When strongmen strangle internal democracy

On July 7, Boris Johnson quit as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Johnson had led his party, the Conservatives, to a landslide victory in the 2019 general elections but could complete only half his five-year term. Like most former British colonies, India inherited the Westminster model of Parliamentary democracy from the UK. Unlike the UK, it would be fanciful to imagine a charismatic Prime Minister's own party colleagues forcing him out of office mid-term.

"India's boast of being the world's largest democracy, and a multi-party one at that, hides a plain truth — the absolute lack of internal democracy in India's party system," says political commentator Prakash Patra.

As political scientist Zoya Hasan has pointed out, there is also a stubbornness among Indian politicians to 'party reform', which has reinvigorated western democracies.

The BJP, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi downwards — there was a time not long ago when communists and socialists did, too — blames the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty of the Congress for some of these ills. For 40 of the 75 years since independence, a member of that dynasty was the president of the Indian National Congress, nearly always elected unopposed, choking any challenge.

Despite consistent electoral reverses since 2013, ad hocism continues unabated in the Congress. Every other day, the Congress headquarters releases names of party workers appointed to various posts either in its state units or national office. "It is a centralised single-window system for deciding appointments, emanating from one source, with the process of consultations quite opaque," said a party leader, bemoaning how despite quitting as the party chief, Rahul Gandhi and his coterie continue to run the party.

But are the rest of the parties, particularly the BJP, any better? "Of all the parties, the BJP had more internal democracy, but not anymore, which should be a cause of concern to them," political analyst Radhika Ramaseshan says. The BJP, she says, held internal elections every three years from the block level upwards, where competing interests and groups contested in earnest. The process gave rise to factionalism but also strong leaders with a grassroots support base, keeping the organisation vibrant. "I do not see that happening under the present regime," Ramaseshan says.

However, as Hasan and others have pointed out about the BJP, all its presidents since 1980, the year of its founding, have been elected unopposed. The men of the Nagpur-headquartered RSS selected or nominated the BJP chief, at least they used to until Modi cut them to size after 2014, getting associates Amit Shah and J P Nadda elected unopposed to the post in the last eight years.

But the party seems to have also forgotten to hold other internal elections. The BJP's national executive, reconstituted every three years, has not been rejigged after Nadda became the president in 2020 and is nearing the end of his term. It would be interesting to see if the BJP conducts its internal elections before getting its new president next year or giving Nadda another three-year term. "This ebbing of internal democracy is all because of the party becoming personality-driven, and the processes laid down in the party constitution not being followed," Ramaseshan says.

"If the Indira Gandhi years smothered whatever internal democracy the Congress had until then, the BJP is now experiencing a similar process under Narendra Modi," Patra says. Just like Indira did for the Congress in the 1970s and early 1980s, Modi's charisma is delivering massive mandates for his party. Indira ran a powerful PMO (Prime Minister's Office), as does Modi, undermining the cabinet system of collective power and responsibilities. Similarly, she appointed chief ministers without consulting the Congress state unit concerned. A similar process was seen with the appointment of BJP's CMs in Haryana, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh.

The process of diminishing internal democracy within the party had started before Indira.

In 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of the newly independent India, was still treated as the first among equals within the Congress. With Sardar Patel's help, he thought it necessary to rid the party's top post of J B 'Acharya' Kripalani. The Congress president in 1947, Kripalani, a Gandhian and a critic of Nehru's policies, was eased out the subsequent year. Ironically, in 1950, Nehru adopted Kripalani as his candidate for the election to the post of Congress president against Purushottamdas Tandon. Nehru abhorred Tandon, a Hindu revivalist, who, with Patel's support, won the election in August 1950. Patel passed away in December of that year, and with none to mediate between the two, relations worsened between Nehru and Tandon. Nehru quit the Congress Working Committee to force the rest of the leadership to choose between Tandon and himself. In September 1951, Tandon resigned, and Nehru, the prime minister, was elected the president of the Congress, continuing in the post until 1954. Indira became the president in 1959, and after a decade and a triumph against the party veterans later, the Indian National Congress literally morphed into Indira Congress.

Around the same time, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a former Congressman, founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951. Mookerjee died in 1953, and Mauli Chandra Sharma, who, like Mookerjee, wasn't a swayamsevak, succeeded him. Trouble between the RSS and Sharma began when he refused to accept a draft list of office bearers drawn by Nagpur. The RSS got a young Deen Dayal Upadhyay to force Sharma out of the party. Sharma quit a year later but released his resignation letter to the press, accusing the RSS of interference in party matters. He claimed even Mookerjee was "seriously perturbed" by the RSS demands in the appointment of officer bearers. Ever since, the RSS became the arbiter of tussles within the Jana Sangh, or later the BJP. It is a role that the Gandhi family believes it performs in and for the Congress, making it inviolable if the party is to survive.

The flip side of internal party democracy in the Indian context is the case of the socialists. Led by Acharya Narendra Dev, Kripalani, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan, the caucus exited the Congress after Gandhi's death and swore by intra-party democracy. But internal elections nearly always meant the defeated faction forming its own party, only to reunite and split again some years later, dissipating political capital in the process.

According to some studies, including by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), the leader-centric party system in India has contributed to the greater criminalisation of politics. Nearly half of the current Lok Sabha members (43%) have criminal charges against them, which is a 26% increase compared to 2014, according to ADR. Similarly, a party's lack of internal democracy complements the opacity of political financing.

Over the years, commissions and committees have recommended 'party reform' to implement processes that institutionalise inner-party democracy.

But as the example of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), India's most successful political startup, tells us, no politician in India would wish to be in Johnson's shoes. The AAP initially promised a collective leadership model but lost little time projecting Arvind Kejriwal as its supremo once it won the Delhi Assembly polls, ridding the party of his critics and potential rivals.