Oppn's future may be entirely in BJP's hand

Defeat is bitter but a debacle can be traumatic. Post-May 23, India’s main opposition parties seem to be imploding. Congress is reeling from the dual trauma of an electoral rout and a petulant Rahul Gandhi; the Samajwadi Party-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh has collapsed, as have the anti-BJP alliances in Bihar and Jharkhand; the Left has been obliterated; and Mamata Banerjee has lost her composure. True, there are regional parties that have significant parliamentary presence and are buoyant in their respective states, but their principal focus is regional. They have minimal national expectations and are willing to forge working relationships with the Centre.Despite agonised voices lamenting India’s democratic future, the situation isn’t unprecedented. There was no worthwhile national opposition from 1947 to 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1971 and 1984 elections. However, and certainly after 1967, parliamentary dominance didn’t automatically generate either stability or purposeful governance. After Indira Gandhi, the Congress proved incapable of supplementing electoral victories with political consolidation. Flagship welfare schemes, such as MNREGA, did not succeed in providing it an assured national constituency of the rural poor in the same way as Operation Barga did for the CPM in West Bengal. Most of the gains were squandered by unbridled corruption.The past isn’t always a guide to the future, but contemporary history suggests that there is a direct correlation between the failures of the ruling party and the revival of the opposition. At present the BJP seems all-powerful and has spread itself both geographically and socially. Its spectacular growth coupled with its organisational rigour has even led to it being equated with the pre-1967 Congress — a dominant party with the opposition working at the margins. However, nothing is permanent. The future of Indian politics will depend not so much on how the opposition is able to cope with its present disarray but more on how the BJP manages its dominance.So far, the ruling party has demonstrated stupendous energy and political imagination. The famed political machine that Amit Shah has built is no doubt centred on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal appeal but that appeal in turn has been constructed on the strength of meticulous calculation and the willingness to accept the most daunting of challenges.The Modi-Shah duo realised — soon after the defeat in the Assembly poll in Bihar in 2015 — that the BJP could not rely only on the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system. It was assumed that the opposition would eventually rally its forces and present a united front. The challenge was, therefore, to build a party capable of securing 50% of the votes. This meant redrawing the party’s social matrix and targeting government policies to realise this objective. Consequently, the state welfare system focussed singlemindedly on sections that were hitherto outside the BJP ecosystem — particularly individuals who valued caste solidarity and weren’t traditional BJP voters. The outcome of the general election revealed that, riding on the back of welfare schemes, the BJP rallied an incremental constituency of the poor that transcended ties of either caste or political affiliation and voted for Modi, the man who had facilitated a betterment of their personal lives.Secondly, unlike the first NDA government that took its eye off the BJP’s core constituency to manage coalition pressures and secure greater acceptability, the Modi government was never inclined to shelve the party’s foot soldiers. The sabka saath, sabka vikas approach of the government was complimented by issues that had an emotive appeal to the faithful. These included the constant invocation of national pride, bursts of foreign policy hawkishness, proposed legislation on citizenship and triple talaq, and low tolerance of corruption. These were complemented by symbolic assaults on the Nehruvian consensus and the Khan Market cabal — trivial in the larger scheme of things but issues that excited the bhakt imagination and triggered culture wars.It is unlikely that this approach will see any shift. Modi will focus on achieving the $5 trillion economy target, securing state efficiency, expanding the architecture of welfare and enhancing India’s global clout. Home minister Amit Shah will pursue more explicitly ideological objectives: crafting a new consensus on citizenship, anti-terrorism and the integration of Kashmir. Seen in totality, the second Modi government will be simultaneously pro-development and pro-nationalist. These approaches will be supplemented by a populist blend of anti-elitism and ethical uprightness.The opposition to today’s BJP is built on disparate appeals: dynastic loyalty, caste politics, minorityism and cosmopolitan modernity. Their sectional appeals just cannot match Modi’s meta-narrative. Theirs is a crisis of political imagination.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/302Q10r