TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: An amazing reversal of roles

LINE & LENGTH

In 2004, the Congress would not name its PM. Now the BJP can't.

Here is a puzzle. Indian television is run by some of the brainiest people in the country. They still manage to put out some of the worst nonsense you can imagine.

But this article is not about TV. It is about the assumptions that TV makes.

Consider, in this context, the two weeks since Pramod Mahajan was shot. They are very instructive.

Whenever a second-rung leader "unites with the five elements" (one TV channel used the phrase charmingly during Pramod Mahajan's funeral), the viewer is led to believe that but for their untimely exits such men might have gone on to become Prime Ministers. The same assumption was made when Rajesh Pilot and Madhav Rao Scindia met with fatal accidents.

But clearly the assumption is self-serving. The idea is to justify the utterly tasteless saturation coverage.

If we look at the 1990s, one thing stands out: we cannot predict who will become Prime Minister. Or, conversely, we can make that assumption about almost any MP.

Who would have thought that P V Narasimha Rao, H D Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral and Manmohan Singh would ever become Prime Ministers? But they did and thus added another complexity to Indian politics.

Strangely, even though it should be the other way around""this unpredictability does not hold for the states. There everyone knows who the next chief minister could be. Hence we have Jayalalithaa, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chandrababu Naidu, Navin Patnaik and so on.

It cannot be argued that this holds only for states where there are two major parties, accounting for around 75 per cent of the popular vote. The fact is that even where there are coalitions, rank outsiders don't become chief ministers (except when a government is pulled down, a la Deve Gowda recently in Karnataka).

Thus, in UP, the choice is between Mulayam Singh and Mayawati. In Bihar, it is between Nitish Kumar and Mrs Lalu Prasad. In Rajasthan, it is Ashok Gehlot or Vasundhara Raje Scindia. And so on.

But it is true that where either the BJP or the Congress leads the coalition, there is uncertainty. This reflects both poor leadership and its lack of authority.

Nevertheless, even in those states, there are no dark horses. The voter knows who will become the chief minister if the party that he votes for forms the government, or leads the coalition. Hence we get a Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, a Ghulam Nabi Azad, a Vilasrao Deshmukh, etc.

In other words, at the state level, the voter is not buying a pig in the poke. He may or may not approve of the person who becomes chief minister, but he knows the alternatives.

But this is not the case at the Centre. When people voted for the Congress-led coalition in 2004, they thought Sonia Gandhi would become the Prime Minister. Instead they got Dr Singh. In 1996, had people known they were going to get first a Deve Gowda and then a Gujral, they may well have voted differently.

It can be argued that in our system we only vote for MPs, who then elect the Prime Minister and that this is unlike the presidential system, where people vote for a President as well as his party. But while this may be true in theory, in practice even in parliamentary democracies, and in even those of the Westminster sort, people do know who the next Prime Minister is going to be.

The Congress has finally solved the problem by adopting the Gandhi family as its permanent provider of Prime Ministers. It is clear that if the Congress wins or leads the next coalition, Rahul Gandhi will be the Prime Minister. That, at any rate, is the general expectation, and if it is belied it will prove my theory. On balance, though, the era of non-Gandhi family Prime Ministers in a Congress-led government seems to be over for the foreseeable future.

This is a huge role reversal vis-a-vis the BJP. Until now we knew who the BJP would elect as its Prime Minister. Now we don't. Nor would we have if Mr Mahajan had been still alive.

This role reversal is almost 100 per cent. In the 2004 campaign the BJP charged the Congress with not naming the likely Prime Minister. Now that charge can be made against the BJP.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that people know Narendra Modi will be the BJP's Prime Minister. How would they vote?

My bet is the party will win at least a simple majority, not only because many Hindus approve of his social policies but also because he is quietly acquiring a reputation as a no-nonsense man with considerable administrative skills. And, unlike the other putative contenders, he has a solid political and, equally importantly, ideological base.

But this is where the real Congressisation of the BJP becomes apparent: even if it wants Mr Modi to be its next leader will it have the courage to say so? And would it have made a difference if Mr Mahajan had lived?

Think, and you shall know the answer.