People's Democracy

People’s Mandate Is Supreme

Nalini Taneja

THERE is a general impression that a critical stage has been passed over with the electoral defeat of the BJP. No doubt there has been much to celebrate about because we have seen what a BJP government in power can do, which a Congress led coalition cannot. But the Congress seems to be vacillating on people’s mandate.

There is no failure more disastrous than the failure of an alternative. It can lead to extreme right wing reaction among the people and a kind of cynicism where anything goes as long as it promises to get things done for those in power, and allows for some activism and leadership roles to those who have felt helpless and victimised. It is precisely such elements that allowed a BJP victory in the first place.

RIGHT WING ECONOMIC POLICIES

The underlying link between liberalising policies in the economic sphere and a right wing polity has not disappeared with the change in the government. For that to happen the Congress would have to change its orientation in favour of the people’s mandate — for which it has not shown much inclination yet.

There seems to be an understanding in the current Congress leadership that a right wing agenda in economy is desirable, if only the worst forms of chauvinism and parochialism in politics has to be avoided. This is a pipe dream. A right wing economic agenda in the conditions of globalisation, where it crushes the people to a point of helplessness and despair mixed with social rage can only breed right wing political solutions — both at the level of mass mobilisation and governance. The successful mobilsation of lower middle class unemployed youth among the Hindus in Gujarat, and the partially successful mobilisations of dalits and tribals in Gujarat and Rajasthan, and the fury of the unemployed in Assam and Maharashtra under the leadership of right wing forces, afforded us glimpses of this during the BJP-led NDA regime.

On the other hand, “less of State”, as sections of our intelligentsia are clamouring for, means ultimately an authoritarian State. The US is prime example of a polity where extreme privatisation has bred an unprecedentedly right wing State which has promoted war, subversion of democracy in the Third World, and brought parochial and chauvinistic sentiments into play in its own governing institutions.

There is a rightward shift in economy and politics, which can only benefit the BJP. It is the one party that has presided over and proved to be the most efficient instrument for affecting this rightward shift on the sub continent, and in fact in the entire south Asian region. This rightward shift has been so decisive that other bourgeois parties are now competing for the same political constituencies — that is, support of the corporate sector, and the US, and if we talk in social terms, the upper caste and the middle class Hindu ‘opinion makers’. Anything else would be accommodated only within this given framework.

INDIAN POLITICAL REALITY

The ‘era of coalition politics’, which the Congress now concedes as the Indian political reality, is shaped by the liberalisation agenda of the 1990s and is firmly within the framework of the right wing consensus created by liberalisation policies in the international and national contexts. The green revolution-created rural political leadership feels the pressure of this consensus as well, which the Congress is comfortable with, even as it may have problems with this or that regional formation. The Congress seems to have happily drawn its line of continuity from Narasimha Rao’s politics rather than Nehru’s or even that of Indira Gandhi in her initial days.

The Congress ought to have made some political points as soon as it took over. As we can see the idea of this government even now is to balance (in the words of the PM) “right wing fundamentalism” and so-called “left wing fundamentalism”. Uma Bharti is being allowed to get away with her communal antics, and the RSS is being allowed to spew venom against minorities while the Congress pursues right wing economic agenda. The Census Commissioner who seems to have collaborated with the RSS in manipulating public opinion through making public faulty Census data is still in place and will probably get away with a few explanations. Enemies of the people continue to head institutions devised for popular welfare. Chairpersons of the Minorities Commission and National Women’s Commission and various film Censor Boards continue to be active spokespersons and implementers of agendas opposed to the very institutions they are heading. And the BJP sponsored history texts are still in place.

POLICY OF DRIFT

In Gujarat the Congress has little to offer the suffering minorities, and its reliance on communalism and casteism to stay a factor in Gujarat politics has in fact helped the ‘real’ Hindu party there, as Radhika Desai’s work shows (Slouching Towards Ayodhya, From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics). In Maharashtra the NCP-Congress alliance government seems hell bent on outdoing the Shiv Sena in its concessions to Maratha chauvinism. Whatever openings have been created for ensuring justice for the Muslim victims of the Gujarat genocide are at the behest of the citizen’s groups who have made it their cause.

The Congress hold on the vast majority of the Indian people belongs to the pre-liberalisation era. It could not have affected the right wing consensus it today stands for without first abandoning what it stood for, and losing its appeal among these sections in the bargain (which is precisely what has happened). There could be no straight line from garibi hatao to India Shining in the case of the Congress. The BJP had no such baggage of anti -imperialism and pro-people slogans from which it needed to dislodge its politics. Its rise belongs to and parallels the liberalisation drives of the 1990s and the right wing upsurge at the international level, in both political and ideological terms.

Imperialism, the corporate sector and the Hindu upper caste support have become decisive in the articulation of bourgeois politics in this country. Therefore the Congress today is not what it was twenty years ago, nor are the regional state level leaders and their parties that owe their rise to the green revolution, and later Mandal, what they were ten or even five years ago. We need to remember this today as we try to build the widest possible front to defeat the BJP. Only the growth of the left and its mass organisations can push these bourgeois political parties into recognising the viability of winning on pro people policies.