Savour cautiously

Opposition by the wayside

The results exceeded everybody’s expectations. Advani, Modi, Mayawati, Sharad Pawar and others need no longer keep vigil, waiting to be annointed prime minister. Nor need Prakash Karat wait to play his superior role as king-maker. The electorate has declared otherwise. The Third Front, a misalliance if there ever was one, and the Fourth Front have crumbled without a trace. There are no mourners. The 24 x 7 channels and their unceasingly talking heads, which trivialised the elections as they do much else, are busy reading profound meanings in what they trashed. 

The BJP has had its comeuppance. It ran a poor and largely negative “presidential” campaign under an arrogant and divisive leadership, harking back to its Hindutva plank and proving once again the hugely complex fact for some that you cannot walk backwards into the future. It embraced Varun Gandhi’s poisonous vituperations while appearing to reject him. It put forward Narendra Modi as Advani’s successor as prime minister forgetting that with the Supreme Court having assumed supervisory control over justice in Gujarat, the man may have little time from now, to keep himself arraigned for  complicity in the 2002 genocide. Nor was the electorate forgiving for the BJP’s attitude on 26/11, criticising the Congress for its handling of terror yet seeking to protest the trial of “Hindu terror” only because it labelled all other terror “Muslim terror”, a staple in its hate campaign.

BJP must look inward

The BJP will now have to introspect and decide whether it wants to continue on the path of exclusion and violence by pursing an inherently divisive Hindutva agenda or reinvent itself as a democratic right of centre party, free of such negative, unaccountable encumbrances as the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and Hindu Munani, albatrosses around its neck. If Hindutva is to go, Advani must go too as he has assumed the role of its mentor ever since the disastrous rath yatra and its bloody toll.

The Left has also suffered a great fall, as a consequence of its arrogance, politics of blackmail and seeking power without responsibility while claiming to support the UPA. The notion that the UPA owes thanks for highly successful programmes like NREGA, which has fared poorly in West Bengal, and RTI to the vanguard role of the Left is nonsense. It blocked reforms and sought a veto over the civil nuclear deal which, over time, will increasingly be seen as a major gain that has restored India equity and room for manoeuvre on the international stage. The Left remains an ideological fossil in a fast changing and modernising world. And Big Brother CPI (M) was poorly led by an inflexible, egotistical commissar whose days in leadership are surely numbered. This is probably the end-game for the Left Front whose smaller partners may now prefer to go their own way to political oblivion.

Mayawati, another self-propelled prime ministerial hopeful, has been cut to size not on account of conspiracies against Dalit-ki-beti but because of her own greed, corruption and authoritarianism that is fast blunting her original appeal as a Dalit leader intent on forging a wider social alliance. People do not want innumerable self-aggrandising statues and mausoleums at the cost of good governance and welfare. She perhaps still has time to learn and mend her ways.

J&K’s nationalist consolidation and the defeat of the Amarnath Yatra leader, Leela Karan, paves the way for quick movement on internal resolution within the state. The Yadav-SJD caste combine in UP-Bihar is licking its wounds. The UPA does not need their kind of opportunistic caste and vote bank politics, nor the petty intrigues of men like Amar Singh. Nitish Kumar has done well by focussing on governance. In Tamil Nadu, Dravida chauvinism over Sri Lanka has found little purchase. The DMK has done well but cannot therefore demand three cabinet seats for the ruling family.

Build itself bottom up

Dr Manmohan Singh has emerged far stronger and must now not yield to pressures to have others choose persons for and portfolios in his cabinet. There were a lot of misfits and corrupt elements in the outgoing ministry. This is unacceptable if reform and performance are to be the hallmark of the new government. Rahul Gandhi has certainly done well as a campaigner and party organiser but it is feudal and foolish for sycophants insistently to demand his induction into the cabinet as prime minister-in-waiting. If the Congress wants to renew itself it must build itself bottom up.

Finally, the new government need not hunt for any bogus “magic number” of 272 and invite horse trading. It will enjoy a three to six month honeymoon within which to push through its earlier thwarted agenda and its new reform programme. Reforming the police, intelligence, CBI-anti-corruption apparatus and the criminal justice system are fundamental. The restructuring of foreign relations, especially with regard to neighbourhood policy, also merits attention.

The Congress now has a clear mandate to go forward on previously contested issues. The BJP and the Left in turn have an obligation not to stall their implementation by preventing Parliament from functioning as they very undemocratically did before.