BJP, which mocks Congress, has fallen prey to extreme centralisation

The capture of the BJP by a duumvirate underlines a phenomenon visible across the board — the lack of democracy within political parties.

The Congress deserves a lot of stick for a lot of things — especially for being to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the gift that keeps on giving. In terms of effort, organisation, and consistency, its stubborn refusal to learn is Bourbon-like.

But the flak it is singled out for, in terms of dynastic control, lack of inner-party democracy, and the celebration of a culture of sycophancy, is hard to endorse. The complete capture of the BJP by a duumvirate underlines a phenomenon visible across the board — the lack of democracy within political parties.

Before addressing the issue in detail, let me make the main point upfront. Liberal democracy has never existed historically in the ideal form that one kind of political theory describes. It’s not just in the developing, usually ex-colonial, world that it is ‘exceptionally’ flawed. It was flawed in eighteenth-century Britain during its conception, and it is misshapen in the United States today.

At the heart of the failure of liberal democracy, especially contrasted to its universalist claims, is the problem of representation. To what extent is ‘representative’ democracy, in which the only role, give or take, the ‘demos’ has is to vote governments or regimes into power, truly representative? Even without intimidation, gerrymandering, and plutocratic corruption, representation is largely, and necessarily, symbolic in indirect democracies.

One way in which the democratic deficit in liberal democracy can be diminished is by making parties, indirectly the bearers of state power, as democratic as possible. To some extent, Western democracies have been able to democratise at this level, though financial muscle and the power of lobbying continue to distort party bureaucracies, for instance, in the US.

In India, all parties that have a significant national or regional footprint seem to have chosen undemocratic models, whether dynastic or otherwise. Practically every regional party across India functions based on some form of family control.

But the BJP, which makes a great show of mocking the Congress for its dynastic propensity, has itself fallen prey to an extreme form of centralisation, which mirrors the extremely autocratic, personalised regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with some power monarchically delegated to Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

The appointment of three politically lightweight party apparatchiks as the chief ministers of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan by the party high command, each counterbalanced with two deputies, finally shreds the vestigial pretence of democracy in the BJP. We’ve been seeing it happening for a while, as we’ve also seen dynasties prosper in the party.

It took the Congress close to three decades in power to be overtaken by Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian control both organisationally and in the arena of government and about a decade more for the dynastic principle to kick in. It has taken the BJP well under two decades of tasting power to become a two-driver vehicle of unapologetic authoritarianism, while other parties have mostly never even bothered experimenting with organisational democracy, though not all of them are committed to shredding constitutional values.

The Left parties and the BJP blame former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru for founding dynastic control, displaying complete illiteracy about India’s post-colonial political history. As a matter of fact, despite all the obvious failings of Nehru’s ‘model’, we have his generation of Congress leaders and workers to thank for laying the basis of a relatively open and competitive political system, which was meant to mesh with a relatively open society.

Social change, to some extent powered by State power, didn’t quite pan out the way it was supposed to — but the unprecedented freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution did provide some momentum to it. The political competition was not perfect in what was named a one-party-dominant system. But as we know, democracy is never perfect.

That doesn’t mean that the perfect must be the enemy of the attainable. As India’s post-Independence history has shown, many freedoms can be guaranteed and many equities grown. Unfortunately, the current regime has exploited all the deficiencies in the political system to ruthlessly impose authoritarian rule.

It isn’t coincidental that democratic backsliding within the BJP is accompanying the one in the wider polity; the same thing happened within the ruling Congress when Emergency was imposed in 1975.

Parties must begin to reform themselves to be able to fight for democratic norms and practices. Ironically, despite all its well-advertised frailties, it does appear that it is the Congress that has taken a step, however tentatively, in the right direction.

Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.

Disclaimer: The views mentioned above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.