going to reward or punish you entirely based on your performance. So while the Congress governments were defeated in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the voter defied anti-incumbency to re-elect Sheila Dikshit in Delhi because he thought she had performed. That this was no isolated shift and that this new mood also cut into the Mandalised heartland, became evident in Bihar where the voter stormed out of the ossified caste-based trenches to vote Lalu-Rabri out. And what is the slogan that Nitish Kumar used? More reservations? Temples? Special treatment? None of the above. I heard him speak at rallies countering Lalu’s favourite war cry of empowerment to the downtrodden: apni laathi ko tel pilao (season your sticks with oil). Nitish was telling his voters, to forget the laathi now, it will not bring you any equality, nor take your children to a better future. “Laathi ko tel nahin, kalam ko syahi pilane ka samay hai (don’t soak your lathi in oil, the time has come to fill your pens with ink),” he said, because it is education and knowledge that will bring you equality. I know a dozen political pundits, experts on fine caste divisions, exponents of AJGAR, MAJGAR, KHAM, MY, and all kinds of dreadful acronyms representing caste combinations, laughing at Nitish then. But who had the last laugh? The BJP was a very grateful collateral beneficiary.

That is the lesson both national parties have to learn. This India is waiting for somebody who will give them an idea, a dream, even a slogan, a better future as Indians, not as Muslims or Brahmins, or Yadavs or Dalits. The politics of division, where you voted not for your and your children’s future, but against somebody who did something to your ancestors, is now over. Elections between 2003 and 2005 have shown the politics of blood feuds is now dying. The Congress has to remember nearly 40 per cent of Indians who voted in 2009 would have been born after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. And the BJP, that 30 per cent would have been born after Bofors broke, and nearly 20 per cent after the Mandir-Mandal movements of 1989.

So here is a suggestion for each side. Can the Congress tell Arjun Singh to get off the reservation horse and get on the equality wagon by promising, instead, to build ten Kendriya Vidyalayas and Navodaya Vidyalayas, one of the greatest contributions of Rajiv Gandhi to India’s future, in every state? That will do more to bridge the Bharat-India gap than any increased reservations anywhere. And could the BJP please get its chief ministers to focus on governance? Out of sheer cussedness, it delayed implementing VAT in its states for a year, losing additional revenues that would have built more roads and schools and would have been encashable in votes in 2008 as well as 2009. Will it ask its chief minister in Madhya Pradesh why his state is lagging so far behind in acquiring land for the National Highway Programme corridors passing through it? What will he tell the voters in 2008/09 – that he will now build them a temple at Ayodhya instead?

There is no percentage in this politics for either national party. If they still divide the vote banks, then they better accept the inevitability of a charismatic indigenous leader taking these away, just as Lalu, Mulayam and Nitish have done with Muslims and backwards, Mayawati with the Dalits and Pawar with the Marathas. National parties, by definition, cannot fight small guerrilla skirmishes and win. They should, instead, be consolidating it all on one big battlefront where bit players can’t divide and rule through the leverage of 30, 20, or even five MPs in a permanent coalition situation. If the respective Chanakyas and Machiavellis of both parties are incapable of figuring this, they can go on with a private little war of their own while they cede real power to the motley third front-ists, with the Left having the most delicious option of going with the winner.