By Aakar Patel
The other half is controlled by parties that have no national ideology. They have a regional identity, and are needed by the Congress and the BJP to take power. These parties are also likely to form governments of cobbled coalitions independently in future.
India’s best columnist, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, thinks there is a 40 per cent chance that Mayawati, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, will become prime minister in three months. He says this is because she has no ideology of her own. In a hung parliament, the Congress, the BJP and the Communists will all support her identity agenda, which is the uplift of Untouchables.
Because they have national presence, the Congress and the BJP reach for a higher common denominator when they express themselves. They sought this in national identity, but in the last 15 years this has been eclipsed. The issues of political debate in India are not secularism versus communalism, or China or Pakistan or Kashmir. They are not about economics either, because there is a consensus on this issue, as we will see. The issues of debate are more fragmented, revealing the identity of those actually wielding power.
The Congress has fallen steadily from its peak of 404 seats under Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 to its current 145. The BJP looked like it was rising with its Hindutva agenda through the 90s, but it plateaued in 1999 at 182 seats and has since declined to 138, as it discovered the limits of Hindu nationalism.
Then we have the Communist Party, through its various factions. It has about 80 seats. All other parties are regional with a presence in one or two states. In a parallel process, the large parties are becoming big-tent, which means accommodating of multiple issues and points of view.
The BJP has had to put in storage its Hindutva agenda as the condition under which it hooks up with allies. Internally, the Congress and the BJP are each looking more like a coalition of regional parties with their state units dominating, rather than one entity with a strong centre.
With this understanding that power is being ceded from the two big parties to the regions, we can speculate about how the new government will act. Strategic policy: there is a view that India should be more assertive through a blue water navy, and increased military presence in the Indian Ocean region, through what is called the Curzonian approach.
However, the country does not have the money to build a world-class navy. It only has one aircraft carrier and eight destroyers. There are also limited returns from strong military presence without a coherent strategy, which India lacks because its concerns in the last two decades have been economic. There will be pressure on the BJP and the Congress from each other to beef up the military if either takes power, even though the Indian strategic community itself wields little clout. The nuclear deal was championed by Manmohan Singh in the face of opposition from most of India’s strategy hawks, who favoured isolation. This month India signed its deal with the IAEA allowing safeguards inspections on six existing and all future nuclear plants.
The civilian aspect of the deal will yield India much more reward than the military aspect, and this will be understood by the next government. As India struggles to retain its economic growth, its profile will be less muscular and the nuclear deal with America might well be the last major event for decades.
Economy: there has been a consensus on economics after 1991’s reforms under Manmohan Singh produced very good results. All three political combinations, the Congress, the BJP and the Third Front, have taken power in these 18 years. The Congress in 1991-1996 and 2004-2009, The Third Front in 1996-1998, and the BJP in 1998-2004. All three formations retained or accelerated economic reforms. Even when the Communists were supporters of the government, or a part of it, they did not disrupt the opening up of the economy, though they oppose it ideologically. India is still one of the most difficult countries in the world to do business in.
The problem is that any loss of control leads to anarchy, while control leads to corruption. Threading this needle will take decades, even as the controls are being dismantled slowly. However, the process of privatisation of state-run companies will probably slow down, if not end, as the private sector economy in the west unravels.
Redistribution: the editor of the DNA newspaper R Jagannathan pointed out that the largest number, about 30, of Congress members of parliament in the current Lok Sabha were from Andhra Pradesh. Because of this, he reasoned, many of the premium infrastructure projects went to companies from that state, including those for building airports.
In India the tendering process is finessed to eliminate competition.
Redistribution-through-corruption will increase as states become more powerful in Delhi, and the budget for infrastructure rockets. States that deliver a coherent voice to Delhi through many MPs of a single party will be better off. There is the possibility that parties of one state could come together to press demands for their state, but this is unlikely in the chaos of Indian politics.
Devolution: the decline of the Congress has ended misuse of Article 356, through which Delhi declared governor’s rule in a state. Often this was arbitrary, just as is currently happening with Shahbaz Sharif’s government. In the last 15 years in India, governments have been dissolved only consensually. This happened because of a 1994 Supreme Court verdict that clarified that the loss of majority could only be demonstrated on the floor of the house through a vote, not the opinion of the governor, who was Delhi’s nominee. A weaker centre has meant also that the summary power of the high command is waning. An example would be the Shiv Sena rebel currently in the Congress, Narayan Rane. Though he has behaved appallingly within the party, the Congress keeps nuzzling up to him because of the identity votes he controls on the coastal belt of Maharashtra. States will increase their share of legislative responsibility from the concurrent list.
Parliament is already unimportant in India. The current Lok Sabha had fewer hours worked on than any other, and lost a quarter of its time on disruption. Bills don’t get read before being passed, much less debated. This is no different in the state legislatures either, but localisation might bring about greater focus and accountability.
Foreign policy: under Inder Gujral (prime minister for a year from April 1997 to March 1998) India unfolded the Gujral Doctrine of its Third Front government. This was sophisticated, and stood apart from the pettiness that characterises India’s behaviour with its smaller neighbours. Gujral offered unilateral concessions to Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. He believed, correctly, that by being magnanimous to its smaller neighbours, India would get them to drop their suspicions and cooperate on issues like trade, terrorism and water. These were the issues that were important to India. Though it was mocked by the media, it was India’s best period of regional diplomacy.
Gujral’s outreach could not have been achieved by either the Congress or the BJP, because they are always susceptible to the ‘betrayal’ allegation from each other. Gujral also reached out to Pakistan in this period, though Nawaz Sharif, then leaning on the jihadi guns in Kashmir, scorned bilateralism.
While its textbooks have conditioned Indians in a Pavlovian way to China, trade is changing this over time. Under the rule of small parties, Pakistan will find India more earnest but less interested in Pakistan. The switching off of the Kashmir jihad by Musharraf has helped detach India from Pakistan’s problems in the west.
The smaller parties of India are always more open to seeing the other point of view. Because the parties that were guardians of Indian honour are in decline, a more open and pragmatic policy will likely result regionally.
The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@ gmail.com