T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: The spectre of a weak Centre

LINE & LENGTH

Unless the BJP and the Congress unite, the Centre will be weakened. It is growth that will suffer.

The Congress is celebrating a decade of Sonia Gandhi as party president. But it is not clear what members are so pleased about: the fact of her having been there that long or her electoral triumphs, which have been heartrendingly few. This makes it hard to judge her innings because hers has been a bit like Mr Gavaskar's at Manchester in the 1975 World Cup: 36 runs off 174 balls after batting through for the entire 60 overs. (In those days World Cup matches consisted of 60 overs a side.)

Without any question, she has been good for the party. In 1998 it was falling apart, with some of its current luminaries even knocking at the BJP's doors. But as befits a royalist party, her restoration has been like that of Charles the Second's restoration to the British throne in 1660 "" the "if-not-me-then-not-you-either" culture of the Congress has been put on hold. The clear line of succession posted on the notice board has also helped matters. I asked a young Congress MP a few weeks ago how it felt to be a member of a party that had an official glass ceiling. He said destiny mattered a lot in such things. (But whose destiny he did not clarify.)

The contented smile on the Congress's face also provides the occasion to ask how political parties have evolved in India. One would have expected a few hundred books and journal articles on the subject. But while there are several that describe the way the way these parties work, none describes the way they think about issues.

Nor could I could find any books in English that trace the evolution of the parties purely in non-tactical terms. That is, it is one thing to write about tactical responses to political situations and quite another to describe the way the thinking about issues has changed. For the Congress, the pre-1947 period is vastly richer in this regard and up to a point so is the Nehru era, not least because his letters to chief ministers and others.

If one applies Occam's Razor principle to this "" that other things being the same, the simplest explanation is often the best "" it would appear that the major parties have stopped evolving. Thus, the Congress party has been wedded to one political family since 1971 and the BJP to one political idea. I don't know which is worse because both are manifestations of a defensive attitude. Both are fearful that if they let go of that one thing, they will disintegrate. And they are absolutely right because both coalesce around a negative idea, instead of a positive one.

This raises another issue: in a political system that is as competitive as ours, do only negative ideas succeed? And if so, what does such negativism do to the electorate, which also becomes defensive as it is fed such negativism?

I do not want to trivialise these things but the Indian cricket team provides an excellent example of positive thinking: as long as it was defensive in approach, it failed to triumph. There is a moral in its performance that the BJP and the Congress need to infer and work upon.

This brings up the next question which, too, I asked another young MP: if they don't come together, can the BJP and the Congress survive in a country where the aspirations of the people have changed so dramatically?

He was dismissive of the idea, perhaps because he belonged to some other party. But the point is that if the BJP and the Congress are at the centre of Indian politics in that they are less negative than the regional parties, and if the Centre is to hold, their safety lies in numbers.

With 200-220 MPs between them for the foreseeable future, their only claim to being national parties will be mandated on a 20 per cent share of the popular vote. That is not good enough, whatever the legal requirement to that claim might be. But together, they can add up to not just 40-odd per cent but also around 400 seats.

If India is to get on with economic growth, that too at 10 per cent, this sort of a political outcome is critical for getting things done. Another way of saying the same thing is that India continues to need a strong Centre, if not any longer for unity and integrity reasons then for economic ones. Both the NDA and the UPA experiments have shown this to be true. But "" and here's the medium- and long- term problem for India "" if the BJP and the Congress don't come together, the Centre will not remain strong.

Inevitably, this leads to the most important question of all: is either party willing to give up what it regards as its main strength, namely, the Gandhi family for the Congress and Hindutva for the BJP?

The two parties must soon ask themselves if these are indeed their main strengths. There are many who will agree when I say that the opposite is true, especially after the next general election.