Winning polls over governance

Soon after his election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commented ‘sarkar nahi chalana hai, desh chalana hai’. Under the current regime, state and nation have got conflated into a single entity. Any difference or acknowledgement of their separation is seen as the weakening of the colossal “nation building” project that the BJP has undertaken.

Democracy is seen only to further this project and all those elements of democracy that do not overtly support such a vision of the polity are seen as limitations of democracy that need course correction. Democracy under this vision is essentially understood as winning elections, beyond that any accountability is understood as a blot on the will of the majority.

After the 2002 Assembly elections in Gujarat, majority and majoritarianism have gradually collapsed to mean one and the same thing. In fact, rule of law, autonomy of institutions and individual rights, minority rights, among other things have come to be seen as diluting the will of the majority. Therefore, the legitimacy of the current regime flows exclusively by winning elections and there is very little focus either on governance or policy, because they are mere extensions of the will that is already registered in the election results.

The rule of law, whether in Chhattisgarh or Kashmir, is seen as diluting the strength of a muscular governance, while minority rights have been re-framed as appeasement and institutional autonomy, be it that of the judiciary, universities, the Reserve Bank of India or other constitutional or statutory bodies, is seen as unjustified or freedom without accountability. The singular milestone seems to be winning elections, notwithstanding accusations of trying to form governments even without a majority in the Assembly.

Winning elections and forming governments is the best display of the success of muscular governance. Perhaps, for the first time in post-independence history, a regional leader has assumed such prominence in national politics, that too in such a short span of time. Modi’s pan-India appeal, carefully crafted through the media images, can only be sustained through a renewed claim through successive electoral victories, because there is very little public debate on public policy and governance in the last three years.

Neither in terms of foreign policy, Kashmir, employment, nor on inflation, growth and educational facilities, this government has formulated anything new worth noting. There is either no policy framework or they are more or less continuation of the policies formulated under the Congress, including the much-debated GST and Aadhaar which were in the pipeline under the previous United Progressive Alliance government.

Modi, along with the BJP, seems to perceive the ability to win elections through fresh strategies as a real-time strength. The BJP undoubtedly is on an expansionist mode, including charting out fresh territories in the Northeast and the South. The BJP is a relatively young party that can afford to be flexible with its electoral strategies and leadership choices.

Social groups
All other parties have got saturated in terms of their social base, which has left out many social groups unrepresented. The BJP is taking the lead in representing such social groups, including the Dalits and the OBCs, and providing them with leadership opportunities. Many regional parties have emerged in various states as breakaway factions or from anti-Congress movements. All this provides the BJP an opportunity to forge alliances with various partners.

This is also being made possible because the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) adds a dimension to the rise of the BJP that is missing in all other political formations. While most parties formulate policies with the immediate imperatives in mind, the BJP with the RSS is perhaps the only political force in India today with a distinct political vision and ideological clarity. They firmly believe in creating a majoritarian ‘Hindu Rashtra’ and therefore make political moves that have long-term goals in mind.

Perhaps, the terminal decline of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a notable example in this case. The BJP carefully worked its way through by initially forging an alliance with the BSP, then compelling the BSP to move from ‘bahujan’ to ‘sarvajan’, and then finally re-craft its Dalit symbolism into Hindu symbolism found in the slogan ‘Ye Hathi nahi, Ganesh hai, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh hai’.

The BJP’s singular focus on elections emanates from the new-found space with the collapse of the Welfare State after the 1990s. India cannot afford to remain a secular state without a Social-Democratic Welfare State in place. The Congress is groping in the dark with secularism, while it has actively dismantled the Nehruvian Welfare State.

The BJP is emerging as a formidable political force in combining a pro-corporate economy with a majoritarian- Hindutva politics. How long this “Gujarat model” of politics will continue to succeed and how long will the Opposition take to rework the fragments of their dismembered politics is worth watching.

(The writer is associate professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)