Janata Parivar needs Nitish model not Lalu's

Reasons why going back to the mandal politics of the 90s instead of the Nitish model of governance would be a big mistake

Now that the Janata Parivar is a reality, what should it do to make the most out of the combined entity? Go back to the tried and tested formula of Mandal politics with the associated risk of marginalizing a whole host of other social groups? Or do something that has been done by one of its leaders not so long ago?

The first hint of things to come came from none other than Bihar chief minister and strong advocate of a combined Janata Parivar Nitish Kumar himself. He is reported to have pitched for an OBC quota in the judiciary at the recently concluded conference of chief justices in Delhi. With the talk of quota for Dalits in private sector jobs gaining currency yet again, there is likely to be a greater temptation on the part of products of Mandal politics, which is what all parties that came together are all about, to revive the social justice plank to take on, what they perceive as “communal” Bharatiya Janata Party.

If they choose to do, they will be committing a mistake. They must realize that the country has moved beyond the politics of caste and recent elections have shown that political parties’ association with social groups is a dynamic one: They cannot take certain castes’ loyalty for granted.

Surveys after surveys have shown that disparate social groups, sometimes even hostile to each other, have voted for the same party. It happened in favour of the BJP in May 2014 Lok Sabha elections, helped the Samajwadi Party in 2012 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and worked for the Aam Aadmi Party in the recently concluded Delhi assembly elections. This clearly indicates that the hold of castes in deciding electoral outcomes is waning.

The primacy of economic factors over primordial loyalties in deciding electoral outcome has been established by a recent study of political commentator Milan Vaishnav. His research reveals that “An improvement of one percentage point in a state’s growth rate in the 2000s is linked to a greater than nine per cent increase in the likelihood that the incumbent will be re-elected, a four percentage point gain in seat share, and a 1.3 percentage point rise in vote share.”

So the choice before the Janata Parivar is simple: Promise the Nitish Kumar model of governance or bet on former Bihar chief minister Lalu Yadav’s model of other backward classes (OBC) and Muslims coalition to win elections. Kumar’s was an inclusive agenda that helped his state make a turnaround of sorts and won him truckload of votes. Lalu’s model ignored building roads and augmenting power generation because it would benefit sections of society, upper caste to be precise, he did not want to. It did not matter to him that all others too will suffer as a result.

Nitish may be less confident about the winnability of his model following massive reverses in the last year’s Lok Sabha elections for his party in Bihar. But then he must realize that he lost to the promise of achche din. What he will have to promise is even more achche din, and certainly not all those days when even dreaming of achche din was not possible.