As Ajit Jogi forms a new party, the focus would once again turn to state-level parties. Already, the latest round of assembly elections has underscored the clout of state parties. These developments, along with the inability of the Congress to resurrect itself from the debris of the 2014 defeat, beg the all-too-familiar question again: What role are state parties likely to play in shaping national politics?

Already, the BJP is in partnership with at least four major state parties — PDP, Akali Dal, AGP and Shiv Sena — besides having the support of the TDP. In the run-up to the next parliamentary election, it could further intensify its bid to ally with more state parties. On the other hand, anti-BJP forces would draw succour from the fact that Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, like Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), could become the centre of the new anti-BJP (“secular”) alliance in the near future. This tendency to superimpose discursive categories on the politics of regional forces is somewhat self-defeating and misleading. In the ideological haste to imagine a non-communal political alternative, the historical trajectory and the state-specific context for the rise and continued predominance of the state parties are always ignored.

The absence of an all-India alternative and inability of the Congress to federally incorporate regional aspirations contributed to the rise of the so-called regional parties and they thrived once the local power structures belonging to the Congress began to crumble. It is well-known that the limitations of state parties in tackling the Congress and their all-India aspirations facilitated their alliances with the BJP in the ‘90s. The BJP was then a junior player in most of the states, making the regional parties secure. Whenever the ambitions of the state party and the BJP clashed, their coalitions came under pressure. The earliest instance of this was the BJP-BSP alliance intended to keep the SP away. This alliance never worked because both partners were impatient to emerge as the main player in the state. Similarly, the JD(S)-BJP alliance in Karnataka was ill-fated because each party perceived itself to be the main challenger to the Congress and wanted to use the other only as a temporary prop. Over time, Odisha, West Bengal, and more recently Bihar and Maharashtra, have exemplified the limitations of the BJP’s regional game plan. In these states, once the BJP began to expand and become a major player, the state-level partner developed problems with the BJP and discovered that it was, after all, a communal force.

The lessons to be drawn from this historical context are two-fold. First, the state parties are neither naturally anti-communal nor are they natural allies of the BJP. It is true that the Trinamool Congress or the JD(U) had to take into consideration the wariness of the Muslim voter vis-à-vis the BJP. However, that was not deterrent enough to their overtures to the BJP. It is the state-level context which will decide their stance towards the BJP. Take the case of Tamil Nadu. If the Congress has chosen to continue its alliance with the DMK, it makes sense for the AIADMK to build bridges with the BJP. The case of West Bengal is even more instructive. Here is a ruling party that was for the past two years engaged in an anti-BJP slanging match, has a large contingent in the Lok Sabha, and yet was isolated in the assembly elections. This isolation can easily force the TMC to rethink its strategy regarding the BJP.

The second lesson is that state parties would align with the so-called all-India parties only when the latter do not have much strength to unsettle state-level political equations. As the BJP now keeps expanding in state after state and, under its aggressive national president, trumpets its ambition to rule the country for the next 10 or 20 years, the natural course for most state parties would be to remain cautious of the BJP. Thus, the BJP would find it hard to win the hearts of many state parties. From the Vajpayee era of the mid-’90s, not only have personalities changed, from Mahajan-Vajpayee to Shah-Modi, the core approach of the BJP has changed. Then, the BJP was struggling to gain power at the Centre and acceptance beyond the western and northern regions. Now, the party has made a dent in the east and is looking forward to gain entry in the south. Its future course can hardly be served if it restricts its all-India ambitions in favour of regional allies.

These two lessons have contradictory strategic relevance. As the BJP gains new regional partners and retains some older ones, its relation with these partners is bound to be of tension, suspicion and uncertainty. However, this is no guarantee that state parties would form an anti-BJP front. The Congress would, of course, look forward to such a front given the success of the mahagatbandhan in Bihar last year. However, for such a front to materialise, two preconditions need to be fulfilled.

One is that the Congress must perform well in the states where it is supposed to take on the BJP — Gujarat, Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Only then can it become a serious partner in the anti-BJP front. In other words, the strength that the Congress has to bring to such a front has to come from states where state parties have no stakes. Secondly, the Congress has to be prepared to play a secondary role in states where state-level players are already ensconced. This is exactly what it did in Bihar, but refused to do in West Bengal. It is understandable that this strategic move would create unease within the Congress because it would mean accepting a secondary role in a large number of states, something that can impede the party’s revival. It is therefore unlikely that a real anti-BJP front could emerge from the present set of state parties.

The “regionalism” that state parties inevitably bring into focus constitutes another stumbling block for both the Congress and BJP — not necessarily for ideological reasons but because these two parties have to build support across states. For instance, Ajit Jogi has already invoked the “pride of Chhattisgarh”. Nitish and Lalu, too, thrived on “Bihari pride” during elections last year. Resort to regional pride is becoming a common feature of the politics of state parties. How the BJP and Congress negotiate that will decide their coalition strategies.

In fact, the criss-cross of national and state-level political scenarios might be better understood if we imagine the game of chess where there are not one but many overlapping chess boards and some pieces are common to many boards and some confined to only one. It is a moot question if the kings and queens of different chessboards can emerge as King or Queen across boards.

Written by Suhas Palshikar

Date: 16-06-16

Miscounting The Urban

The General drift of Society

“Write as you speak,” a wise old man once told me, “and speak as you think.” The advice, intended to guard writing from verbosity and artifice, was sound. The urge to be ‘word-perfect’ and ‘pitch-right’ can make writing an endless and self-defeating exercise. Rather like turning and turning a pencil in the sharpener’s groove to bring the lead-end to its ultimate piercing point can actually break the tip. Much the best to say it fast, keep it blunt.

