T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Bharatiya Janata Congress

LINE & LENGTH

Back in the mid-1980s, I wrote a series of articles which argued that within a decade India's GDP would be led by services and, therefore, it made sense for India to negotiate aggressively for the liberalisation of trade in services.

For my pains, the commerce secretary, who had earlier been our chief negotiator in Gatt, sent word that I was "a bloody fool". I was most gratified.

Actually, though, any "bloody fool" could have predicted the role that services were going to play. It was less a matter of data and more a matter of logic.

The simple fact was that Indian manufacturing was so repressed then""what with licensing laws, labour laws, and financial deprivation""that with the number of educated persons increasing rapidly, there was no other way for the economy to go. Indeed, you had to be a fool not to be able to see that.

Ever since then, I have been so impressed with my fluke bull's eye that I am going to risk another prediction now. This one, too, is based on the logic of things. And like the previous one, it goes against the grain of currently received wisdom.

The prediction is this: in a decade or so from now, large sections of the Congress and the BJP will have come together under a common label. This will be the new Third Front.

The starting point is once again the educated middle class, which is growing faster now than it was in the 1980s. Therefore, sooner than you think, a new political formation will have to emerge to reflect the aspirations and needs of this group.

But where will it come from? Certainly not from the perpetually heaving bosoms of the Left and the caste-based parties, because that game is ending.

Also, there are only two political sources with an all-India provenance""the Congress and the BJP. Both have large numbers of politicians who come from the class mentioned above. And their numbers are increasing.

The reason why these people have joined one or the other party is not ideology. Most of them could have gone either way. Partly, there were family reasons for joining. And partly it was the group you fell in with when you were an undergraduate.

By the way, those who follow the political scene in Delhi will confirm that when the BJP was in power several prominent young Congressmen tried to join it but couldn't because they didn't have enough bargaining power. The same thing is happening in reverse now.

Be that as it may, for the BJP, the main point is that its next generation of politicians has not been drawn from the RSS. And in the Congress the next generation of politicians has not cut its teeth on the perverted socialism of the 1970s.

This has very far-reaching political implications. After all, both groups need a common trough to bury their snouts in.

As far as the BJP is concerned, I would also say that the days of RSS dominance are over. Mr Sudarshan's outburst was a cry of desolation, not of war. It may not appear so now but the RSS is a spent force, politically at least. The idea it represented had had its time. You can't mobilise people any more on that anti-Muslim thing.

Likewise, for the Congress, the old paternalism doesn't work any longer. The party never had an ideology in the real sense of the word. But it did have certain formulae after 1969 that were politically useful. That usefulness is now open to very serious questioning.

Interestingly, the nature of this questioning is the same in the BJP and the Congress. It can be described in a nutshell in the following words: are these old fogies for real?

Therefore, the challenge to the current leadership in both the parties is to demonstrate to the contrary, namely, that those old bodies house young brains. If they succeed, which I doubt, the two parties will remain relevant. If not, I don't see how a new formation can be prevented from coming into being.

For the Congress, the problem is a little more acute. Not only does it have to give up its pretensions to socialism""that is the easier part""it also has to stop genuflecting to No 10. Will the new boys respect Rahul Gandhi?

In contrast, for the BJP only the RSS has to be jettisoned. The problem, of course, is that without the RSS, the BJP has very few political workers left.

Stop here for a bit and think this over. One party has to find a new leadership. The other one has to find new workers. What a delicious irony!

But what a wonderful opportunity, as well. And not as far-fetched as it seems. Indira Gandhi split the Congress in 1969 to team up with the Communists, who her father and the Congress party simply loathed. So why is it so difficult to see the Congress teaming up with a bunch of former communalists then?

Most people will say because the Muslim vote will not allow this to happen. This is wrong, for three reasons.

First, the Muslim community has itself changed and is no longer as much a prisoner of the old-style leaders as it used to be.

Second, the relevance of community-based politics is diminishing and will disappear as the economy revs up.

Third, there is no such thing as a Muslim vote. That block thing is gone, if it ever existed.

This does not mean the Muslims will become irrelevant politically. No group with nearly eight crore voters can.

But it does mean that the method of mobilising their votes will change. Ergo, since for their past sins the BJP and the Congress will not attract much of the Muslim vote, a new formation seems inevitable.

That leaves the question of money: can a new party succeed without money, even if it does manage to get on without much muscle? The answer is no, of course.

This leaves the final issue of how this new formation will come about. I believe it will happen as a result of defections in the 15th or the 16th Lok Sabha. There is no other way, really.

Unlikely? Not if you look back and see that this is exactly what Indira Gandhi did so hugely successfully in 1969. India needed a new formation then, as much as it needs one now. She provided it.

The idea is simple: if you don't have the money to get there separately, get in first and then separate.