Good writing has to make good reading.

All of us have admired some writers, preferred their work over that of others for their writing style as much as for the content of their work. One writer who has, for more than half a century, been admired for his searing honesty is George Orwell. He is never recondite, but he is never trite. He says it as it is and yet says it as it has not been said before.

The polemics of Orwell

Seven decades ago, Orwell wrote a clutch of essays for the post-World War II British journal Polemic. The brave effort lived for a mere three years — 1945-1947. But what a journal it was! Described as a “Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics”, it aimed to be a periodical for the non-specialist intellectual. Founded by the ex-communist and Spanish Civil War fighter Humphrey “Hugh” Slater, its first issue came out as a book and only seven more issues ran. But its leaden type-settings were, each of them, worth their weight in gold. On the surface, Polemic was anti-Soviet which in varying degrees seemed like being anti-communism. But it was essentially against totalitarianism, not just of the Stalinist variety but of all types, including that of intolerant majorities. Its contributors included the iconic iconoclast Bertrand Russell (“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”), the celebrated American author Henry Miller (“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion”), the philosopher A.J. Ayer (“… when one buys a pair of shoes, one is buying three things, the right shoe, the left shoe and the pair”), the British poet-novelist Stephen Spender (“Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do”), the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (“Do not go gentle into that good night”) , the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (“The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve”), the controversial thinker C.E.M. Joad (“Some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age”) and Orwell.

Of the five essays that Orwell contributed to Polemic, the most famous is ‘Notes on Nationalism’, the most important is ‘The Prevention of Literature’. The essay is about what its title says, namely, the enemies of intellectual liberty. But Orwell is never predictable. He includes among the threats to freedom of thought in the England of that time the concentration of the press in a few hands, monopoly of radio, the bureaucracy and, curiously, the unwillingness of the public to buy books. He uses a remarkable phrase — direct and terse — to describe this threat as “… the general drift of society”. “In our age,” he writes, “the idea of intellectual liberty is under attack from two directions. On the one side are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy. Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.”

Resonance, seven decades on

Orwell’s 1946 essay, written with frank fluency, is disturbingly valuable to us today, both as a piece of masterful writing and as a warning. One look at the just-appeared volume, Words Matter: Writings against Silence, edited by K. Satchidanandan, and published by Penguin-Viking which includes essays by Nayantara Sahgal, Romila Thapar, Gopal Guru, Githa Hariharan, A.R. Venkatachalapathy, Ananya Vajpeyi and others, with selections from the writings of the slain freethinkers Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and Malleshappa Kalburgi, will tell us why it is so. The book is, in fact, a contemporary Indian avatar of Polemic.

The current Indian establishment’s priorities do not include the independence of writers. They do not place freedom of thought and expression high on its list. But no less worrisome for the defenders of free expression is the “general drift of society” today. The troubled intellectual in India today is being asked to choose between free speech that can lead to intellectual murder or a silence that can end in intellectual suicide. And who is demanding this? Not the state, not directly anyway. It is what Orwell called the ‘general drift of society’.

In his essay Orwell says that some 15 years earlier, Conservatives and Catholics were attacking freedom but that at the time of his writing a new political orthodoxy of the Russophile intelligentsia in tandem with the monopolist mindset in the bureaucracy was crippling intellectual liberty. “The journalist,” writes Orwell, “is unfree, and is conscious of un-freedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news: the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings…”

This is staggeringly true of us in India today. The thirty per cent of India’s electorate that has voted the ruling party into office reflects the desire, often inchoate but not unclear, of the ‘general drift’ towards blind conformity, hero worship and the narrowest of narrow nationalisms.

Totalitarianism is not always operated by diktat. It is insinuated by suggestion and replication. A political dictatorship is not in operation in India. But a political orthodoxy has certainly crept into our national life. That political orthodoxy genuflects in supremo worship, sees Hindus as India’s master race of the purest Aryan descent and the goal of India’s Reich-like dispensation as being a superpower status. Pride is cousin to fear. And fear does not have to be proclaimed by the state. It can be set going as a public flotation.

The self-censoring silence

Artistic expression does not have to be gagged by the state if there are self-appointed vigilantes to bully it into silence. Dissent does not have to be banned if it is countered by orchestrated mass promo rallies, hypnotising oratory. The ‘non-intellectual’ public can be mesmerised through mega events in which celebrity stars participate; intellectuals can be immobilised through the twin ploys of preferment and ostracism. Supremo establishments do not need to turn Hitlerian any more. All they need to do is to let the Reich chemistry work. Self-regulation and self-censorship will click in. Monopoly and the bureaucracy (which includes, very particularly, the techno-scientific, diplomatic and economic bureaucracy) are ever at hand to ‘do the needful’ and the three bagsful.

Raghuram Rajan, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is a thinking man, a strong man — a much-needed and scarce combination. The country’s central banking institution needs a resilient brain, not a programmed robot to guide the fortunes of the rupee. Dr. Rajan’s is such a brain which, in addition, has the humour needed to protect it from robotising. But even as he shrugs criticisms off with a laugh, a great many if not most from the class of ‘intellectual India’ have led themselves into a self-censoring silence over Big Brotherisms. “Political writing in our time,” says Orwell in the Polemic essay, “consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”

Guardians of intellectual liberty must stand four square against the tyranny of the state. But they must not spare the tyranny of a political orthodoxy banking on our inability to write as we think and speak as we think, with the class and style of Polemic. Words matter, words count.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi, a former Governor of West Bengal, is distinguished professor of history and politics, Ashoka University.